Wayne 00 prelims 27/5/03 10:43 Page iii Marxism and Media Studies Key Concepts and Contemporary Trends Mike Wayne ... 100 downloads 1290 Views 2MB Size Report This content was uploaded by our users and we assume good faith they have the permission to share this book. If you own the copyright to this book and it is wrongfully on our website, we offer a simple DMCA procedure to remove your content from our site. Start by pressing the button below! Report copyright / DMCA form DOWNLOAD PDF

Wayne 00 prelims



27/5/03



10:43



Page iii



Marxism and Media Studies Key Concepts and Contemporary Trends



Mike Wayne



Pluto



P



Press



LONDON • STERLING, VIRGINIA



Wayne 00 prelims



27/5/03



10:43



Page iv



First published 2003 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA and 22883 Quicksilver Drive, Sterling, VA 20166-2012, USA www.plutobooks.com Copyright © Mike Wayne 2003 The right of Mike Wayne to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Every effort has been made to obtain permission for copyright material used in this book British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 0 7453 1914 9 hardback ISBN 0 7453 1913 0 paperback Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Wayne, Mike. Marxism and media studies : key concepts and contemporary trends / Mike Wayne. p. cm. ISBN 0–7453–1914–9 (hard.) –– ISBN 0–7453–1913–0 (pbk.) 1. Marxian economics. 2. Commodity fetishism. 3. Mass media––Economic aspects. 4. Mass media––Social aspects. I. Title. HB97.5 .W35 2003 302.23'01––dc21 2003004707



10



9



8



7



6



5



4



3



2



1



Designed and produced for Pluto Press by Chase Publishing Services, Fortescue, Sidmouth, EX10 9QG, England Typeset from disk by Stanford DTP Services, Towcester, England Printed and bound in the European Union by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne, England



Wayne 00 prelims



27/5/03



10:43



Page v



Education upholding the bourgeois state can be replaced by education critical of capitalist society. Instead of being trained to be obedient subjects and disciplined wage-earners dominated by the ideology of individual achievement, young people can be encouraged to think independently and to act in collective solidarity. It is selfevident that a practice of this kind must lead to serious conflicts with the ruling class and cannot in the long-run be reconciled with the normal workings of late capitalist society. Mandel, Late Capitalism



Wayne 00 prelims



27/5/03



10:43



Page vii



For my son Jacob, because change begins at home.



Wayne 00 prelims



27/5/03



10:43



Page ix



Contents Acknowledgements



x



Introduction: From the Small Screen to the Big Picture



1



1



Class and Creative Labour



6



2



Mode of Production: Technology and New Media



38



3



Powers of Capital: Hollywood’s Media–Industrial Complex



61



4



The State: Regulating the Impossible



87



5



Base–Superstructure: Reconstructing the Political Unconscious



118



6



Signs, Ideology and Hegemony



155



7



Commodity Fetishism and Reification: The World Made Spectral



183



Knowledge, Norms and Social Interests: Dilemmas for Documentary



220



Conclusion: Reflections on Key Concepts and Contemporary Trends



257



8 9



Notes Bibliography Index



269 273 283



Wayne 00 prelims



27/5/03



10:43



Page x



Acknowledgements My thanks to the following: Pluto Press for supporting both this book and the Marxism and Culture series, Graham Murdock for his early suggestions on structure and content, Brunel University for providing me with the sabbatical I needed to write this book, Peter Wissoker and Robert Glynn for their comments on Chapter 2, Peter Keighron for his observations and comments, Deirdre O’Neill for her support and thoughts throughout, Douglas Kellner for his reassurances during a moment of doubt, Laura Harrison for her careful copy editing and the readers of the International Journal of Cultural Studies and Radical Philosophy for their feedback on parts of Chapters 3 and 5 respectively. A version of Chapter 3 appears in the International Journal of Cultural Studies (volume 6, no. 1, 2003) under the title ‘PostFordism, monopoly capitalism and Hollywood’s media–industrial complex’ and a version of parts of Chapter 5 appears in Radical Philosophy (no. 117, Jan/Feb 2003) under the title ‘Surveillance and Class in Big Brother’.



x



Wayne 01 chaps



27/5/03



10:51



Page 1



Introduction: From the Small Screen to the Big Picture Something very peculiar has happened to the end credits of television programmes in the UK. ‘Where once they were slow-paced and full screen, increasingly end credits are being shrunk, split, sidelined and confined to boxes or speeded up to the point of being almost illegible.’1 This comment comes from an article in the New Media section within the Media supplement of the Guardian newspaper. Such divisions and subdivisions of ‘news’ are typical of the dominant daily organs for the distribution of information concerning current events and trends. It is inconceivable, within such media practices, that there might be a relationship worth exploring between such a seemingly specialist topic or relatively trivial item as end credits and some larger more substantive world events. Yet is there a relationship between our Guardian news item and some of the events which unfold, with rather minimal analysis, on the nightly television news? What possible relationship could exist between this shrinking, splitting and boxing of end credits on the one hand and mass revolts against the imposition of International Monetary Fund policies (obsequiously followed by national politicians) in a modern metropolitan capital such as Argentina’s Buenos Aires? How could it be that this shrinking, splitting and boxing is related in any way whatsoever to the West dropping bombs on this or that part of the developing world? Surely there is no connection between the peculiar fate of end credits and the slow state-sanctioned privatisation of public services such as transport, health and education in the UK? Could there be a connection between such a marginal aspect of our experience of the media and the structures of the media themselves? And is there anything linking all this to the forms and content of the media and the meanings they generate? Perhaps, like Neo in The Matrix (Andy and Larry Wachowski 1999 US), you are aware that the world is not quite right, but the reasons for why it is wrong do not disclose themselves in how the world appears. But where to begin sifting, sorting, analysing the bewildering complexity of events, processes, and debates? As students of the media, we could do worse than start with our lead story. Those end credits. The problem you see is that the nature 1



Wayne 01 chaps



2



27/5/03



10:51



Page 2



Marxism and Media Studies



of television’s airtime has altered in recent years. Previously there was no problem in having the end credits, which register the involvement and roles of the people who made the product you have just watched, scroll past at a leisurely pace with the screen all to themselves. Today the ferocious competition for audiences between broadcasters (however they are funded) means that the end credits must now vie with promotions and announcements designed to keep the viewer watching their channel. This ferocious competition did not develop naturally within the television industry, but was carefully promoted and institutionalised by the state and corporate agents. Airtime now has an economic value which it never had previously. For something to become valuable for some people, it has to be made scarce for others. Once upon a time scarcity afflicted human kind because nature imposed certain limitations and visited certain cruelties upon us. We lacked the basic means by which to overcome these limitations and afflictions. Then, along came a new social and economic system, which gradually developed and matured and promised to conquer scarcity and provide food, health, material wealth and cultural riches never before obtained. Some of these promises were indeed delivered, although patchily, unequally and often in stunted and limited ways. For many, these promises were never delivered. This social and economic system, which came to be known as capitalism, did not in fact abolish scarcity. Rather, it introduced new forms of scarcity, scarcity that was artificially, or socially designed. Time is money, they say. And this is another way of saying that time has become a scarce resource. A value. So time is now so valuable on television, that broadcasters are toying with the idea of displacing the end credits altogether and relocating them on the Internet. This erasure of the labour that has produced the television programme has not best pleased the industry trade unions. In America, the idea was flighted by the Discovery channel only to be shot down by the Documentary Credits Coalition, which represented various filmmakers’ organisations. Our newspaper report notes: ‘Such was the backlash that Discovery was branded as “greedy” and “un-American” in the US press, a reaction that seems to have frozen management on both sides of the Atlantic.’2 The logic of competition and the drive to accumulate audiences and therefore profits from the advertisers (or sustain audience share if publicly funded) are thus resisted, which indicates one important facet of the social and economic system. It does not go unchallenged. The fact that this resistance has been supported by the American press, a capitalist



