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59

Blindspots Abut Western Marxism: A Reply to Dallas Smythe

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notes

Murdock, G. (2014). Blindspots Abut Western Marxism: A Reply to Dallas Smythe. In McGuigan, L. and Manzerolle, V. (eds) The Audience Commodity in a Digital Age: Revisiting a Critical Theory of Commercial Media. Peter Lang Inc., International Academic Publishers, pp. 59-70

(noun) the scum that forms on the surface of molten metal / (noun) waste or foreign matter; impurity / (noun) something that is base, trivial, or inferior

60

Certainly it needs to be rigorously reworked and the dross jettisoned

—p.60 missing author
notable
5 years, 8 months ago

Certainly it needs to be rigorously reworked and the dross jettisoned

—p.60 missing author
notable
5 years, 8 months ago
63

[...] 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

—p.63 by Graham Murdock 5 years, 8 months ago

[...] 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

—p.63 by Graham Murdock 5 years, 8 months ago
64

[...] 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. [...]

—p.64 by Graham Murdock 5 years, 8 months ago

[...] 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. [...]

—p.64 by Graham Murdock 5 years, 8 months ago
68

[...] 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)

—p.68 by Graham Murdock 5 years, 8 months ago

[...] 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)

—p.68 by Graham Murdock 5 years, 8 months ago