Communications blindspot of western marxism pdf

Marx points out many times e. Capital, Vol. I, Ch. You can do what you 'want' with it. Non-work time is labour power which is yours not-to-sell. Hence it seems to be doubly your personal possession. When we see this, we can fit it within what Marx called the 'false appearance' of wage labour citing Wages, Prices and Profit, Peking, , pp.

I think this false appearance has its other side. Just as it appears, at work, that you are paid for all the labour time you do sell, so it appears, off-work, that the labour time you are not paid for is not sold.

Work and non-work time bear interesting relations that need examination, to see beneath the false appearances. They in fact divide the whole world of commodities in two. For at work it is principally commodities-in-general that are made and distributed. Those who make and distribute these commodities do not sell them. But offwork, we find something else. What is being produced there is primarily the peculiar commodity, labour power. And off-work, those who make this commodity, also do not sell it.

But it is sold, as surely as commodities-ingeneral made at the workplace. The mass media of communications and advertising play a large and probably dominant role. BLINDSPOT through the process of consumption by guiding the making of the shopping list as well as through the ideological teaching which permeates both the advertising and ostensibly non-advertising material with which they produce the audience commodity.

What has happened to the time available to workers and the way it is used in the past century? In under conditions ofcottage industry, i. But all this assumed that consumer goods were not monopolized by brand names and that workers could dispose of their non-work time subject only to class and customary i. In , the average American worker could devote about 42 hours per week hours minus 70 hours on the job and 56 hours of sleep to such "cottage industry" type of production of labour power.

Capitalist apologists equated this ostensible reduction in work time with a corresponding increase in "free" or "leisure" time. The reality was quite different. Two transformations were being effected by monopoly capitalism in the nature of work, leisure and consumer behaviour.

On the one hand, huge chunks of workers' time were being removed from their discretion by the phenomenon of metropolitan sprawl and by the nature of unpaid work which workers were obligated to perform. For example, in the contemporary period travel time to and from the job can be estimated at 8.

A total of A further seven hours of the 32 hours of "freed" time disappears when the correction for part-time female employment is made in the reported hours-per-week. The second transformation involves the pressure placed by the system on the remaining hours of the week. If sleeping is estimated at eight hours a day, the remainder of the hours in the week after subtracting sleeping and the unfree work time thus far identified was 42 hours in and 49 hours in We lack systematic information about the use of this "free time" for both dates.

We do know that certain types of activities were common to both dates : personal care, making love, visiting with relatives and friends, preparing and eating meals, attending union, church and other associative institutions, including saloons. We also know that in but not in there was a vast array of branded consumer goods and services pressed on the workers through advertising, point-of-sale displays, and peer group influence.

Attendance at spectator sports and participation in such activities as bowling, camping, and "pleasure driving" of the automobile or snowmobile - all promoted for the sake of equipment sales by the consciousness industry - now take time that was devoted to non-commercial activities in In-house time must now be devoted to deciding whether or not to buy and then to use by whom, where, under what conditions, and why an endless proliferation of goods for personal care, household furnishing, clothing, music reproduction equipment, etc.

Guiding the worker today in all income and time expenditures are the mass media - through the blend of advertisements and programme content. How do Baran and Sweezy deal with the use made of this illusory increase in free time? Deploying Veblen's concept of conspicuous consumption and BLINDSPOT thereby emphasizing the status-seeking character of workers' consumption decisions, they treat leisure time without quotation marks in psychoanalytic terms as time spent willfully in passivity and idleness: This propensity to do nothing has had a decisive part in determining the kinds ofentertainment which are supplied to fill the leisure hours - in the evening, on weekends and holidays, during vacations.

The basic principle is that whatever is presented - reading matter, movies, radio and TV programs - must not make undue demands on the intellectual and emotional resources of the recipients : the purpose is to provide 'fun', 'relaxation', a 'good time' - in short, passively absorbable amusement.

