Re-Engaging Critical Communication Studies With Social Classes (original) (raw)
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Communication and Capitalism: A Critical Theory
Communication and Capitalism: A Critical Theory, 2020
2 Communication and Capitalism operating under the control of neoliberal managers who have seen students as fee-paying customers yielding profits, knowledge as an instrument of capital, and academics as machines producing outputs, impacts, and grants. Under these conditions, Marx's approach was over decades presented as a failed theory and socialism as a failed model of society corresponding to Marxist theory. The rise of new social movements, individualism, neoliberal pressures on the humanities and social sciences, the long legacy of Stalinism, a flexible regime of accumulation, globalisation, and informatisation all influenced the emergence of postmodern and post-structuralist theory. David Harvey argues that postmodernism is the ideology of a capitalism that has a flexible regime of accumulation. 2 In contrast to Marxist theory's focus on solidarity, class, modes of production, the economy, matter, labour, macro-analysis, totality, production and the dialectic, postmodern theory stresses difference, identity, networks, culture, language, microanalysis, contextualisation/specificity, consumption, and articulation. Knowledge and communication have since the middle of the 20th century played an increasingly important role in the economy and society, which any theory of society must take into account. In his last interview, Stuart Hall said that the problem of the various versions of postmodern theoryhas been, however, that 'in its attempt to move away from economic reductionism, it forgot that there was an economy at all'. 3 As a consequence, postmodern theory has had an anti-Marxist bias. In 2008, a new world economic crisis started. It suddenly became evident that capitalism is not the end of history. The consequence was a renewed interest in Marx's theory and in socialist politics. More and more people became convinced that Marx's theory has something important to tell us about contemporary society. Marx was not just a theorist of capitalism, but also a critical theorist of communication and technology. 4 Marx's thought is therefore an excellent starting point for a contemporary critical theory of communication and communication technology. A Marxist theory of communication aims at showing how capitalist communications work and what antagonisms such communication systems have, and it seeks to inform praxis that points beyond capitalist communications towards socialist communication. This book makes a contribution to such theoretical foundations.
Communicative Capitalism and Class Struggle
2014
We have entered the first phase of the revolt of the knowledge class. The protests associated with the Occupy movement, Chilean student protests, the Montreal protests, European anti-austerity protests, some components of the protests of the Arab spring, as well as multiple ongoing and intermittent strikes of teachers, civil servants, and medical workers all over the world, are protests of those proletarianized under communicative capitalism. These are not struggles of the multitude, struggles for democracy, or struggles specific to local contexts. Nor are they merely the defensive struggles of a middle class facing cuts to social services, wage stagnation, unemployment, and declining home values. They are fronts in a class war under the conditions of global communicative capitalism. Mainstream media babble about Facebook and Twitter revolutions was right, but for the wrong reasons. It was right to draw our attention to networked media, to suggest a link between the protests and ubiquitous communication networks. But it was wrong to think that protests are occurring because people can easily coordinate with social media, that they are primarily struggles for democracy, or that they are indications of a push for freedom on the part of networked individuals. 1 These revolts make sense as class struggle, as the political struggle of a knowledge class whose work is exploited and lives are expropriated by communicative capitalism. 2 I am using the term knowledge class very broadly to designate those whose communicative activities generate value that is expropriated from them. 3 I have in mind both the wide field of knowledge labor and the voluntary, unpaid, everyday activities of media use that are traced,
Social theory and the critique of capitalism in a communication society
Irish Journal of Sociology, 2011
The essay attempts to re-contextualise the normative import of capitalism in the light of modern social theoretical developments. It firstly explores the significance in this regard of the procedural turn in both social theory and political philosophy. While important, this turn has come at the price of a loss of focus on the substantive plane of how unjust social relations – such as those often arising from capitalist structures – diminish the moral capacities of democratic institutions to shape social change. The essay goes on to show in the second section how Axel Honneth (2004, 2007), offering a partial corrective, combines a procedural emphasis on communication with a substantive account of embedded normative structures, opening the way to a differentiated sociological approach that remains normative but not one-sidedly transcendent and deontological. Taking a lead from these reflections, the third section presents a social theoretical architecture concerned both with social st...
