Page 40 - Communication Commerce and Power The Political Economy of America and the Direct Broadcast Satellite

28 Communication, Commerce and Power

mediating role in the ongoing interaction and modification of con-
ceptual systems and cultures. This way of conceptualizing information
directs the analyst beyond assumptions that a predominantly one-way
flow of information from a capitalist metropole inevitably will subject
a receiving population to consumerist desires and liberal ideals.
Instead, what this alternative suggests is that a concern with the
capacity of receiving individuals and collectivities to interpret and
make use of information constitutes a more significant analytical
task. This is not to say that such flows are unimportant, only that,
as the subject of study, culture must be understood as a problematic
process rather than a relatively straightforward power resource akin
to economic wealth or military might.
The importance of developing a precise and relatively sophisticated
understanding of culture can be illustrated by contemporary problems
involving capital flexibility and mobility developments involving new
communication and information technologies and reformed interna-
tional legal and economic regimes (that is, the formation of the World
Trade Organization). For the most part, analyses of this development
lack precise theorizations of the state and its necessary role as a core
structural and conceptual mediator of such historic developments.
While mostly commercial forces are making significant strides in the
quest to globalize capitalism and the logic of 'the free market' and
other such cultural efforts, an essential contradiction has emerged.
While capital systemically tends to universalize itself, the territorially
and historically bound nation state remains the core arbiter of this
process. As Stephen Gill observes,

Whereas capital tends towards universality, it cannot operate
outside of or beyond the political context, and involves planning,
legitimation, and the use of coercive capacities by the state. This
forms the key substantive problem for a theory of international
relations, at least as seen from an historical materialist
perspective. In this context, one of the main tasks of political
economy today is to understand and theorise the possibilities for
the transformation of these dimensions of world order, in the
context of consciousness, culture, and material life? 9

Capitalism and capitalist social relations, over time, must expand
and evolve. However, because this does not take place in a historical
vacuum, contradiction is an inherent condition of the process. This
involves the barriers that capital must overcome in the form of