Giovanni Alves
Our reflection seeks to highlight the historical fact that manipulation became the essential characteristic of capitalism after the Second World War. In coining the term 'manipulative capitalism', Gyorgy Lukács was a visionary. The adjective 'manipulative' qualifies the fundamental nature of the global system of capital. Therefore, more important than qualifying global capitalism as 'cognitive capitalism', 'neoliberal capitalism' or 'technological capitalism' or even 'financial capitalism', the most appropriate way to criticize capital is to qualify it as manipulative capitalism , since it is from its essentially manipulative nature that the capitalist mode of production organizes today - more than ever - politics, work, subjectivity, culture, ideology and technology. Therefore, manipulation in an unprecedented dimension in human history organizes the reproduction of global capital. Never has the power of ideology as manipulation acquired such material force. After the Second World War, the technological resources of mass media and mass ( dis )information developed impressively . From television to the Internet with social networks, such means of mass manipulation contributed to boost the cultural revolution of capital. In a historically unprecedented dimension, consumption and politics became objects of manipulation by capital. We cannot underestimate the power of the new informational technologies in leveraging the power of ideology and the manipulation of human subjectivity in the service of the interests of the profit system.
