Notes on the Mass Media of Capital
Alienation exists at the very root of the capital order in the very process of the production of capital. The mass media of capital – whose seeds first started to germinate in the nineteenth century before the invention of all those technical innovations now associated with it today – is the outgrowth and expression of a state of affairs where capital is the dominant form of social relationship in the social metabolism as a whole.
Relations are not only mediated by the requirements of capital at the level of immediate social intercourse but are invaded and infected by the productions of its media so that people relate through the ideological fog and haze pumped out daily by the mass media in the form of ideological pronunciamento and imagery.
Marx, of course, referred to religion as ‘an inverted world’. A world created by Man in which deity is worshipped and supplicated as a creation of his own making. God is Man’s creation to which he bows down whilst identifying his own creation as his very own creator. Just as people project idealised human qualities into the deities of religion and then proceed to bow to their own self-creations, so in the mass media of capital, people create an alien realm to whose tunes they dance. In this way, this media is an inversion of life in which human beings become its marionettes in the service of capital. Rather than being understood as social relations between people disguised as a complex of imagery and ideology, the media is identified as something which is autonomous and independent of these social relations and, as with commodities, social relations are fetishised. With commodities, in the form of things. With the mass media of capital, in the form of ideology and moralities which service the capital order and the imagery of disembodiment, abstraction and projected idealisation, especially in advertising.
The mass media – although only a sector of society – seeks and purports to represent and articulate the interests of the whole of society and, accordingly, functionally serves as a putative instrument of social cohesion. But it forecloses and conceals the truth of this representation and functionality as that of the capital order. For it is the outcome of the development of this order, its own creature, and, therefore, cannot in its existence be separated from this order. Or rather can only be distinguished from it in its organic and intrinsic connection to the whole capital order. It both expresses and perpetuates the alienation of this mode of production on all its different levels from the material productive to the aesthetic and ethical.
Social relations between people are presented in the multiple forms of imagery and ideology and this, accordingly, gives the capitalist media its fetishistic character. The world of commodities is not a mere collection of things, merely the physical products of human labour. Rather the world of commodities is a social relation amongst and between people who exist in a specifically and historically-determined, social system of productive relations based on the domination of the capital relation in part or the whole of the social metabolism. If we look at prehistory, we can see that these societies were not ‘worlds of commodities’. They were worlds where men and women produced things for their direct use. Exchange (and therefore the emerging worlds of commodities of Antiquity) only comes later once a surplus has been produced and people have something to trade. Exchange takes place at the contact points between peoples and serves to accelerate the break up of productive systems based on people’s direct needs where exchange and commodities are totally alien to them. Within the context of the mass media – and especially within the so-called advertising media – we can identify the media of capital as the highest expression of this form of fetishism. These media forms are, of course, a development of the commodity form but in the sphere of the mass media. In fact, the media forms are merely developments and elaborations on the commodity form.
The mass media is wholly the creation of capital for its own purposes. It is not a mere accidental product but a necessary creation of capital. Any accidental characteristics are rooted in the very necessity of its creation, development and control by capital. It is not simply technique’s creation but the child of capital’s own evolution and needs. It is its ‘world outlook’ and vision become actually manifest and materially translated as representation in media forms. It is the vision and mission of capital become objectified for direct subjective consumption according to the needs of the developing capital order itself.
The mass media of capital is the essential, ideological part of the capital system in the 21st century. It arises and vanishes with the mode of production based on capital. Today, outside of direct labour time, the capitalist media – with television, cinema, internet, etc, so-called ‘entertainment’ both public and private – provides and consumes a significant portion of labour’s ‘free time’. The capitalist society which produces it, and feeds it, is confronted by it, especially in the form of advertising where the latter’s projected idealised imagery serves to remind and imbue a sense of absence, of lack, of socially and materially posited deficiency. This gives capital a directly intrusive admittance into the internal privacy of people’s lives, simultaneously creating and propagating the conflict between ‘having’ and ‘should be having’. It creates an unquenchable desire for ‘possession’ (to own and to have) because it projects a never satisfied and forever unfolding of deficiency of ‘things’ whose absence can only be partially transcended in the exchange. This, of course, is an insidious mechanism of marketisation which serves and worships at the high altar of capital.
