Means of Communication

Marx, famously, ”placed Hegel on his feet” by arguing the primacy of economic and material processes over the spiritual and intellectual. In his analysis, the world advanced, dialectically, through growing contradictions between means of production and relations of production (property relations), mediated by recurrent class struggles. Although material scarcity is by no means absent from the contemporary world, an important scarce resource analysed well by Hegel and largely neglected by Marx, and which is essential today, is self-esteem, including the right to define oneself. Using examples from identity politics in a number of countries, I am trying to show that a democratisation of the means of communication may be a key to a less volatile world and an important dimension of a more equitable world society.