Probably, yes - unless you live in a squat and steal absolutely everything you need to survive. When we make financial transactions with privately owned companies we are collaborating with the competitive Capitalist system.
The world sure ain't perfick - and I view Capitalism, at least as we understand it and as it is practised today, as a big part of the problem. The word is just a word, a means of fair distribution of goods/services recognition for labours and achievements is nessary Are you part of the problem? Yes. It is currently impossible not to be part of the Capitalist machine, however hard we, as individuals or as organisations, might try not to deal with profit making organisations - there are simply not enough alternatives to escape being a cog in the global economic machine.
The way we buy, sell & distribute music (and everything else) is in flux at this time. As individual artists/consumers of music the manner in which in which we interact now will dictate the future of how music is distributed in the future -we are voting with our feet. The same goes for all forms of Capitalist transactions - in my view it is imperative that we continue to develop alternatives to private/shareholder ownership of the means of communication and distribution, collectively owned by the producers, consumers and service providers.
There are many reasons why I feel the means of distribution should be collectively owned by the producers/consumers, in the case of music these are the artists and their audiences. The structure of the free-market is controlled by those that do not create product (while consuming a vastly larger quantity than those that do), while the producers and consumers have largely had to rely on bowderlised unions and impotent consumer organisations to represent them.
Those that buy from the producers and sell to the consumers have rarely showed remorse for the producers when technologies have become available that can do the job more quickly and cheaply without the need for skilled labour (eg- when Murdoch layed off 6000 striking skilled and semi-skilled employees, secretly opening a hi-tech printing press at another location). I think the elimination of unnecessary labour is a good thing - the competitive system is inefficient, unsustainable and generates meaningless menial alienated jobs - research is duplicated by competing companies, while unnecessary products with built-in obsolescence are churned out and sold to people by a constant stream of Capitalist propaganda - everywhere we are bombarded with adverts, telling us we need what we don't need, that we need this to be like this, pummeling our every sense with incitements to consume, consume, consume.
The mass media has homogenized our culture - for example, for economic reasons the record industry ensures that a few acts dominate the air-waves across the country, even the world, and are disproportionately rewarded, while local acts of not inconsiderable talent are unable to find the support to break even and are all too often signing on. Local culture is steamrollered by acts that are basically corporate investments - is at any wonder that local communities are so fractured and alienating when they have been robbed of a
At first the mass media was almost entirely passive for the consumer - Newspapers, Movies, Radio, Television - they all give out, but they do not take back - and what they dish out is largely propaganda for the appeasement of the masses. I do not believe in "us and them" conspiracies - we are all complicit in our own brainwashing, for it is the masses themselves that drive what is produced - WE WANT TO BE SEDATED - and who can blame us? - just look at the state of the world. As an aside it is an interesting observation that the aspiational American psyche is more demanding of aspirational propaganda, their films, soaps and dramas are predominantly set in glamorous locations with an attractive cast, and many of them marvel at why we want to watch Eastenders or Steptoe and Son - "isn't television about escape" they ask - American viewers seem to want a drug to escape, and that is what the networks provides - the British? Perhaps they seek a drug that provides reassurance - that makes them fell like their real lives are of worth as they are, are worth making television programmes about. A Marxist might argue that this is a conspiracyto brainwash the working classes into accepting their place in society - but again I would say that while this phnomonon stems from the class system it is a self-perpetuating institution in which both supplier and consumer are complicit, supply and demand. Perhaps it is because I am british, but I prefer our approach, while oiur dramas might placate the masses at least they do not, for the most part, conspire to motivate the consumer to higher and higher levels of consumption.
the ICT revolution unfolding around us
This is not a time to step up industry to buoy up the economy, we do not need so many things, and it is unsustainable to keep producing them - it is a time for industry to stop competing and started collaborating globally. A lot of what Marx said in the Communist Manifesto seems to make a lot more sense now, for example that true Communism is only possible in a united world - and now that the internet is beginning to democratise the media and give the masses the potential to speak with a global voice. If a global referenda were possible now the aspirational capitalists and starving millions alike would place a tick in the box "would you like to see the world's wealth distributed more fairly" because for 99% (thats a guess) of the respondents this would be the same as asking "do you want a fairer share of the world's resources?" or "do you want more"? Please, Sir, can I have some more?
The internet has the potential to reduce the intermediary to an automated process, cutting out the middle-men, who have control over the market and find it most beneficial to the lining of their own pockets to please the share holders, redistributing the wealth that the producers and consumers have generated to a group of people who largely toil not, nor do they spin, share-holders whose only virtue is an obscene bank balance made possible by a system that offers disproportionately high dividends to people for making money or having rich parents - yes, some kind of system is necessary to ensure the fair and proportionate distribution of goods and services based on people's contribution to the community, yes - but the global economy as we know it is a system for keeping the rich very rich, and the poor very poor.
Steps are being taken in the right direction - many of the super-rich in the world today made their millions in the trading rooms or in the ICT revolution. It seems surprisingly common that these
Or if some leak should shatter the global economy we must be ready with our non-profit collectively owned alternatives ready to fill the void it leaves before chaos sets in.
