This article attempts to synthesize the debate around the pressing issue of the relation between communication and development. It considers that the issue must be considered within the framework of the immanent general laws of capitalist production, in order to throw light on the matter. It is suggested that the system is more and more characterized by a double contradiction: capital-labour/economy-culture. The contradictory character of the relation, which opens up possibilities of auto-determination and at the same time impedes its effective realization, can be cleared up, in economic terms, by considering a double movement of coordinated expansion of mercantile logic and a non-mercantile sector, which occurs now at the service of capital, but already pointing towards the possibility of a new and more advanced mode of production.