This capture of political energies and investments and their reformatting as contributions is enabled by the reduction of politics to communica• tive .acts, to speaking and saying and exposing ;:md explaining, a reduction key to a democracy conceived of in terms of discussion and deliberation. Struggles on the Internet are able to reiterate and thereby displace political struggles in local and institutional settings precis�ly because these latter struggles are envisioned as communicative engagements. In turn, this displacement protects the activities of corporate and goverrimental oficials who are able to market and monitor, expropriate and privatize, unencumbered even as their activities are observed and discussed.19 That people !mow what corporations and governments are doing doesn't mean they can change them. That they are aware of a problem, have an opinion, and make their opinion !mown doesn't mean they have developed the infrastructure necessary to write new legislation, garner support for it, and get it passed, much less carry out a revolution (a term the left has abandoned and the right embraced).20 Vhen communication serves as the key category for left politiCs, whether communication be configured as discussion, spectacle, or publicityj this politics ensures its political failure in advance: doing is reduced to talking, to contributing to the media environment, instead of being conceived in terms of, say, occupying military bases, taking over the government, or abandoning the Democratic Party and doing the steady, persistent organizational work of revitalizing the Greens or Socialists.
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