In the postindustrial age, labor is seen as essentially uninvolved in the social process because there is no need for assertive labor.

With deregulation, one sector of the economy after another is "liberated" to capital's unmonitored authority. The very notion that there is a public interest is contested.

In the 1990's, a time of corporate capital's global ascendancy, the mildest restraints on its prerogatives have been peremptorily rejected. Automatically, under this designation, measures to protect national cultural industries, for example, have been ruled unacceptable infringements of "free trade."

The content and forms of American communications-the myths and the means of transmitting them-are devoted to manipulation. When successfully employed, as they invariably are, the result is individual passivity, a state of inertia that precludes action.

The actions and inactions of hundreds of millions of people and nearly 200 states, will affect what kind of world emerges in the time ahead.

Though some still see the Internet, for example, as a democratic structure for international individual expression, it is more realistic to recognize it as only the latest technological vehicle to be turned, sooner or later, to corporate advantage - for advertising, marketing and general corporate aggrandizement.

Triumphant capitalism has unleashed a powerful drive toward inequality, not improvement, in the social sphere.