As against the seven hours per week of apparent "non-work" time gained by the average worker between and , how much time does he now spend as part of the audience product of the mass media - time sold to the advertisers? Here the audience-measurement sub-industry gives us some information. In the "prime time" evening hours 7 to 11 p. Women were a significantly larger proportion of this prime time audience than men 42 percent as against 32 percent, while children were 16 percent and teenagers, 10 percent.

It is relatively easy to determine how much radio listening and newspaper and. But much TV and radio programming is attended to incidentally while engaged in other activities such as performing household chores, visiting with friends, reading, and now even while attending spectator sports.

It should now be possible to obtain some clues to the nature of work which workers perform in relation to advertising. If freedom is the act of resisting necessity, what is the nature of the process by which workers react to advertising, and why is it profitable for advertisers to advertise? An advertising theorist, Professor T. Levitt, says, "Customers don't buy things. They buy tools to solve problems. Unfortunately, while workers are faced with millions of possible comparative choices among thousands of "new" commodities, they lack scientifically objective bases on which to evaluate either the "problem" to be solved by buying the proffered "tool" or the efficacy of the "tool" as a solution to the "problem".

In this situation, they constantly struggle to develop a rational shopping list out of an irrational situation. Reduced time for reflection previous to a decision would apparently entail a growing irrationality. However, since it is extremely rational to consider less and less per decision there exists a rationale of irrationality. Monopoly capitalist marketing practice has a sort of seismic, systemic drift towards "impulse purchasing".

Increasingly, the work done by audience members is cued towards impulse purchasing. Again, Linder is insightful : Second, it serves to provide quasi-information for people who lack time to acquire the genuine insights. They get the surrogate information they want to have, in order to feel that they are making the right decisions. The advertiser helps to close the information gap, at the same time exploiting the information gap that is bound to remain.

The object will be to provide a motive for an action for which no solid grounds exist. Brand loyalty must be built up among people who have no possibility of deciding how to act on objective grounds. As routine purchasing procedures gain in importance as a means of reducing decision-making time, it will become increasingly important to capture those who have not yet developed their routines.

According to the publisher ofone recent study: As the authors see it, consumption is a perfectly legitimate and unavoidable activity for children. Consequently they reject a strategy directed at protecting kids from marketing stimuli. What is necessary, then, is to acknowledge that children are going to watch television commercials and to prepare them to be selective consumers. Buy provides evidence to confront existing theories in the emerging field of consumer socialization. The work is essential to everyone concerned with the effects of advertising: sponsors, ad agencies, the television industry, educators, governmental regulators, consumer researchers, and parents.

Constrained by the ideology of monopoly capitalism, the bourgeois notion of free time and leisure is only available to those who have no disposable income What has happened to the time workers spend off-the-job while not sleeping is that enormous pressures on this time have been imposed by all consumer goods and service branches of monopoly capitalism.

Individual, familial and other associative needs must be dealt with, but in a real context of products and advertising which, taken together, make the task of the individual and family basically one of coping while being constantly on the verge of being overwhelmed by these pressures.

Baran and Sweezy state that "advertising constitutes as much an integral part of the system as the giant corporation itself '42 and that "advertising has turned into an indispensable tool for a large sector of corporate business.

Baran and Sweezy are contradictory in answering this question. They tell us that advertising expenses ". What should be crystal clear is that an economic system in which such costs are socially necessary has long ceased to be a socially necessary system.

As I read the work, however, it seems to me that in Capital Marx was concerned to analyze the operation of capitalism under the then realistic conditions of competition and the organization ofindustry as being generally unintegrated from raw material processing through exchange to the consumption process.

If one turns to Marx's "Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy", however, it seems probable that his analysis of monopoly capitalism, had such been possible in his time, would have answered the question of the productivity of advertising differently. Indeed the following passage accommodates the phenomena of advertising, branded merchandise, and monopoly capitalism in managing demands.