Wayne 01 chaps



27/5/03



10:51



Page 3



Introduction



3



press funded by advertisers, calling the television industry ‘greedy’ points to another facet: the social and economic scene is full of contradictions, with individual and collective agents espousing values at one level that are contradicted by their practices at another. We should also note that the internationalisation of commercialisation very often takes the route implied here: exported from America, onto Britain, and then the rest of the world. Our own newspaper article is rather keener on the idea of relocating end credits, judging by the many quotes from industry sources supporting the idea which pepper the article. One commentator suggests that ‘There’s no evidence to suggest that consumers are that interested in them.’ There is, on the other hand, plenty of evidence that audiences get irritated and frustrated with adverts. Of course, that kind of consumer response is not something the industry wants to do anything about since that would threaten its very existence. Now you may understandably be unmoved by all this and feel that it is hardly a matter of life and death to have an opinion either way. The point, however, is to imagine what a world would look like if it was organised entirely around such principles as artificial scarcity, competition for profits, the marginalisation of labour, the use of new technology to ‘solve’ problems in a way that is beneficial to capital and so forth. Of course you do not have to have a BA in Imagination Studies to do this because this is in fact the world we live in. The penetration of the forces of capital into every area of our lives, every interaction we have, extends all the way from those end credits to wars over oil supplies (another resource which has become scarce within the social and economic relations of capitalism where there are monopoly providers with built-in vested interests slowing research into renewable sources of energy). The forces of capital stretch all the way through the changing corporate structures of the media, the role of the state, the use of new technology and the cultural forms and meanings the media generates. These forces are contradictory, riddled with surprise twists and turns and meet, to varying degrees and at varying levels of intensity and strength, resistance and counter-forces. It is this narrative, of a newly unrestrained capitalism, restructuring itself and the world it is embedded into (including our own sense of self and identity), on the one hand, and the practical and theoretical forces of resistance on the other, which this book tries to portray amongst contemporary trends as they are filtered through



Wayne 01 chaps



4



27/5/03



10:51



Page 4



Marxism and Media Studies



the media. The key concepts that will be our guide, our compass, derive from Marxism. Marxism is rather more than a methodology for studying the media. It is a political, social, economic and philosophical critique of capitalism that has been much fought over, contested and condemned ever since a nineteenth-century German bloke with a big beard developed it out of a synthesis of French radical politics, German idealist philosophy and British economic analysis. As a critique it has predictably received a bad, begrudging or caricatured press from those who feel that there is no going beyond our present social and economic system. It has also been severely damaged by the track record of those who have acquired power and proclaimed themselves Marxists of one persuasion or another. Even though this track record had its Marxist critics it was the pro-capitalist bourgeois critics who got the most exposure. Marxism in the West had its high point in academia back in the 1960s and 1970s, riding on the crest of a wave of political radicalisation throughout the developing and Western world. Today, within the study of culture and media, it is at best often gestured to as part of a history of methods, whose main themes, concerns and approaches have now been surpassed with infinitely more sophisticated tools of analysis. There are signs that this is beginning to change, perhaps because people are recognising that, as Fredric Jameson once noted, ‘attempts to “go beyond” Marxism typically end by reinventing older pre-Marxist positions’ (Jameson 1988:196). This book is written in the hope that there are people out there studying the media who are increasingly looking for more radical approaches to their subject, searching that is for ways of making sense of the media and culture which really get to the roots of why things are as they are. Marxism I believe is the best methodology we have to begin to do that. It does not by any means have all the answers and it is in any case a field of dispute between Marxists. Yet as a set of tools it has enormous durability, with the world today looking more recognisably like that described by Marx in The Communist Manifesto than it did in 1848, when the Manifesto was first penned. This book is not organised as a history of Marxist thought, but is instead more of an intervention into contemporary trends, drawing on and elucidating Marxian concepts in the expectation that they will help us understand media culture in the context of advanced capitalism. I have tried to explain and apply these concepts as lucidly as possible



Wayne 01 chaps



27/5/03



10:51



Page 5



Introduction



5



without sacrificing their complexity. The latter is particularly important, as opponents of Marxism are quick to dismiss it as being ‘too simple’. In some ways capitalism is incredibly and brutally simple. In others, it is immensely complex and Marx devoted his entire adult life to developing the means to analyse and understand its historic significance for the human race. In integrating an exposition of key Marxist concepts with an analysis of the media, this book moves, broadly speaking, from a discussion of the contextual determinants at work on media practices and structures, to the more textual concerns of media meanings and finally onto more philosophical issues to do with the nature and fate of consciousness and knowledge under capitalism. In some chapters, a variety of different media are drawn on to illustrate the conceptual issues at hand, but, in most, there is a clear emphasis on grounding the discussion in particular media as case studies. The Internet and digital technology and culture are discussed in Chapters 1 and 2. Hollywood’s media–industrial complex dominates Chapter 3. UK television is a frequent point of reference in Chapter 4. Television again features in Chapter 5, with a case study of the international phenomenon known as Big Brother. The print media are centre stage in Chapter 6, Hollywood film in Chapter 7 and the documentary in Chapter 8. Nowhere do these chapters intend to offer histories of those different media. Instead, in a reciprocal dynamic, the hope is that I demonstrate the explanatory power of Marxism by analysing contemporary media practices and that, in turn, the media (and the questions they raise) will clarify, sharpen and question Marxian concepts. The various chapters also necessarily engage with and critique alternative non-Marxian and quasi-Marxian positions within the field while simultaneously, where appropriate, using those other positions to illuminate the blind spots within Marxism. Because the methods we choose to understand the world have an impact on how the world changes, the questions of which tools are deployed and how remain unavoidably political. This book is a contribution to putting Marxism squarely back on the agenda for the study of media and culture.



Wayne 01 chaps



1



27/5/03



10:51



Page 6



Class and Creative Labour



What is capital? Capital is stored-up labour. Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts The more higher education becomes a qualification for specific labour processes, the more intellectual labour becomes proletarianized, in other words transformed into a commodity. Mandel, Late Capitalism If any one concept could be identified as absolutely central to the Marxist methodology and critique of social formations, then it would be class. Class designates a social and economic position and it always involves an antagonistic relation between classes. It is not the only cause of social division and conflict and is indeed usually complexly interwoven with other factors, from geography to other social identities such as ethnicity or gender. The nature of the relationship between class and other social relations has been the topic of much debate, controversy and argument, as well as conflicts between different political strategies. But, for Marxists, class is fundamental because of its integral links with labour and production, the very basis of social existence and development. This is an unfashionable proposition in today’s so-called ‘consumer society’, a term which conveniently conceals the human labour which makes consumption possible. If you doubt the fundamental character of labour, then just consider how much you were dependent on it in your first waking hour this morning. Assuming that you did more than stare blankly at the ceiling for 60 minutes, your morning’s dependence on labour would have begun as soon as you flicked a switch for gas and electricity; as soon as you turned a tap for water; as soon as you reached into the cupboard for your cornflakes and into the fridge for your milk; as soon as you put on the clothes you are wearing while you read this book (assuming you are wearing any). And if you did just stare at the ceiling for 60 minutes, well, someone had to make the ceiling too. All these things depend on the labour power of others, organised under particular social and economic relationships, and, while we may take these things pretty much for granted, without 6



