The Broadcasting and Print Media: In the Ideological Service of Capital and its State Power
The print and, increasingly and more significantly, the broadcasting media both have a pivotal ideological role to play in maintaining the rule of capital and defending the established social conditions of that rule. The latter’s broadcasts reach into the homes of millions, day and evening. There are now twenty-four-hour news channels. Chomsky and Herman assert that,
It is our view that, among their other functions, the media serve, and propagandize on behalf of, the powerful society interests that control and finance them. The representatives of these interests have important agendas and principles that they want to advance, and they are well positioned to shape and constrain media policy. This is not normally accomplished by crude intervention, but by the selection of right-thinking personnel and by the editors’ and working journalists’ internalization of priorities and definitions of newsworthiness that conform to the institution’s policy. [1]
What is clearly emerging – as the crisis of the whole capital system unfolds – is the unswerving loyalty and ‘reflex’ responses of a media which stands as an ideological pillar of a repressive order. Such a media – and especially the broadcasting news media which serves directly as the official, televised propagandist mouthpiece of the state power of capital and the social relations which it defends – is a vital, integral and indispensable part of such an order. As such, it must be subject – as an ‘organically mediating part’ itself of this order – to the impact and influence of the broader mediations and determinations of its unfolding structural crisis.
As media of and for capital, it can do no other than articulate and defend all those state structures and social relations whose inalienable and intrinsic modus operandi and modus vivendi operate to serve to maintain the capital system. Indeed, to purvey the bizarre notion that such a system is as ‘natural’ as nature’s creation itself and therefore, implicitly, unthinkable to question the ‘endurability’ of its existence.
The print and broadcasting media are as much a part of the arsenal of the state power of capital as its police, armed forces and prisons. They do not simply act as a directly politicized propagandist mouthpiece for the capital system, serving an indispensable ideological function in the apparatus of state repression. They also articulate and ‘impose as gospel’ daily the ‘official morality’ of the capitalist system and of the complex of bourgeois relations intrinsic to it. And, as Trotsky observed, in the conflicts between capital and labour…
morality is one of the ideological functions in this struggle. The ruling class forces its ends upon society and habituates it to considering all those means which contradict its ends as immoral. That is the chief function of official morality. It pursues the idea of the ‘greatest possible happiness’ not for the majority but for a small and ever diminishing minority. Such a regime could not have endured for even a week through force alone. It needs the cement of morality. [2]
He adds that,
morality more than any other form of ideology has a class character. [3]
To listen to the broadcasting media today in 2016 – the BBC, ITN, CNN, Fox News, etc. – or to read the print media, tabloid or broadsheet, is to recognize the living truth of Trotsky’s conception here. Their output constitutes the articulation of this ‘official morality’ produced and reproduced daily for the forced consumption of millions. This is the character and function of the media in the epoch of capital; to act as an ideological and political agency for the maintenance of the capital system and its state and global agencies upon which this media feeds like a dependent, bloated parasite.
In the age of capital, the morality purveyed by the media grows out the character of capital’s rule. It is organically inseparable from that rule and from the need to maintain it against all forms of opposition. This is the bottom line (default) of the role of the capitalist media in its different forms which becomes an animating ideological sine qua non for the rule of capital and its political agencies. Ultimately, it can only mean the justification of oppression, exploitation and the death and destruction with which the continuation of capital’s rule must always be intrinsically associated. The capitalist media is the central ideological support for this moral justification of the continuing rule of capital. Even as it systematically descends into the most disturbing forms of pillage, destruction and barbarism.
It is in the interests of the capitalist class and its state power to purvey the conception that morality founded on the existence of private property is the absolute morality, the eternal ‘natural’ morality, the morality of some eternal, nebulous ‘human nature’ and that anyone who contradicts it in thought and practice is immoral, arraignable, imprisonable or even worthy of hospitalization. It is the morality of subjection to capital and its state power. Always on hand are its willing and salaried ideologues, chatterers and news controllers in the media and elsewhere to reinforce all those hideous, ahistorical moral precepts which serve to ‘cement’ the capitalist order together. To keep it in one big ugly, grotesque piece.
Of course, for the socialist, capitalism is an inherently unethical system of social relations founded, as it is, on exploitation and inequality. It is supremely ethical to put an end to its existence by whatever means are actually necessary. For if these means be actually necessary to end the age of capital and replace it with a global socialist human life, and these means necessarily realize ends which are historically ethical in themselves, then the means through which these ends are realized are also ethical. Indeed, the means share the same degree of ethicality as the realized ends themselves. The bourgeois moralists and ideologues of capital and its state power will whinge and whine about this assertion. They will label it ‘immoral’, ‘dangerous’ or even ‘Machiavellian’. They will seek to qualify it and convolute it into forms which are designed to confuse, bamboozle and present problematics of one kind or another. Unfortunately, we can do nothing about that. But leave them to their metaphysical perambulations. The welfare of the revolution – that is the supreme law! [4]
The supremely ethical precept – which is predominant above all others – is an end to the global epoch of capital and the creation of a communist life by humanity for humanity; regardless of what that is going to involve in the course of an unfolding global struggle and period of transition. Any form of morality which ideologically serves to prop up the capitalist order is, accordingly, supremely immoral. We do not agonize about the abstract, transcendental morality (often based on religious doctrine and the ‘fictions’ of bourgeois democracy) aired by the ideologues of capital. We recognize that what we are doing is supremely ethical because it is putting an end to a barbarous social system and putting one in its place which will create social relationships far more human than the present one. It will create a totally different type of human being and human personality to the current one; one in which the oppression and exploitation of man by man has come to a final, irreversible end and where the conditions for the flowering and flourishing of the human personality will be posited and daily reproduced in continuously higher and increasingly more developed forms.
The print and broadcasting media of capital daily purveys a moral outlook to many millions which serves to defend and maintain a highly immoral social order. In that activity, they share the same degree of immorality as the very system which they are serving to protect. And, likewise, in that regard, they deserve to share the same fate. The broadcasting and print media are, taken collectively, the propagandist mouthpieces of capital and its state power. They are as much a part of the continuing rule of capital as its bureaucracy and armed forces.
Notes
[1] Herman, Edward S., and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political
Economy of the Mass Media (New York: Pantheon Books, 2002), p. xi.
[2] Trotsky, Leon, Their Morals and Ours (New York: Pathfinder, 1979), p. 20.
[3] Ibid. p. 21.
[4] Ibid. p. 65
Shaun May
mnwps@hotmail.com
December 2022
spmay 