Consumption produces production in a double way. Consumption creates the motive for production; it also creates the object which is active in production as its determinant aim. No production without a need. But consumption reproduces the need. Production not only supplies a material for the need, but it also supplies a need for the material. As soon as consumption emerges from its initial state of natural crudity and immediacy - and, if it remained at that stage, this would be because production itself had been arrested there - it becomes itself mediated as a drive by the object.

The need which consumption feels for the object is created by the perception of it. The object of art - like every other product - creates a public which is sensitive to art and enjoys beauty. Production thus not only creates an object for the subject, but also a subject for the object. Thus production produces consumption 1 by SMYTHE creating the materialfor it; 2 by determining the manner ofconsumption; and 3 by creating the products initially posited by it as objects, in the form of a needfelt by the consumer.

It thusproduces the object ofconsumption, the manner ofconsumption and the motive of consumption. Consumption likewise produces the producer's inclination by beckoning to him as an aim-determining need.

The same holds, secondly, for the exchange of products, in so far as that exchange is the means of finishing the product and making it fit for direct consumption. To that extent, exchange is an act comprised within production itself. Thirdly, the so-called exchange between dealers and dealers is by its very organization entirely determined by production, as being itself a producing activity.

Exchange appears as independent and indifferent to production only in the final phase where the product is exchanged directly forconsumption. When the president of the Revlon corporation says : "We manufacture lipsticks. But we sell hope", he is referring to the creation of products initially posited by it as objects in the form of a need felt by the consumer - similarly with Contac-C, the proprietary cold remedy which so disturbed Baran and Sweezy.

Why do they continue to regard the press, TV and radio media as having the prime function of producing news, entertainment and editorial opinion and not audiences for sale to advertisers?

The evidence for the latter is all around us. Baran and Sweezy do indeed indicate how much advertising has grown and when, i. BLINDSPOT In the first three quarters of the nineteenth century, newspapers and magazines in the countries going through the Industrial Revolution were characterized by : a diversity of support as between readers' payments, subsidies from political parties, and advertising most of the latter being information about commodity availability and prices and not about branded merchandise ; and b a cyclical process of technological improvement with consequent larger printing capacity, lower unit costs, lower unit prices of publications, larger profits, capital accumulation and reinvestment in new and more productive plants, etc.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, capitalism faced a crisis. The first stage of the development of the factory system under conditions of competition between relatively small capitalists had succeeded in mobilizing labour supply and exploiting it crudely under conditions documented so ably by Marx in Capital. The very success of the system bred grave threats to it. Politically conscious labour unions posed revolutionary threats to capitalism.

When they looked at their marketing methods, manufacturers were also beset by chronic insecurities. The periodic business cycles in their crisis and liquidation phases forced manufacturers into cut-throat pricing of unbranded merchandise, typically because of the pressure of overhead costs. The result was a short life expectancy for competitive industrialists. In sum, a watershed in the development of capitalism had been reached. Knight said, "Down to the last quarter of the nineteenth century, commerce dominated industry ; after it industry dominated commerce.

But to make such giant integrated corporations viable, their operations had to address directly the problem of people 1 as workers at the job where they were paid, and 2 as buyers of the end prod The systemic solution was a textbook example of the transformation of a contradiction on the principle "one goes into two".

This was an ideological task and it was solved by capitalizing on the deeply held ideological reverence for scientific rationality in the pursuit of possessive individualistic material goals. After militant unions had been crushed by force between and , scientific management was applied to people as workers.

Knowledge about the work process was expropriated from skilled workers to management. The work process was reduced to "ladders" of dead-end "tasks" to complement which ever more sophisticated generations of mass production machines were innovated.

And through varieties of "incentive" wage plans, linked with promotion-from-within on the basis of seniority, supported by company welfare plans and later social insurance through government , the workplace where people got paid was transformed ideologically.

The carrot which systemically motivated them was the pursuit of commodities, which joined this half ofthe ideological exercise with the next. Simultaneously the system dealt with its problem of people as buyers of end products.

As on the job front, science was invoked. The objective was personal satisfaction, and the rationale was efficiency. The term "consumer" was invented to describe the desired object. Advertising and the creation of mass produced communications press, radio and TV principally were developed as the specialized means to this systemic end.