Wayne 01 chaps



27/5/03



10:51



Page 7



Class and Creative Labour



7



them, life would get brutish and short very quickly. The political and methodological implications of this (growing) social interdependence and reciprocity are nothing short of revolutionary. The question of creative labour in cultural analysis has usually been discussed within the category of individual authorship, with the stylistic features of cultural artefacts being linked back to the key creative personnel involved in their making. There are ways of doing authorial analysis within a Marxian framework (see McArthur 2000 for example) but my concern here is with the wider social conditions of creative and intellectual labour as a collective relationship occupying a contradictory position between capital and the ‘traditional’ working class. We will need to stage an encounter between Marxist and sociological conceptions of class to explore this contradictory position, while grounding intellectual labour in some of the specific conditions of media production, such as its divisions of labour and the impact of technology. MAPPING CLASS Let us begin with an emblematic image – one that as a microcosm provides a map of class relations and an indication of some of the pressures and transformations within class relations in recent times. From there we can begin to crystallise the ambiguities in the class position of creative or cultural labour. The image comes from Ridley Scott’s classic science fiction/horror hybrid film, Alien (Ridley Scott 1979 GB/US), that inaugurated a remarkable series of films, which have tapped a zeitgeist around questions of the body, gender and reproduction (Penley 1989, Creed 1993, Kuhn 1990). Less remarked upon but just as central to the films and to Alien in particular is the question of class. Conceptions of class are encoded implicitly into popular culture as a kind of common sense, an instantly, spontaneously, almost unconsciously understood code, part of our reservoir of popular wisdom and knowledge that is in general circulation. Barthes calls this knowledge, which media texts draw on and reconfigure within their specific narratives, a cultural code (Barthes 1990:20). In Alien, the crew of Nostromo, a deep space mining ship, have been awakened from suspended animation to respond to a signal from an unknown planet. In one scene, packed with signifiers of class, Parker (Yaphet Kotto, who the year before had starred in Paul Shrader’s classic working-class drama, Blue Collar (1978 US)) and Brett (Harry Dean



Wayne 01 chaps



8



27/5/03



10:51



Page 8



Marxism and Media Studies



Stanton) demonstrate their reluctance to go and investigate the mysterious signal and seek reassurances from Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) that they will be compensated for this extra work. The location for this scene is down in the bowels of the ship, the domain of Parker and Brett; despite the future setting of the action, this location is all machinery, engineering parts, pipe work and steam shooting out of valves: all classic signifiers of the industrial domain of the manual working class. The verbal discourse of Parker and Brett also signifies class location: they make it clear that they want to be remunerated for this extra work – there is clearly no sense on their part of doing something for ‘good will’. Their attitude could be said to be representative of a working-class perspective, which realistically assesses their limited career opportunities and the conflicting interests between them and their employers that make notions of ‘good will’ or ‘common benefit’ a non-starter. Ripley meanwhile clearly occupies a different class location. She has a pen and clipboard (signifying some sort of supervisory status); it is she who is answering questions rather than asking them; she quotes ‘the law’ at Parker and Brett (it apparently guarantees them their share of whatever is found): believing in the law and being knowledgeable enough about the law to quote it also indicate a different class position, in terms of education and outlook (both, as everyone intuitively knows, important indicators and determinants of precise class location). Finally, Ripley invokes the class dimensions implicit in the spatial relations of the ship (above/below) when she sarcastically tells Parker and Brett that if they want anything, she’ll be ‘on the bridge’, an explicit reference to the division of labour (and the prestige, status and power which go with that division) on the ship. Ripley, then, has all the signifiers of being middle class. These are importantly combined with the gender frisson of Ripley’s female class power over two men, and in this, as in much else, the film prophetically anticipates the influx of female labour – both middle- and working-class – which would become so marked from the 1980s onwards. Now, what we have here, so far, is a partial map of class relations, but it is this partial map that dominates sociological discussions of class. Generally, mainstream sociology presents class as a series of layers, using occupation, income, education and consumption patterns as key criteria for defining class belonging. Mainstream sociology provides important shadings and nuances to any map of class but it characteristically excludes the really central fact of class as far as Marxism is concerned: the social (and economic) relations of



Wayne 01 chaps



27/5/03



10:51



Page 9



Class and Creative Labour



9



production. As a result, there are huge swathes of social experience which mainstream sociology cannot address because the dominant pole in its class map, the social and economic force most responsible for the generation of change, is undertheorised and/or invisible. For example, mainstream sociological definitions of class cannot explain why in the same year that Barclays bank ran a ‘big bank for a big world’ advertising campaign, it was closing smaller branches; why developing world countries pay more money into Western banks than they do on healthcare and education; why a 0.25 per cent tax on financial speculation would raise £250 billion to tackle global poverty and why that tax is unlikely ever to be implemented; or why GM foods are being driven onto the market despite widespread consumer concern over the safety and environmental impact of the technology. Questions about the occupational or educational background of people do not begin to address how class is shaping these social phenomena. Consider this mapping of class from a popular A level sociology textbook: Recent studies of social class have focussed on the white-collar non-manual middle class and the blue-collar manual working class. These classes are often subdivided into various levels in terms of occupational categories. A typical classification is given below. Middle Class



Higher professional, managerial and administrative Lower professional, managerial and administrative Routine white-collar and minor supervisory



Working Class



Skilled manual Semi-skilled manual Unskilled manual (Haralambos 1985:48)



Now it should be clear that the picture of class that the sociologists draw is just as much a representation of class as that found in a popular text such as Alien. Class is in this sense what Fredric Jameson calls an ideologeme, that is, a belief system which can manifest itself primarily as either a concept or doctrine (in a work of sociology for example) or as a narrative in a fictional text. While it is likely to be weighted more towards one or the other of these poles, there is always an



Wayne 01 chaps



10



27/5/03



10:51



Page 10



Marxism and Media Studies



element of both components at work since narratives cannot work without underlying abstractions and even the most conceptual work usually tells some sort of story (Jameson 1989:87). We can see that Alien draws on an ideologeme of class similar to that described in the standard sociological text, with Ripley locatable as ‘routine whitecollar/minor supervisory’ and Parker and Brett as ‘skilled manual’. However, the striking thing about the sociological map is precisely what is absent from the account. The fine grain attention which sociology pays to the differences within and between the working and middle classes is conducted via a repression of the class force which these stratas have to relate to. What is interesting about Alien (and the subsequent films in the series) is that another class force emerges, most spectacularly when one of the crew, Ash, turns out to be a robot who has been programmed by the Company to return the alien to them at the expense of the lives of the crew. This sudden and abrupt foregrounding of the Company as secretly shaping the course of events, draws our attention to that class which often disappears within mainstream sociological discussions of class: the capitalist class. To talk of the capitalist class is to stress their agency as a class; their conscious attempts to organise and shape the world according to their own interests. But capitalists are also in some sense ‘personifications of capital’ (Mészáros 1995:66) for even they must operate according to and within the parameters set by the ‘logic’ of capital. This is a structuring principle of life, which, if individual capitalists did not obey, would soon put them out of business. This logic has two main features: the drive to accumulate profit and competition. In Alien we now have a class map in which Ripley, as representative of the middle class, is dramatically relocated between the working class on the one hand and capital on the other. The figurative and conceptual blockage in mainstream sociology lies in the fact that the capital side of the sandwich which places the ‘middle class’ in the middle is unaccounted for. In Alien what Ripley and we the audience learn is that, despite her differentiation from the labour of those below her (Parker and Brett), she is viewed by the forces above her (capital) as equally expendable. And this indeed is emblematic of wider socio-structural changes. The extension and penetration of the powers of capital, particularly its restructuring of the production process, have begun to impact on wide layers of the middle class through, for example, casualisation and de-skilling. These processes cut across and come into conflict with the differentiations and privileges which capitalism also fosters.