The Political Economy of Communication: Power and Resistance, An Interview with Vincent Mosco
2010. In this interview professor Vincent Mosco discusses major structural features of the social system, which constrain the possibilities of using technology, media and communication in a genuinely democratic way. At the same time, he also emphasizes the importance of dialectics in social processes and analyzes the agency and resistance of different social actors -such as communication workers- in the processes of media production and democratic struggle. He then refers to the challenges that new communication technologies pose to capitalism. Finally, he reflects on the theory and the state of the field of political economy of communication.
Prodnik, Jernej A. - 3C: Commodifying Communication in Capitalism
Marx in the Age of Digital Capitalism (eds. Christian Fuchs and Vincent Mosco), 2015
This is a book chapter published in the volume entitled "Marx in the Age of Digital Capitalism", edited by Christian Fuchs and Vincent Mosco. Abstract: The commodity-form played an important, if often overlooked, role in the studies of capitalism. Processes of transforming literally anything into a privatized form of (fictitious) commodity produced for market exchange are of fundamental importance for the rise and reproduction of capitalism. At the same time, the commodity, as the “cell-form of capitalism”, has played a crucial role throughout Marx’s oeuvre. This chapter aims to contribute to a large body of academic work dealing with commodification and commodity-form by directing focus on the field of communication in the widest sense of this word. Commodity-form and commodification are analysed from a theoretical, conceptual and historical point of view. Main consequences for society and social relations that emanate from the global universalisation of the commodity-form are emphasized. In the conceptual and theoretic part this chapter analyses how the commodity-form was analysed by Marx throughout his oeuvre, how this corresponds to the wider constitution of capitalist society, and how critical authors analysed these processes. It is claimed there is now an enduring global commodification of everything, including culture, creativity, information, and diverging types of communication; these social categories are becoming fundamental in what could also be called capitalist informational societies. Historical dialectical approach is used in the historical part of the chapter to make sense of this on-going contradictory social transformation, which manifests itself simultaneously as continuity of capitalist social relations and discontinuity of the means of production (because of the strengthened influence of information in the present historical epoch). Commodification of communication and information is analysed in deeply historical manner by looking at how these resources have been subjugated to capitalist market relations since the capitalist economic system first emerged several centuries ago. It is claimed, however, that especially political incentives and interventions led to the increasing social, economic and political significance of the information and communication systems and resources we have been witnessing in the last few decades. A seeping commodification as a historically novel type of commodification, which trickles throughout society, is conceptualized in the final part of the chapter. This is done by referring to the long historical transformations and to two strands of thought that offer several converging points between them: a) to critical communication studies, more specifically to political economy of communication (through a reappraisal of the “blind spot debate” initiated by Dallas W. Smythe and his audience commodity thesis); and b) to some neo-Marxist approaches, especially to the findings of the authors basing their research in the autonomist (post-operaist) movement (that defined the present transformations through concepts such as communicative, bio-linguistic capitalism, and social factory). The concept of a seeping commodification indicates we are witnessing a qualitative transformation in the commodification processes that is, in part, owed to an overwhelming capitalist enclosure of the wider communicative field, which accompanied its increased economic importance. Keywords: Commodity-form, Commodification, Abstraction, Political economy of communication, Critique of political economy, Social factory, Audience commodity, The Internet, Communication capitalism, Capitalism, Critical communication studies, Information Society, Enclosures, Intellectual Property Rights, Critical Media and Communications History.
Media Power and Class Power: Overplaying Ideology
2002
The media have a contradictory role in relation to class power. They do predominantly carry corporate and state friendly messages, but not exclusively. They do have a role in legitimating capitalist social relations, but the role of ideology in maintaining social order has been overplayed by some theorists. A variety of other mechanisms employed by the powerful to pursue their interests are arguably as important as the mass media in the maintenance of 'ruling ideas'. In attempting to rethink the relationship between media power and class power, this essay uses the work of Stuart Hall as the starting point for a critique of cultural and media studies. It argues that Critical Theorists such as Hall overemphasized the importance of ideology and the 'function' of the media in capitalist social order.