Even if a seeming "overproduction" of consumer goods threatened the profitability of an industry the ability of a company to distinguish its products from unbranded similar products allowed its sales and profits to grow in security. If studies are done - I have been able to locate none - of the history ofbrand names, it will be found that this was how brand name loyalty became an essential weapon in industry when the trusts which produced the present oligopolistic empires of monopoly capitalist industry became dominant features of the industrial landscape.

Certainly the Baran and Sweezy thesis that monopoly capitalism manages demand through market controls and advertising would seem to carry as its corollary the hypothesis that something like the suction of commodities from the material production line to the oligopolistic end-product markets has replaced the atomistic circulation of commodities typical of Marx's time as the model of monopoly capitalist marketing.

While historical scholarship in marketing seems conspicuously undeveloped, fragmentary evidence from studies of marketing history tend to confirm the outline of the process here sketched. BLINDSPOT For example, Joseph Palamountain says, "Great increases in the size of manufacturers or retailers have changed much of the distribution from a flow through a series of largely autonomous markets to a single movement dominated by either manufacturer or retailer.

Technical advances in typesetting, printing including colour , photographic reproduction, etc. The newspaper and magazine entrepreneurs the William Randolph Hearsts and their rivals invented the "yellow journalism" which took advantage of this situation.

The cycle of capital expansion ensued in accelerated speed and scope. Production and circulation were multiplied, while prices paid by the readers were held constant or decreased. And the "mass media" characteristic of monopoly capitalism were created in the 's. It was these mass media, increasingly financed by advertising, that drew together the "melting pot" working class from diverse ethnic groups which were flooding in as migrants to the United States into saleable audiences for the advertisers.

The advent of radio-telephony in the first two decades of this century made possible the use of the same principle which had been proven in the print media. And so commercial radio broadcasting became a systemic innovation of, by, and for monopoly capitalism. When the pent-up civilian demand at the end of World War II, and the generous capital subventions of a government intent on winning that war had provided electronics manufacturers with shellloading and other war plants easily convertible into TV set manufacturing, and when a complaisant FCC could be manipulated into favouring TV over FM broadcasting,b1 TV was approved and largely financed out of capital accumulated from commercial radio broadcasting's profits.

Because it offered a cheaper and more efficient mode of demand management than the alternatives which could be devised. What alternatives? The obvious alternative was "more of the same" methods previously used in marketing: heavier reliance on travelling salesmen to push goods to retailers, heavier use of doorto-door salesmen. To calculate the opportunity cost with a hypothetical elaboration of a marketing system designed to sell branded commodities without advertising was and is a horrendous prospect.

Moreover, it would be pointless because mass production of branded consumer goods and services under capitalism would not have happened, absent advertising. An indication of the efficiency of the audience commodity as a producers' good used in the production of consumer goods and a clue to a possible measure of surplus value created by people working in audiences is provided when we compare In in the U.

Three percent of the sales price as the cost of creating and managing demand seems very cheap - and profitable.

The system also accrued valuable side-benefits. Institutional advertising and the merchandising of political candidates and ideological points of view in the guise of the free lunch and advertising messages were only appreciated and exploited systematically after World War I when propaganda and its associated public opinion polling were developed for war promotion purposes. Background This article addresses the question of productive labour in the information sector.

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With much contemporary discussion on social media and the ethics and transparency of the way they operate, this article examines the discursive processes of user engagement as Baudrillardian … Expand. Second-screen subsumption: Aesthetics of control and the second-screen facilitation of hyper-attentive watching-labour. The article at hand theorizes the political economic shift between the aesthetic strategies deployed by network television in the broadcast-era and those deployed in the matrix-era.

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Dallas W. This article renews Dallas Smythes blindspot argument by examining the economy of. Smythe DW Communications: blindspot of western Marxism. Open navigation menu. Close suggestions Search Search. User Settings. Skip carousel. Carousel Previous.

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