Wayne 01 chaps



27/5/03



10:51



Page 11



Class and Creative Labour



11



Alien not only provides us with a more complete map of the class structure but it is important to understand that it is a map drawn from a very particular perspective: that of the middle class. For Ripley is the film’s heroine and it is in her in which it invests its hopes for overcoming the threat of the alien and the designs of the Company. One sign of this class perspective is the way the film withdraws from the tentative possibilities of a class alliance between Ripley and Parker (who will save her from Ash’s murderous designs) by killing Parker off. Thus the film may be understood as a narrative manifestation of the political unconscious of the middle class generally and specifically of the cultural workers who occupied key creative positions (principally Scott and writers Dan O’Bannon and Walter Hill) in the making of the film (Heffernan 2000:9). We now need to explore in more detail the Marxian conception of class as mapped out in Figure 1.1. Moving from left to right we see how labour sells its labour power to capital. Labour power, Marx writes, is ‘the aggregate of those mental and physical capabilities existing in a human being, which he [sic] exercises whenever he produces a use-value of any description’ (Marx 1983:164). Freely is in inverted commas because although there is no official compulsion to sell your labour power, unless you do or can, labour is condemned to a very impoverished and marginal existence. Thus, what Marx called ‘the dull compulsion of economics’ coerces labour, which has no other means of survival, to enter into a subordinate relationship with capital. Labour, as Marx ironically notes, is, therefore, free from, ‘unemcumbered by, any means of production of [its] own’ (Marx 1983:668). Conversely, it is the ownership of the means of production (land, equipment, raw materials) that defines capital and allows it ultimately to ‘own’ or possess for the working day the body which is inseparable from the power to labour. The diagram shows that for part of the working day the labourer is working for herself, insofar as the value, which she generates through her labour, is paid back to her in the form of wages. However, for part of the working day, labour is working free for capital since labour power has the peculiar ability to generate more value than it needs to survive and reproduce itself (clothing, eating, shelter and so on). This is called surplus value and it is this value which is embodied in the commodities which labour produces. Like an evil spirit capital then moves from the body of labour whose power to labour it activates, and into the commodity labour has produced only to then leave this material body when it is exchanged so that its use-values can be consumed; at the point of



Wayne 01 chaps



12



27/5/03



10:51



Page 12



Marxism and Media Studies



exchange, the spirit of capital flees this material body and enters into money capital which converts the surplus value (embodied in the commodity) into profit. (This analogy between the spirit of capital and ghostly spirits is developed further in Chapter 7.) owns Land, Equipment, Raw Materials



CAPITAL



WAGE



PROFIT



THE WORKING DAY



LABOUR



WORKING FOR HERSELF



‘FREELY’ SELLS



CONSUMES THE PRODUCTS OF OTHER WORKERS’ LABOUR



Figure 1.1



WORKING FOR CAPITAL



LABOUR POWER



⇒



Commodity



SURPLUS VALUE



FOOD, CLOTHES, FILMS, TELEVISION, MUSIC, NEWSPAPERS



The Dichotomous Model of Class Relations



With capital replenished with profit, the personifications of capital will do two things. First, they will siphon off a part of this capital into their own personal consumption. But second – if they wish to remain personifications of capital tomorrow and the day after – they must reinvest that capital in further means of production and in wages to buy more labour power to exploit in order to recommence the whole sordid cycle all over again. Labour meanwhile takes the wages which it has earned and uses them to buy non-productive property (consumer goods) which have been produced by other workers. Some of those goods will be media commodities.



Wayne 01 chaps



27/5/03



10:51



Page 13



Class and Creative Labour



13



The class map tells us that the relationship between capital and labour is inherently, structurally, antagonistic. The extraction of surplus value requires capital to be the prime controller of what, where, why, when and how commodities are produced. Thus production is inherently, structurally, a site of contestation where labour deploys strategies from the small-scale to the large-scale, from the individual to the collective, which resist and subvert the priorities of capital, and capital deploys a variety of strategies to contain and stifle any challenge to its priorities and logic (Barker 1997). This contestation is called class struggle. A number of commentators who are hostile to Marxism point out that there is very little class struggle going on these days. But it all depends on what you imagine ‘struggle’ to encompass. At one end of the spectrum there are strikes and barricades in the streets, the icons of insurrection and revolution; but, on the other hand, class struggle can take quite passive and individualised forms such as absenteeism at work, or minor redistributions of wealth. Thus in A Letter to Brezhnev (Chris Bernard 1985 GB) good-time girl Theresa emerges from the factory where she spends her time with her hands up the arses of poultry, with a prime turkey specimen for her friend because it is Christmas. On the soundtrack a police siren wails in the distance. This signifier of the law asks us to ponder the meaning of Theresa’s theft compared to that larger theft of life, wealth and opportunity that constitutes her working life. Now, it has often been objected that the dichotomous cleavage between two fundamental classes which Marxism invokes, assumes too high a degree of internal coherence and homogeneity for the two classes while at the same time failing to address the important role of the middle class. These objections need to be addressed. Let us begin with Figure 1.2. We have seen that it is commonplace for sociologists to specify differentiations within and between the middle class and the working class. Differentiations such as skilled and semiskilled within the working class and white collar and lower professional within the middle class are indeed important differentials, but sociology often sees only the differentials. Marxists would stress that such differentiations are not absolute, but different facets within the social and economic ‘unity’ of the class that sells its labour power to survive, and this includes the kinds of ‘intellectual’ labour carried out by the middle class. A classic formulation of this view of wage-labour (one which subsumes the middle class into the category



Wayne 01 chaps



14



27/5/03



10:51



Page 14



Marxism and Media Studies FINANCE CAPITAL INDUSTRIAL



Senior Management/Higher Professional



SOCIAL RELATIONS:



PETIT BOURGEOISIE



MIDDLE CLASS



Self-employed



White-collar?



Lower Prof. Managerial/ Admin.



LABOUR/working class White-collar? Skilled Semi-skilled Unskilled Unemployed



Figure 1.2



Class Relations: Marxian and Sociological Perspectives Synthesised



of labour) was made by Marx where he argued that as labour became subordinated to capital and new technology, ‘the real functionary of the total labour process becomes, not the individual labourer, but increasingly a socially unified labour capacity, and since the various labour capacities … participate in very different ways in the immediate process of the formation of commodities … one working with his hands, the other more with his head, one as a manager, engineer, technologist, another as a supervisor, and a third as a direct manual labourer … the functions of labour capacity are … directly exploited by capital and subordinated to its valorization and to the production process as a whole. If we consider the total labourer who makes up this workshop … it is a matter of complete indifference whether the function of the individual labourer, who represents only a limb of the total labourer, is more or less distant from the immediate labour done by hand. (Quoted in Mandel 1978:195) One side of the process which capitalism develops is the hierarchical divisions of labour within and between mental and manual labour, and it is these differentiations which sociology characteristically fore-