Communicative capitalism and class conflict
We have entered the first phase of the revolt of the knowledge class. The protests associated with the Occupy movement, Chilean student protests, the Montreal protests, European anti-austerity protests, some components of the protests of the Arab spring, as well as multiple ongoing and intermittent strikes of teachers, civil servants, and medical workers all over the world, are protests of those proletarianized under communicative capitalism. These are not struggles of the multitude, struggles for democracy, or struggles specific to local contexts. Nor are they merely the defensive struggles of a middle class facing cuts to social services, wage stagnation, unemployment, and declining home values. They are fronts in a class war under the conditions of global communicative capitalism. Mainstream media babble about Facebook and Twitter revolutions was right, but for the wrong reasons. It was right to draw our attention to networked media, to suggest a link between the protests and ubiquitous communication networks. But it was wrong to think that protests are occurring because people can easily coordinate with social media, that they are primarily struggles for democracy, or that they are indications of a push for freedom on the part of networked individuals. These revolts make sense as class struggle, as the political struggle of a knowledge class whose work is exploited and lives are expropriated by communicative capitalism.
Communication, class and concentric media practices: Developing a contemporary rubric
New Media and Society, 2013
Understanding class as a process of self-making in relation to a particular, historical form of capitalism, in this article we argue that media and communication (from face-toface and old mediums such as radio to internet-powered tools) must be conceptualized as an emerging structural dimension for class formation. Based on ethnographic fieldwork on the Media Mobilizing Project in Philadelphia, a community-based media and communications infrastructure and a network of organizations across the region, we develop a conceptual approach we call concentric practices, which provides us with a framework of how contemporary class formation is occurring through the use of media and communications. Concentric practices we understand and analyze along three overlapping processes, which establish a "common" among the different fragments of the working class: communicative spaces, narrative practices and shared struggles. Analytically, these concentric practices describe a process of thickening and converging of the atomized and fractured neoliberal working class. This model can be employed as a heuristic framework for a host of similarly situated dynamics, aiding in teasing out and better understanding processes of class formation under neoliberal capitalism.
An Analysis of Marx's Legacy in the Field of Communication Studies
TripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique, 2018
New communication technologies strengthen existing power relations, helping to maintain class inequalities and alienating people. In the new communication age, human sub-jectivity itself has become a commodity. This paper analyses the role of Marxist studies in the academic field of communication studies. It focuses on the relevance of Marx's views for understanding communication in the digital era, Marxist communication studies after the expansion of digital media, and new dimensions of communication that have been incorporated into Marxist literature. Topics that matter in this context include the intersection of play and work, media economics in the age of digital communication, digital labour, the online games industry, targeted advertising, newly emerging social inequalities, and surveillance and privacy issues. Also an outlook for potential future Marxist studies of communication is given.
Marx and the Political Economy of the Media, 2000
Communication is examined in the realm of Marxist theory not as an autonomous social field, but as a component in the total social structure. It is argued that there was a shift from the initial Marxist idea of forms of communication as relations of production to communication as part of the superstructure, and that this view has prevailed in Marxist theory for a long period of time. In the work of later Marxists, we can spot a re-connection of communication with the capitalist mode of production, but not with the process of structuration and changing of relations of production. In my view, first we must connect these modifications in Marxist theory with the changes in the capitalist mode of production itself and secondly we must seek the role of communication primarily in the production process. We stress that at the end of the 19 th century there was a shift from extensive to intensive forms of surplus value which was tightly interconnected with the mass (enlarged) consumption of symbolic commodities and commodities -symbols as stimulus for the intensive production. In this way capitalism was transformed to symbolic capitalism. In the '60s, the symbolic logic of enlarged consumption led to the need for diverse and flexible production and therefore to the deep information -symbolic changes in technology and social organization of the labour. Thus the logic of consumption became the logic of production. This made possible on one hand the shrinkage of the enlarged consumption and on the other the high productivity of the economic systems. This was the rise of a new, deep symbolic capitalism, which made possible the social change without seizing the power. Therefore, the recent developments in the capitalist mode of production takes us back to the primary Marxist notion of communication forms as relations of production and make possible to change the laters by changing the first.