Re: <nettime> Eric X. Li: Democracy Is Not the Answer..

[Newmedia@aol.com]

John:
 
> Propaganda for official, state, religious, commercial 
> and their UNIFIED agenda  has ALWAYS been the 
> primary source of funding for intellectual labor.

Always is a long time.  Indeed, it usually isn't a very good  description 
of *these* times in which we live (whenever those times might  be.)
 
And rarely have the POLITICAL (i.e. official), MILITARY (i.e.  state), 
IDEOLOGICAL (i.e. religious) and ECONOMIC (i.e. commercial) elites  had a 
*unified* agenda.
 
That's what makes history interesting.
 
And that's why UCLA sociologist Michael Mann proposed (and extensively  
documented) his IEMP "model" of *social power* in history . . . in most  
societies there are *conflicts* among these groups, if, indeed, they can even be  
called cohesive groups with any agenda at all.
 
In this year, the centenary of Jacques Ellul's birth, we might benefit by  
trying to understand what made his times the AGE of PROPAGANDA during which  
he thought he saw the "perfection" of PSYCHOLOGICAL WARFARE.
 
We might also benefit from the intellectual labor of trying to understand  
why our own times are different and why we, sometimes, try to pretend that 
they  are not.
 
Mark Stahlman
Brooklyn NY
 

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