Wayne 01 chaps



27/5/03



10:51



Page 15



Class and Creative Labour



15



grounds. Marx by contrast emphasises the other side of the selfsame process by which capital develops a socially unified labour capacity in which particular roles represent ‘only a limb of the total labourer’, while all roles are subjected to a generalised exploitation by capital. Another strand to Marx’s argument, one which is central to the Marxist critique of capitalism, is that these hierarchies and the exploitation for private profit which they facilitate, cut against the progressive socialisation of production. Socialisation of production refers to the way labour becomes increasingly interdependent, so that what is done in one part of a production process or one sector of production is reliant on the labour of other workers elsewhere. For Marx, the socialisation of production provides the objective possibility and the moral necessity to transcend the hierarchical and profit-driven structure of capitalist production. But where sociology focuses too much on differentiations within the workforce, thus destroying in theory the possibility of establishing a unity of class interests, Marx certainly goes too far in suggesting that such differentials are a matter of ‘complete indifference’. Instead we have to see how the traditional working class and the intellectuals take up differential relations to the same socio-economic force: capital. Insofar as those relations are different, the objective unity of labour capacity can be fragmented and the growth of class consciousness can be checked and stunted; insofar as the differential relations are all relations with capital, whose gods are accumulation and competition, labour of different kinds may be said to share fundamental interests. The ambiguities in the two models of class are represented by the question mark over white-collar labour, which I have placed under both labour and the middle class. Even sociologists have debated to what extent white-collar work has become as routinised and managed from above as any ‘working-class’ occupation. As we have seen, Alien and the fate of Ripley may be taken as indicative of trends towards the proletarianisation of white-collar work. As we shall see, the rise of the middle class means that the working class should be viewed as a particular category of labour rather than labour being subsumed into the working class. Ehrenreich defines the working class as: ‘all those people who are not professionals, managers or entrepreneurs; who work for wages rather than salaries; and who spend their working hours variously lifting, bending, driving, monitoring, typing, keyboarding, cleaning, providing physical care for others, loading, unloading, cooking, serving, etc’ (1995:40–41). The working class constitutes 60–70 per cent of the American



Wayne 01 chaps



16



27/5/03



10:51



Page 16



Marxism and Media Studies



population, she contends, and she notes that they nowhere appear in the media in anything like this proportion. Again we have that sociological distinction between wages and salaries which indicates some important differences (job security, career progression) between the working class and the middle class. But it could also conceal some important lines of continuity. The petit bourgeoisie (or small capitalists) are defined as the selfemployed, small business-person. Their place in the social relations of production is characterised by the fact that they do not sell their labour power to an employer since they are the employer and sometimes in turn employ a small number of people. In terms of family background, educational and cultural capital, the petit bourgeoisie may either come from the middle class or the working class. The latter are often to be found running their own small shops or market stalls, or working in trades (plumbers, electricians, etc.) and services (cleaning for example). They therefore have a contradictory class location (but all class locations are contradictory), being culturally working-class but economically small capitalists. The middle-class petit bourgeoisie tend to set up businesses commensurate with their educational capital, which is to say their investment (of time) in acquiring formal educational qualifications (Bourdieu 1996:287); for example, information technology companies, interior designers, alternative therapies and medicines and of course ‘independent’ media companies. This class is continually under pressure and competition from monopoly capitalism, which exerts enormous power in the market (see Chapter 3). Indeed, one of the most frequent class dramas in Hollywood films takes the shape of the struggle of the petit bourgeoisie to survive in a world dominated by monopoly capitalism (see You Have Mail (Nora Ephon 1998 US) and Antitrust (Peter Howitt 2001 US) for example). THE MIDDLE CLASS/INTELLIGENTSIA I want to now turn to the middle class because it is this class in which we can locate cultural and media workers. In what follows I want to do three things: a) define the middle class in terms of their social relations of production as knowledge workers; b) look at the distribution and function of knowledge workers in the production and reproduction of social life under capitalism; c) explore the political implications of the class location of cultural or knowledge workers and the possibilities of antagonism which may exist between them



Wayne 01 chaps



27/5/03



10:51



Page 17



Class and Creative Labour



17



and capital in the context of technological changes which have placed increased emphasis on knowledge, culture and information. Knowledge workers Within the Marxian conception, classes are defined by their social relations of production. One needs to stress social because there has been a tendency to abstract one determinant out of the social and privilege it in isolation from the rest: the economic. For Marxism, there can really be only three classes under capitalism. The principal classes are defined by the selling and buying of labour power, done respectively by labour and capital. The third class, the petit bourgeoisie, who do not sell their labour power but own only small-scale facilities, lie at an oblique angle to this principal antagonism. So far, then, the three classes have been defined by their economic relations to production. But the point about the economic determinant, it needs to be remembered, is that it provides the principal means through which the social control over the labour of others and the social control over one’s own labour within the labour process are either lost or gained (Wright 1979:194). What happens then when people must sell their labour power and therefore effectively cede control over the production apparatus as a whole to capital, while at the same time retaining some real if limited and variable control over their own labour? Such is the position of much of the middle class. Crucially, the middle class must sell their labour power like anyone else in return for a wage. This wage generally secures a higher remuneration (particularly in the private sector) for their labour power than is secured for most members of ‘the working class’ and this is not an unimportant differential. However, this is not the most defining differential and it is not always true in any case. A skilled car worker on a production line for models at the upper end of the market can earn as much or more than your university lecturer. The crucial feature of the middle class, which differentiates them from the working class in the social relations of production, is that they are knowledge workers. Their central activity is, as Wright notes, ‘the elaboration and dissemination of ideas (rather than simply the use of ideas)’ (Wright 1979:192). Gramsci calls this class the intelligentsia for this reason. ‘All men are intellectuals’, Gramsci argues, ‘but not all men have in society the function of intellectuals’ (Gramsci 1971:9). Under capitalism, the elaboration and dissemination of ideas become specialised within a particular category of people who monopolise premium modes of knowledge (formally accredited in



Wayne 01 chaps



18



27/5/03



10:51



Page 18



Marxism and Media Studies



educational institutions) and augment their advantages with social capital (personal networks, ‘knowing the right people’) and what Bourdieu calls cultural capital, the socially determined acquisition of competences and preferences which make up cultural tastes and further help to reproduce class differences (Bourdieu 1996). Wright also calls this group intellectuals, preferring to see them less as a distinct class than a group torn in a three-way split between labour, capital and the petit bourgeoisie (1979:203). Two points are worth underlining here. First, that the split between intellectual labour and more manual or technical labour is central to the division of labour within the cultural industries. Second, there is a close relationship between specialising in the elaboration and dissemination of ideas and meanings, and acquiring some relative autonomy and independence, at least at a day-to-day level, in the production process. This is because ideas develop over time as a process, and constant monitoring and interruption threatens to disrupt and break down this developmental form. Specialising in the production of ideas also provides leverage because the content of those ideas derives from inside the heads of people or (in the case of onscreen stars) in a performance which is inextricably part of their labour power (or labour performance). In either case, the inextricable connection between the value (for capital) and the use-values (for consumers) which they produce and their own minds and bodies (a connection which can be severed by capital with more routine and material kinds of labour power) means that creative labour constitutes a problem for capital’s command and control structure over it. This is why there persists within much cultural and intellectual production the sort of artisanal modes of production which preexisted modern capitalism where skilled labour had close control over its own output (Garnham 1990:36–7). Capital’s control over intellectual labour is thus somewhat loosened relative to its normal practices at the point of production, but control of reproduction, dissemination and revenues (once the cultural product has actually been made) is fully integrated into advanced capitalist structures of control (Hesmondhalgh 2002). So intellectual labour does not present an insuperable problem and to be sure different media industries develop different ways of shaping and influencing creative, intellectual labour and establishing certain parameters for it. In this way, because intellectuals sell their labour, their real but variable autonomy is under constant threat. As the middle class expands and/or becomes industrialised, as in the case of draftsmen, tech-



