Corporate propaganda and global capitalism - Selling free enterprise?

This chapter examines the way in which capitalism has been underpinned by a self-conscious propaganda campaign on the part of the world’s major corporate powers. Corporations have used a variety of propaganda techniques not only to dominate markets but also to attempt to monopolise the realm of ideas where dissent and alternate voices might be heard (Beder 2002; Ewen 1996). The rise of corporate propaganda since the 1970s has been particularly aimed at selling the idea of free, unregulated business enterprise and an accompanying policy agenda that facilitates the expansion and spread of global capitalism. Ideas associated with the maintenance and expansion of capitalism as a social and economic system have progressively taken on the status of accepted wisdom in policy circles.