Since capital’s crisis today is intractably and irresolvably structural, this must impact its mass media. For as the contradictions of this crisis deepen and sharpen – as they inevitably must – this brings this mass media into continuously heightening degree and more intense confrontational posture with society as a whole. The social manifestations of capital’s structural crisis increasingly expose the class character of the mass media of capital. They reveal it to be a subordinate creature of capital, for all to see, regardless of the severity and nature of its crisis and regardless of the social and material impact of this structural crisis on the lives of people. It confronts billions as ideological servant of a decaying system in a state of ever-deepening and ever-intensifying structural crisis.
The mass media presents itself and its published or broadcasted content as something ‘open’, ‘debatable ‘ and even ‘impartial’ or ‘objective’. It seeks to portray these characteristics under the cloak of a bourgeois liberal ethos which defends capital’s so-called democracy, its ‘freedom of speech’, parliamentarism, etc. But all this serves one central focus and purpose : to maintain an order based on capital and its state powers. In this regard, the media is not a formal part of the structure of the state power of capital but it is, nevertheless, an intrinsically ideological and projected social mediator of that power and the rule of capital. Its ‘independence’ is merely formal. In reality, it is indispensable in the organisation, rule and propagation of the capital order. It cultivates the presuppositions of ‘passive acceptance’ in the population that the capital order is as natural as the turning of the seasons and an eternal system. To question such presuppositions – that capital must always ‘be’ because it is ‘natural’ – raises the question of its very own existence as eternal handmaiden of capital and, accordingly, always elicits the appropriate response to justify these presuppositions.
The mass media now dominates the ideological life of people. It holds them in an ideological, vice-like grip by means of its different sectors. It has created and enclosed this ideological area and within this arena it projects itself and keeps the population captive. Even to oppose it is to recognise its domination in the epoch of capital. Its imagery – especially in advertising, TV, cinema and internet – serves to cajole, entice and enchant with the false promises of so-called ‘happiness’. This is an intrinsic part of its generation of a ‘false consciousness’. It promises paradise but delivers hell. The ‘visual’ becomes specialised as a medium for the propagation of capital, for its production and reproduction, for its turnover in the social metabolism. The mass media is the ideology of capital audio-visualised and animated.
The mass media of capital has brought religion down to Earth. Capital – in and through its media – projects the abstract and idealised images of achievable ‘happiness’ as part of the ideological ventilation to legitimate its rule. And it does so with more conviction and an increasingly higher degree of intensity as its structural crisis widens and deepens. The ‘fallacious paradise’ which it projects is merely an intrinsic part of the Pandaemonium of its real, crisis-ridden, existence. It is an internal ideological reaction of the capital order to its own deepening Pandaemonium of structural crisis.
The mass media becomes a necessity for the capital order. Its informational aspect is subordinated to its subliminal and overt propagandist function and its role as an ideological sedative to the painful reality of social life under capital. It appears as an independent and autonomous phenomenon which acts as a societal cohesive. As the capital order evolved in the last two centuries, it lacked social cohesion and required an overarching expression and mass functionality which would exist and operate to attempt to deaden the inherent and sharpening social conflicts of the capital order. The mass media emerges to perform this ‘deadening’ function within the ideological realm.
The mass media continually perfects the ‘internal dialogue’ of the power of capital projected over society as a natural and eternal relation; the limit beyond which humanity cannot step and re-create itself on foundations which have eradicated this relation across the whole globe. The relations between people and classes are projected in their ‘appearance forms’ (imagery or spoken word) fetishistically. The imagery in the advertising mass media, for example, contradictorily both expresses and conceals the real relations between people in the operation of the capital system. It expresses their exploitative character, on the one hand, whilst simultaneously serving to hide the root and origin of this exploitation in the movement of the capital relation itself.