Wayne 01 chaps



27/5/03



10:51



Page 19



Class and Creative Labour



19



nicians, engineers, accountants, teachers, nurses and media workers, so their skills and knowledges experience a kind of inflation, where they lose value as they become more prevalent and therefore replaceable, or as those skills are integrated into new technologies (Braverman 1974:407, Wright 1979:210–11). When, for example, the advent of PCs enormously increased the productivity of scriptwriters, this did not lead to them working less time to produce the same amount of product, but instead working harder to produce more product than hither to. Here is scriptwriter Paul Abbott (creator of the working-class BBC TV drama Clocking Off, 2000–2001) describing one example of how increasing competition and technological development brought about a partial ‘proletarianisation’ to the writer’s craft: In the early 90s, TV schedulers started gearing up for guerrilla warfare. I was a storyline writer on Coronation Street when they first went word-processed (‘wave Tippex goodbye!’). The stories remained the same, but the speed of output could double. We in the story office imagined this was purely for our benefit. No chance. They were about to increase the number of episodes to Monday, Wednesday and Friday. I have vivid memories of looking at the newly installed computer archive that could, apparently, tell us what colour cardigan Hilda was wearing when Stan died. The guy in charge of ‘modernising’ us was Jules Burns (now joint MD) who proudly switched on the archive computer with a fanfare, beaming, ‘Whadya-think?’1 Here we see how the category of the intelligentsia is internally differentiated into a hierachical division of labour. Film and television producers, for example, mediate between creative workers such as writers like Abbott and the senior executives in charge of profit accumulation. This mediation can take place either within the same organisation or between petit bourgeois producers who own their own production companies and the creatives they hire for particular projects and the financial investors in those projects. In this particular example, computer technology is used by management to compile and retrieve archive data, thus facilitating the expanding productivity of writers and loosening the company’s reliance on the memories of long-serving scriptwriters. Distribution and function Braverman describes the middle groups as embracing ‘engineers, technical and scientific cadre, the lower ranks of supervision and



Wayne 01 chaps



20



27/5/03



10:51



Page 20



Marxism and Media Studies



management ... marketing, financial and organisational administration ... as well as, outside of capitalist production proper, in hospitals, schools, government administration’ (1974:403–4). However, it is worth unpacking this a little and exploring the distribution of knowledge workers and their social functions. Why has the middle class expanded so prodigiously since the time of Marx? John Clarke reminds us of Marx’s discussion of the ‘circuit of capital’. This involves the processes of production, the circulation of products, their exchange (or purchase) for money and their consumption or practical use. Surplus value cannot be achieved unless this entire circuit is closed. The problem for capital is that this process, as Clarke points out, is complex, involving all sorts of ‘gaps, interruptions, blockages, tensions and contradictions’ (1991:48–9) which need to be administered. The middle class therefore have emerged and expanded in order to address the problem of co-ordinating (and speeding up) all the factors (human, logistical, technological and cultural) that enable the circuit of capital to be completed. This idea of co-ordinating the circuit of production does capture something of what much of the middle class do and perhaps describes most of what various fractions of the middle class do, particularly accountants, lawyers, administrators, senior managers, lobbyists and so on. Cultural producers also play a key role here in co-ordinating the circuits between production and consumption, as is the case with advertising, marketing, public relations and market research (Murdock 2000:16). It has often been suggested that the middle classes are involved in helping to reproduce the social relations of production, oiling and coordinating the wheels, rather than directly contributing to the production of surplus value proper. This is the gist of the Ehrenreichs’ classic study of what they call the Professional Middle Class (PMC) (1979:12). The Marxist economist Ernest Mandel, however, reminds us that Marx ‘unequivocally stated that the labour of the research worker and engineer was productive in character’ insofar as it is employed to generate surplus value and profit (1978:255). Rather than sharply distinguishing between direct producers and those who reproduce the relations of production, we ought to see them as closely interrelated. The co-ordinators, after all, are essential to the production cycle (which would come apart without them) while the producers (both working-class and middle-class) are helping to reproduce the relations of production by the very act of production



Wayne 01 chaps



27/5/03



10:51



Page 21



Class and Creative Labour



21



(Noble 1979:131). And what about cultural workers? From the point of view of the impact of their symbolic products, they may be engaged in reproduction (producing ideas and values, otherwise known as ideology, which legitimise the dominant social order); but, viewed from the point of view of production, it is clear that they produce commodities which realise surplus value for media capital, and, indeed, cultural goods as commodities have become increasingly important for capital investments and profits. There is, however, no necessary fit between the economic imperative and cultural values and, indeed, there are good reasons why they often diverge. Economy, technology and culture In his important analysis of the social and economic contradictions of the culture industries, Garnham notes that cultural and informational goods are classic public goods because they are not used up and destroyed by consumption (1990:38). They are also public goods in another related sense. Because they are not used up in their consumption, there is an objective basis for cultural goods to acquire their meanings and values and pleasures because they are shared. The pleasures and meanings of consuming film or music are evidently part of a collective experience in the way that satisfying biological needs such as eating and having shelter, or using private-based utilities such as your fridge or washing machine are not. Of course collective meanings are attached to even these very functional goods (for example in their design) and even more so in relation to such public commodities as clothes and cars. But this is only to say that culture (questions of status and identity) have become attached to them. With cultural goods whose sole raison d’être is cultural expression, the collective dimension of use and consumption is that much more pressing. There is a peculiar tension in this culturalisation of consumer commodities, because while they gesture towards collective if also exclusive (taste) groups, they exist as privately owned, sold and bought. Culture wrapped consumption then increasingly relies on socialised meanings in a system of private property rights. Struggles over cultural products as social products which cut against their status as private commodities are one issue I want to look at in relation to software engineers. But the contribution of intellectuals to that struggle is also bound up with the culturalisation of production. This is the process by which production becomes ever more dependent on the production and dissemination of ideas and information.



Wayne 01 chaps



22



27/5/03



10:51



Page 22



Marxism and Media Studies



What Ernest Mandel defines (perhaps optimistically) as ‘late capitalism’ is precisely a dependence on computer technologies for generating, storing and distributing information. The entry of data processing machines into the private sphere of the American economy in 1954 (after they were developed by the arms economy) was crucial to the technological revolution that subsequently transformed capitalism (Mandel 1978:194). The high costs involved in research and development, in technological innovation and the merciless nature of competition between firms, in turn make ‘ever more exact planning within the late capitalist enterprise’ crucial (Mandel 1978:228). The computer, with its capacity for ‘the rapid processing of colossal quantities and complexes of data’ (Mandel 1978:229), makes planning within the firm possible, while, paradoxically, inter-corporate competition makes it necessary (and in turn makes democratic planning in society as a whole impossible). Planning within the firm entails the self-reflexive management of knowledge and information as a crucial underpinning to the adaptability, innovation and survival of organisations and constitutes a new mode of consciousness amongst bosses and managers (Prusak 1997). Thus, within business management theories, there has been a renewed awakening of the importance of the cultural assets and knowledge resources which all workers have. Communication technology products have magnified the importance of knowledge in sustaining competitive advantage (Tapscott et al. 1998). The relative and variable autonomy of the intellectuals does not rest on the difficulties of standardising knowledge; knowledge can be standardised into machines, as the working class has found to its cost. Crucially, though, the application of knowledge (Castells 1996) as a flexible and continually developing resource is, in fact, very difficult to standardise since to do so immediately freezes that knowledge and inhibits its responsiveness to new conditions. To avoid such rigidities, ‘[n]ew information technologies are not simply tools to be applied but processes to be developed’ (Castells 1996:32). The problem, however, in sustaining and developing the cultural and knowledge resources of the workforce is that, as with cultural products themselves, this requires or more accurately points towards social structures that cut against actually existing capitalism. Thus the development and dissemination of knowledge and skills requires, one business management book tells us, ‘free communication’ and a sense of shared goals. And it goes on, apparently without any sense of irony: ‘This attitude, it has been observed, comes through the



