by
Lee McGuigan
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[...] labour-power was "home-made" in the absence of dominant brand-name commodities, mass advertising, and the mass media [...] the principal aspect of capitalist production was the alienation of workers from the means of producing commodities-in-general. Now the principal aspect of capitalist production has become the alienation of workers from the means of producing and reproducing themselves. The prevailing western Marxist view today still holds the incorrect assumption that the labourer is an independent commodity producer of labour power which is his to sell.
(in Marx's period)
But is the production and consumption of the audience commodity for advertisers a "productive" activity in Marxian terms? Baran and Sweezy are contradictory in answering this question. They tell us that advertising expenses "...since they are manifestly unrelated to necessary costs of production--however broadly defined--(they) can only be counted as part of aggregate surplus." [...]
Just as advertising [...] do promote and increase sales, and thus act as indispensable props to the level of income and employment [...] The prodigious volume of resources absorbed in all these activities does in fact constitute necessary cost of capitalist production. What should be crystal clear is that an economic system in which such costs are socially necessary has long ceased to be a socially necessry system.
citing the 1966 Monopoly Capitalism
[...] the workplace where people got paid was transformed ideologically. People learned there that work under monopoly capitalism involves competition between individuals whose possessive needs necessarily set them in conflict with each other rather than with the owners of the means of their (concealed) cooperative production. The carrot which systematically motivated them was the pursuit of commodities [...]
not really relevant to the rest of this essay, but a nice way of putting it
[...] Because the consciousness industry produces consumable, saleable spectacles, its product treats both past and future like the present--as blended in the eternal present of a system which was never created and will never end. The society of the spectacle, however, cannot be abstractly contrasted with the "real" world of actual people and things. The two interact. The spectacle inverts the real and is itself produced and is real. Hence, as de Bord says, objective reality is present on both sides. But because of the society of the spectacle is a system which stands the world really on its head, the truth in it is a moment of the false. Because the spectacle monopolizes the power to make mass appearance, it demands and gets passive acceptance by the "real" world. [...]
not really sure what this is saying but it's weirdly pretty (and quite different from the rest of the piece)
[...] selling audiences to advertisers is not the primary raison d'être of these media. Rather, they are in the business of selling explanations of social order and structured inequality and packaging hope and aspiration in legitimate bundles. In short, they work with and through ideology--selling the system.
on cinema, music, comic books, fiction
[...] Materialist analysis needs to begin by realising that although integrated into the economic base, mass communications systems are also part of the superstructure, and therefore they play a double role in reproducing capitalist relations of production. They complete the economic circuit on which these relations rest and they relay the ideologies which legitimate them. This second function is not reducible to the first. [...]
[...] The expansion of consumerism was accompanied by a dampening down of industrial conflict and class struggle. The contradictions between Capital and Labour receded from the centre of attention and its place was taken by conflicts grounded in age, in gender, in nationality, in race, and above all in the yawning gap between the developed and underdeveloped worlds, between the colonisers and the colonized. Moreover, these conflicts appeared primarily as political and cultural struggles for self determination, political liberation and cultural autonomy. To many observers on the left it seemed that culture was not just one important site of struggle among others, but perhaps the most important. This misreading of history reached its height during 1967-1968, when for a brief moment it seemed that the construction of a radical counter culture coupled with the control of key institutions of transmission would bring about a bloodless transformation of capitalism.
think about how applicable/accurate this is for the left today? esp in the UK
(i mostly just like how this is written)
In broadcasting studies, the situation has been somewhat different with industry organization taking precedence over textual analysis. notions of internal production constraints, external commercial constraints, and of professionalism form the basis for explaining why cultural products reproduce hegemonic ideology. In other words, it explains why in a broadcasting system lacking direct State censorship or control, themes, ideas, claims, values, visions and notions supportive of the capitalist system are promoted via news and entertainment programming, while others critical of the system are reconstructed and re-interpreted in such a way as to co-opt their critical content. Still others are simply excluded [...]
not directly relevant to diss but interesting and worth thinking about further (think of how platforms like Instagram become taken over by marketing logic)
[...] the ratings industry per se and the more specific form of producing ratings for national television are open and competitive--and just happen to have a single more important firm. This lends the status quo within the ratings industry an aura of naturalness; the industry appears to "simply exist" abstracted from the processes of history and the imperative of capitalist economics.
nice way of putting it
[...] instrumental problems that required solutions in order to facilitate transactions between advertisers and broadcasters. The most obvious was to demonstrate the existence of an audience. In economic terms, this meant some measure of productivity. But besides adequate numbers of listeners, a measure was needed to demonstrate that the right product was being produced that the audience for which advertisers expressed a demand was in fact being delivered by broadcasters. Only after agreeing on a basic method for producing measures of productivity and quality could broadcasters and advertisers move to the real business at hand--the buying and selling of audiences according to a rational price structure.
Inherent in the situation, then, is both continuity and discontinuity in the interests of the advertising and broadcasting industries. While continuity rests in the need for an official description of the audience, discontinuity arises from the connection between that description and pricing. [...] neither industry could trust the other to measure productivity and quality, yet both needed some measure in order to transact sales. In this way, despite unified demand for measures of productivity and quality, the situation presented contradictory interests and thereby the possibility for independence for any ratings producer that could successfully manipulate those differences. [...]
think about how this applies to digital advertising? where fb/goog have all the data (massive info asymmetry) and both publishers AND advertisers have to simply trust
remember that time, summer 2013, when doubleclick fucked up and accidentally paid publishers twice? like massive deposits (thousands, at least) doubled for publishers like the NYT. and it took a while to notice
also: nielson is partnering with these companies where they dont themselves have the ability to gatekeep the ratings process (like FB / Nielson partnering for TV shit), but obvs they would prefer to absorb that vertical on their own