You might not think that the illegal downloading of music and worker anxiety resulting from the economic crisis would have much to do with one another. But you'd be wrong.
In Britain, some seven million people are estimated to use illegal file sharing. This costs the music industry a lot of money, obviously, so it's currently the focus of a major campaign by that industry, as well as the government.
Also in Britain, millions of workers are suffering from anxiety and other disorders as a result of the current economic crisis. The capitalist system, dedicated to the accumulation of capital through the sale of commodities (most of them items that people need to be convinced to buy through massive corporate propaganda - ie. advertising - despite the rhetoric that the system simply responds to the "demands" of the consumer), is squeezing the happiness out of the people it promised to make happy. One senses a spiritual disequilibrium at the societal level. Security and prosperity giving way to insecurity and worsening material conditions is akin to a betrayal of trust.
So what's the connection? When you indoctrinate people in the virtues of being "rewarded" (ie. collecting junk) and train them to believe that the measure of a person is how many material needs and wants they can satisfy (needs and wants that, as I mentioned above, are often manufactured), they aren't going to behave like good Samaritans when you pull the plug on their binging. When the very system that supposedly provides them with their happiness (now shown to be a paper tiger) screws them over by threatening them with unemployment, longer working hours, a lack of benefits, rising costs of living, and mounting debt, what should a rational person expect them to do? More to the point: what should a free marketeer expect them to do? You'd expect them to find ways of circumventing their legal obligations when they think they can get away with it. Treat people like they're "self-interested rational agents" (that is, sociopaths) and they're going to behave as such. Capitalism faces a contradiction: the contradiction between the need to make people buy more and more junk to sustain the economy (by cultivating a mentality of selfishness), and the need to induce restraint among those very same individuals so that their actions don't lead to the destabilisation of the system. This is where the state comes in: it passes and enforces laws to maintain the flow of capital in order to prevent the system from eating itself, to prevent the child from eating its parent. The far greater theft daily visited upon the working class - the expropriation of surplus value from their labour - is not in issue, obviously, for it is perfectly legal and forms the very foundation upon which industry is expanded, so that still more junk can be produced and sold. The populace, lacking the money to buy back everything they produce (since much of it was stolen in the form of profit), must be lent credit (at interest, of course, thus providing another flow of money that can be tapped - or what's known as the financial sector of the economy). This charade always leads to trouble in the end, with stock exchanges collapsing, businesses going bankrupt, workers being laid off - all of which feed off one another and find an outlet in crime, social dysfunction and, often, state repression. I don't know about you, but it seems to me that there are human needs and wants more pressing than the "right" to accumulate capital, that there are loftier goals and possibilities that we can aspire to than being creatures of the market. The "free market" is actually a human prison. We subordinate ourselves to objects, whether for the sake of possessing them because we have been trained to believe that they will make us "happy", or for the sake of producing them so that we can simply get by. Is this not the most corrupt vision of human progress ever devised? The only system that will work in the long term will be one that turns work into a truly creative human enterprise, undertaken for the satisfaction that it brings to the person doing it; that cultivates not only a social conscience but a social consciousness; that centrally takes into consideration the consequences of our actions on one another and on the planet; that doesn't need to divide people by setting them up as obstacles to each other's goals and hence as objects to be undermined and vanquished; that encourages people to seek contentedness in human relations rather than pursuing a mad rush for abundance; that doesn't require bosses and other lieutenants to administer its activities but that is genuinely democratic and participatory. Anything else can eat my dick.
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