Wayne 01 chaps



27/5/03



10:51



Page 23



Class and Creative Labour



23



building of trust between managers and employees. Only trust can make knowledge flow inside the company, generating a shared world of experience’ (Roos 1997:127). The notion of a culturalisation of production has been a key theme in those accounts of contemporary capitalism which argue that we are moving towards an Information Society. Very often, the claim that goes with that thesis is that class conflict, associated with the industrial production of ‘hard goods’, is now a thing of the past. My argument is less comforting for capital. If culture in all its ramifications (as ideas, values, pleasures) is all about the sharing and exchange of meanings, the culturalisation of production is a problematic development, a problematic mode of development within a mode of production which imposes strict limits, inequalities and distortions on sharing, on interdependence, on the socialisation of production and consumption. Capital and the intelligentsia: a case study in antagonism We have seen that the intellectuals are contradictorily located between capital and labour, as well as the petit bourgeoisie. They are integrated into capital to some extent and differentiated from the working class by their cultural privileges, relative workplace independence and (usually) by remuneration levels. Yet they are not capitalists and their status as labour reasserts itself whenever they are subjected to similar processes of exploitation and proletarianisation as the working class below them. Squeezed between capital and labour they are also constituted by them economically (using their culture as ‘capital’, yet still they are hired hands) and influenced by them at the level of ideas. But not being fully integrated into either social class they often gravitate towards the petit bourgeoisie, either at the level of ideas (seeking individual solutions to social problems) or literally moving economically in the direction of being their own boss. It is hardly surprising then that the questions of autonomy, independence and the existential meaning of work, have been crucial ones for the intellectuals (Heffernan 2000:39–71). One way in which intellectuals have attempted to explain their social role has been to depoliticise what it means to be elaborators and disseminators of ideas. This involves uncoupling knowledge production from vested social interests, defining professionalism as rising above the social conflict between capital and labour, and instead promoting ‘objectivity’ and ‘rationality’ as the very essence of what it is intellectuals do. Nevertheless, it is also true that while the ideology of ‘objectivity’ has, under the guise of working for all humanity, justified their



Wayne 01 chaps



24



27/5/03



10:51



Page 24



Marxism and Media Studies



role to capitalists, it has also inevitably led the intellectuals into conflict with their employers as and when the irrationality and partiality of capital has become too acute to ignore (Ehrenreich and Ehrenreich 1979:22). One kind of mode of antagonism between capital and the intellectuals occurs when the latter seek pragmatic reform of capital to try and make its interests re-converge with more general interests. However, another mode of antagonism separates the intellectuals rather more dramatically from capital as they raise demands which (whether they know it or not) fundamentally conflict with capitalism’s modus operandi. Here pragmatic reform begins to shade into demands that point to a fundamental divergence between the interests of capital and the rest of humanity. An excellent example of the different modes of antagonism that can exist between capital and the intelligentsia can be found in the software culture industry. A thriving movement has emerged around the issue of making the code which software is written in accessible to the user. Corporate software increasingly adopted a proprietary model as the Internet expanded. This model keeps the code that makes the program what it is secret. So even if this software is given away free (in terms of price), it is not free in terms of expression and use. Without access to the source code it is impossible to modify or customise the software or fix bugs in it as well as illegal to copy and distribute the code to other users. The key reason why access to the code software programs are written in has become a political issue is precisely because of the dual dynamic which has seen the culturalisation of production and the expanding production of cultural goods. The culturalisation of production has placed a massive premium on the knowledge and skills of software engineers. It is very clear to such knowledge workers that they are the key assets that are generating a company’s wealth. Yet at the same time they must work within the parameters of corporate strategies and agendas. Thus progress is kept secret; different software engineers in different companies are coming up against similar problems but are unable to discuss them or share solutions because of corporate competition. The ‘free’ communication of ideas, which business management theorists are advocating that companies explore so that they can plan more effectively, here seeks to transcend the limits of communication as they are trapped within the boundaries of the company. Condemned by the logic of capital to perpetually reinvent the wheel, many software engineers working for private companies by day work for more public purposes at night. Alternatively, software developers are setting up Internet



Wayne 01 chaps



27/5/03



10:51



Page 25



Class and Creative Labour



25



co-operatives, such as FreeDevelopers.net with the explicit intention of introducing democratic principles into economic activities and contesting corporate governance. The issue of access to source codes has a broader social significance precisely because software is a cultural product, not a material product like a VCR or a typewriter, but a means of expression and communication. This is what makes the proprietary model in the case of software contentious and a site of struggle. FreeDevelopers.net, for example, states that Our enemy is the proprietary software companies and the managers at the top of those companies. These are the people that disproportionately benefit from perpetuating the system of proprietary developer servitude, which results from hiding the code ... This cabal will fight us furiously and to the end.2 However, not everyone in the software development community sees the issue in such antagonistic terms. The movement to open up access to source codes has two wings to it. The Open Source movement represents the more pragmatic wing. Open Source stresses the commercial benefits of sharing the source code. By using the co-operative and distributive power of the Internet, a software program can be tested and cleansed of bugs by the millions of worldwide users far more thoroughly than it can if it is locked away within a company’s laboratory. So there is plenty of scope to argue that Open Source is a more rational and efficient means by which to develop software. It is still then perfectly possible for corporations to sell some software that is Open Source but subjected to other restrictions that do not threaten their revenue streams. For example, companies can place restrictions on copying and distributing the code, or modifying it. Or a company can restrict access to the source code to within the company, say to its support service team, thus making its support services more effective in dealing with technical difficulties, but not disseminating the source code to the public users. Open Source thus becomes a marketing and PR tool obscuring the many ways in which the freedom to do what you want with the source code is being controlled. A more radical approach to the question of source code is adopted by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) set up by Richard Stallman. Stallman has devised a ‘copyleft’ system, the General Public License (GPL), which guarantees that the source code is kept genuinely free.



