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A Marxist theory of communication should "demonstrate how communication and culture are material practices, how labor and language are mutually constituted, and how communication and information are dialectical instances of the same social activity, the social construction of meaning. Situating these tasks within a larger framework of understanding power and resistance would place communication directly into the flow of a Marxian tradition that remains alive and relevant today" (Mosco, 2009, 44). A Marxist theory of communication sees communication in relation to capitalism, "placing in the foreground the analysis of capitalism, including the development of the forces and relations of production, commodification and the production of surplus value, social class divisions and struggles, contradictions and oppositional movements" (ibid., 94)
Marxist media and communication studies are not only relevant now, but have been so for a long time because communication has always been embedded into structures of inequality in class societies. [...]
[...] Labour is a necessarily alienated form of work, in which humans do not control and own the means and results of production. It is a historic form of the organization of work in class societies. Work in contrast is a much more general concept common to all societies. It is a process, in which humans make use of technologies for transforming nature and society in such a way that goods and services are created that satisfy human needs. [...] The realm of freedom really begins only where labour, which is a form of work that is determined by necessity and external expediency, ends.
[...] labour faces a dialectic of poverty and wealth: it "is absolute poverty as object" (labour does not own what it produces) and at the same time "the general possibility of wealth" (only labour, not capital, produces and is a necessary condition of wealth) [...]
citing from Grundrisse. need to think about how this will work in the context of automation & robots producing wealth??
[...] Heinrich's basic point is that value does not exist in the individual commodity, but only in exchange, and the all-sided exchange of commodities (in contrast to the exchange of isolated products) exists only as reference of commodities to money" [...] Money is "not simply a formal translation of an immanent magnitude of value that has already measured the quantity of value. It is rather the necessary and above all the only possible form of the appearance of the commodity value, there can be no form of appearance of value that is independent of exchange" [...]
Michael Heinrich in Die Wissenschaft vom Wert
[...] Capital aims at lowering the price of wage labour (wages) and increasing the price of commodities in order to increase profits. Workers can refuse work in the form of strikes and thereby attack the wage mediation and money profit, and they can refuse or eliminate prices by trying to obtain use-values below market prices or for free (e.g., by refusing to buy certain products and producing them together with others). So money is not only a medium of circulation, but also a "mediator between the classes" [...] and an object of class struggle.
citing Harry Cleaver, Reading Capital politically (p156-158)
[...] prices cannot simply be derived and calculated from labour values, but depend on the politics of class struggle. [...]
draws on Jacques Bidet in Exploring Marx's Capital
[...] mentions that social network markets may have hubs and be dominated by elites, but this analysis is not systematically connected to power inequalities in society. It rather seems that Hartley assumes that such markets are nonetheless a realm of democracy because many have communicative tools available that can, if they are lucky and hard-working, enable them to become part of this elite, at least for a short time. This logic is at the heart of neo-liberalism's stress on performance, individualism and personal responsibility for success, failures and downfall. [...]
criticising John Hartley's Digital Futures for Cultural and Media Studies
[...] For Graham Murdock and Peter Golding (1974, 4), the media are organizations that "produce and distribute commodities", are means for distributing advertisements and also have an "ideological dimension" by disseminating "ideas about economic and political structures". Murdock (1978, 469) stressed in the Blindspot Debate that there are non-advertising based culture industries (like popular culture) that sell "explanations of social order and structured inequality" and "work with and through ideology--selling the system" [...]
- capital accumulation in the media industry;
- advertising, public relations and sales promotion for other industries;
- legitimization of domination and ideological manipulation;
- reproduction, regeneration and qualification of labour-power.
Horst Holzer and Manfred Knoche (in different books)
Media content would be "an inducement (gift, bribe or 'Free lunch') to recruit potential members of the audience and to maintain their loyal attention" (Smythe 1977a, 5). Smythe (1977a; 1981, 22-51) introduced the notion of the audience commodity for analysing media adveritsement models, in which the audience is sold as a commodity to advertisers: "Because audience power is produced, sold, purchased and consumed, it commands a price and is a commodity. [. . .] You audience members contribute your unpaid work time and in exchange you receive the program material and the explicit advertisements" (Smythe 1981, 26, 233) Audience "work to market [. . .] things to themselves" (ibid., 4) The "main function of the mass media [. . .] is to produce audiences prepared to be dutiful consumers" (Smythe 1994, 250) [...]