Technique, its development and operation in the mass media is engineered for capital. Supposedly for an ever-expanding market which, like capital, has no determinative end point of structural crisis. This media of capital must degenerate and sink into turmoil with the unfolding of capital’s intractable and irresolvable structural crisis. To act to justify anything which props up a system which is grasping at straws as it sinks into the quicksands of history. This is why capital must absolutely dominate the means of communication and information. Its media becomes the principal means for defending and protecting its rule and those who run it, who manage it, who govern it, know this, and are acutely aware of their role as the ideological guardians of the capital order. And this applies as much to ‘social media’ as to any other form.
Capital’s media never shows the proletariat the real image of itself as a class. For then it would be showing it what it really is as a class, how it was formed historically, how it became, potentially, the most revolutionary actor ever to walk the stage of history. To do this would be in contradiction to its own interests. Until now, in the course of human history, the bourgeoisie has been the only revolutionary class to win power because its historic struggle against feudal relations was the bearer of a new mode of production which would become a world system. And that is how the capitalist class intend it to stay. Rather, the media shows, and cultivates within, the proletariat a false image of itself. That it is a ‘self-made’ class whose destiny is in its own hands but only within the bounds and parameters of the capital order and the system of governance evolved by its state powers. Capital’s mass media creates a diremption between the real life of the proletariat as an oppressed class in the epoch of capital and the false image, conceptions and consciousness it has of itself and with which it is imbued by this media as a functioning totality and expression of capital’s rule. This state of affairs daily reinforces, on an ideological plane, the alienation rooted in the process of capitalist production. It serves to fragment the life of people by confronting them with unrealisable idealisations and aspirations, with the ‘could be that never can be’ and a world which is not theirs yet is projected as their very own to acquire.
‘Leisure time’ in the ‘realm of capital’ can never be truly human leisure time as a time for the fullest possible development of people’s humanity in free time outside of the initial necessities and compulsion of production time. Under capital, all leisure time is directly or indirectly linked to the realisation of value and the accumulation of capital. This time is enclosed within the orbit of capital and becomes increasingly and more indispensably associated with the requirements of capital sinking deeper into structural crisis. Here, as well, the media performs its obligatory function as capital’s pimp.
Leisure time under capital is the alienation of real human leisure time because it serves to bind wage labour to capital, to an exploitative social relation whose reach is beyond mere production. The leisure of alienated humanity whose alien labour creates the world of ‘leisure’ in the capital order and continues to confront it outside of direct production as a hostile power of its own making. Leisure is merely the manifestation and reflection of wage labour’s own alienated condition under capital. This ‘leisure’ which people seek outside of labour time is not a recovery of themselves for their own human development but rather a reaffirmation of what has been lost in the course of ‘the theft of alien labour time’ by capital. In ‘leisure time’, the commodity and capital continue to confront people as hostile creations of their own making as a result of the capital-generated and perpetuated diremption between labour time and free time.
Technology created and developed in the epoch of capital is materially and socially ’embedded’ to serve the needs of capital. It is not materially ‘neutral’, that is, divorced from the needs of capital. It is materially designed, engineered and modified to address and pander to the altering needs of capital. This ’embeddedness’ of technology within the capital system means that society in transition away from the epoch of capital will have to re-design and re-engineer technology for the new socialist epoch to address both human and Nature’s needs. This ‘capitalist’ technology must, accordingly, bear the fingerprints of humanity’s alienation under capital since it is the embedded outgrowth of such relations. This technology is not only the product of alienated relations but also a contributory aspect to their perpetuation. The car, the TV, the mobile phone, the personal computer, for example, are covered with the fingerprints of the alienation intrinsic to the capital system.
Capital must, historically, take all forms of labour power and transform them into wage labour power in order to create the conditions necessary for its own development and perpetuation as a social relation and system. This means that all forms of labour which were directed towards the production of things for direct use, and unmediated by exchange, must be extinguished and directed for the production of commodities and, accordingly, for the reproduction and augmentation of capital. In this way, these forms of labour become wage labour. Capital – the creation of wage labour – confronts the producers as a hostile and repressive power resulting from their labour time and this becomes evident in the relations between people and capital’s media. The mass media of capital not only represents the interests of capital but is itself a self-representation of capital. It is a form of capital representing itself whilst articulating the interests of the capital order as a whole.
Shaun May
July 2022
mnwps@hotmail.com
spmay 