Wayne 01 chaps



26



27/5/03



10:51



Page 26



Marxism and Media Studies



The GPL has four components: the freedom to run a program for any purpose; to study how a program works and adapt it to your needs; to redistribute copies; and to modify programs and release them to the public.3 Generally such activities are ‘free’ in a financial sense as well, although the FSF does not insist on this. Developers can charge for software they have designed, but under the copyleft system such software will naturally spread around (since it can be copied and redistributed by other purchasers) to users who do not want or cannot afford to pay. Whereas the Open Source model seeks to make capitalism more efficient, the FSF has followed the logic of the argument further: the aim of the FSF is to abolish the proprietary model when it comes to software. As Richard Stallman has argued, If … [people] don’t write software, they probably cook. If they cook they probably share recipes. And they probably change recipes. It’s natural to share something with other people. But those who want to profit by controlling everyone’s activities try to stop us from sharing with each other – because if we can’t help each other, we’re helpless. We’re dependent on them.4 But ambiguities persist in the Free Software Movement where many developers, such as at FreeDevelopers.net, see themselves as anticorporate, not anti-capitalist and certainly not socialist. But this position can only be sustained by refusing to follow the logic of the argument through and by arbitrarily limiting the debate about ‘worker control’, participation and general social collaboration to software and its developers. The specificities of cultural practice: film and music We have seen that under capitalism labour exists to produce surplus value. This is true of all labour, irrespective of its type or the human needs it serves. There is then a generality about capital and its relations to labour which any critical theory aspiring to adequately know the world has to match. But this generality, the remorseless generality with which capitalism applies its logic to all and sundry, is also part of the problem which theory/thought has to avoid. If everything under capitalism becomes a commodity, something to be bought and sold, this generalised commodification is only a necessary but not sufficient basis of understanding the different and concrete forms which cultural labour takes under commodity production (Garnham 1990:29). For the generality of capitalism’s



Wayne 01 chaps



27/5/03



10:51



Page 27



Class and Creative Labour



27



logic should not blind us to the concrete and particular ways capital and different kinds of labour get articulated together. It is for this reason that we have begun exploring the contradictory position of cultural workers generally. As labour they exist to produce surplus value or are a crucial component in ensuring the production of surplus value by their co-ordination of the circuits of capital. But their very assets require some autonomy, dialogue and temporal duration not easily harnessed to capital’s usual mechanisms of topdown control, while the inextricable connection between their use-value to capital and their individual minds and bodies places certain barriers in the way of making them as interchangeable and controllable as more routine and material kinds of labour power. The political hip hop punk/rock group Rage Against The Machine cannot simply be replaced by their record label with a more politically docile personnel and product, since the personnel and the product are inextricably connected. Similarly, when the creative personnel of Cold Feet, ITV’s successful late 1990s drama about middle-class angst, decided that they did not want to make a fifth series for fear that their labour would become stale and standardised, ITV, who were desperate to exploit this cultural product further, could not simply draft in new writers, actors and so forth and recreate the series because it was the labour power and performance power of the cultural workers making the series which made it what it was and gave it its distinctive identity.5 Nevertheless, this difference in creative/intellectual labour has not been all bad news for capital. It has meant the expansion of a class fraction that has differentiated itself from the working class and has happily exchanged a privileged position in return for acquiescence to the broad agenda and goals set by capital. Although in a contradictory class position, the intellectuals have only sporadically occupied oppositional positions. For just because cultural labour has some inherent resistances towards its own rationalisation and disempowerment that does not mean that capital has not tried (and very successfully in many ways) to work its usual logic. The industrialisation of culture that saw the separation of conception and execution from the majority of the workforce (Braverman 1974) and the concentration of conception into the hands of a controlling managerial elite was very effectively implemented in the Hollywood film studios. The shooting script functioned as blueprint for the film and a means by which producers could keep daily control over the production process, measuring the rushes against the plan (Bordwell,



Wayne 01 chaps



28



27/5/03



10:51



Page 28



Marxism and Media Studies



Staiger and Thompson 1988:135–7). This division of labour and hierarchical control, coupled with standardised production procedures led Adorno and Horkheimer to argue that the culture industry destroys all authentic individuality, leaving only a pseudo-individuality, ‘mass produced like Yale locks, whose only difference can be measured in fractions of millimeters’ (1977:374). This strikes a chord today when we look at boy and girl bands manufactured and coordinated from above. Indeed this manufacturing process itself became a television programme in the case of Popstars (ITV 2001) where performers auditioned for the group that was to eventually roll off the production line as (the inevitably short-lived) Hear’Say. From a macro point of view, the constraining social, organisational and economic determinants can look all-powerful, yet these power relations still have to be negotiated at a more micro day-to-day level, which reintroduces the question of human agency (Negus 1997:69). As Vincent Porter notes, a director’s choice of camera angle or the particular nuance elicited from a performer could alter the meanings of the film in subtle but significant ways (1983:181). Hesmondhalgh also stresses the ‘unusual degree of autonomy’ which creative cultural workers enjoy (2002:55). Yet ‘autonomy’ is difficult to measure, especially given the human propensity to internalise the institutional norms and expectations which structure our actions. Bourdieu calls this process the development of a habitus, which he defines as ‘necessity internalized and converted into a disposition that generates meaningful practices and meaning-giving perceptions’ (1996:170). The story of Hollywood is littered with directors who have tried to squeeze a little more than a nuance of difference out of a film and push the boundaries of institutionalised norms and have found themselves rewarded with redundancy for their efforts. In 1957 Universal Studios took over the editing of Orson Welles’ last Hollywood film, Touch of Evil (Orson Welles 1958 US). As film editor Walter Murch observed, Welles’ film Committed perhaps the worst sin in the Hollywood book; it was a decade or so ahead of its time. Somehow, the executives had been expecting a conventional B picture, and they were upset and confused by the film’s innovative editing and camera work, its use of real locations, its unorthodox use of sound and, thematically, the boldness of its reversals of stereotypes and routine acceptance of human degradation.6



Wayne 01 chaps



27/5/03



10:51



Page 29



Class and Creative Labour



29



Welles subsequently wrote a 58-page memo detailing the differences between his vision for the film and the final studio cut product. As Murch makes clear, the studio’s final cut sought to reintegrate the formal and thematic differences which Welles had crafted, back into a more standardised product. Experiences such as Welles’ are not confined to the particular organisational forms of the classical studio era however. More recently, Richard Stanley, the British writer and director of cult horror films, suddenly experienced the powerlessness of wage labour when he was sacked from making the US film The Island of Dr Moreau (it was eventually directed by John Frankenheimer and released in 1996). This sort of thing is not supposed to happen according to Information Society guru Robert Reich: ‘The idea merchants ... exert at least as much authority, and have as much control over the final product, as do the executives back at headquarters’ (1991:102). Stanley had written the script which had attracted Marlon Brando and Val Kilmer. New Line were the film’s financiers. However, when Stanley fell out with Kilmer, widely reported on this and other film sets to be an ego out of control, it was Stanley who was sacrificed. The dynamics of power between different cultural workers and capital and the very cynical process by which challenging ideas can be remodelled into something bland and uncontentious are nicely described by Stanley to the writer David Hughes: But surely it was Stanley – or his script – that had first attracted somebody of Kilmer’s calibre? ‘It doesn’t matter. The script is just a lure. They don’t actually want or need a script to shoot the movie – they need it to draw the talent. Once the talent’s on board, the script gets thrown over your shoulder and it’s time to do something completely different ... In my script, Prendick was a sort of civil rights lawyer working for the UN, who has just come from trying to negotiate a peace settlement in somewhere like Bougainville in the South Pacific, when a limited nuclear exchange breaks out in the rest of the world.’ This premise, not part of the original novel, was the cornerstone of Stanley’s update. ‘The beast people became the cradle of civilisation, and were potentially what was going to come next in the evolution of the species. Moreau was diligently working on a replacement species for Man.’ In Stanley’s draft, Prendick takes on the role of law-giver when Moreau dies, and has to sort things out for the beast people. ‘It was going to turn into a kind of piss-take on Yugoslavia or Somalia, where the man from



Wayne 01 chaps



30



27/5/03



10:51



Page 30



Marxism and Media Studies



the UN did extremely badly and succeeded in messing things up even worse for the people he was trying to protect. That is all completely gone ... It’s now the slave bunch liberated by the outsider, who leads the rebellion – the same old pro-democracy liberal American message which creeps into everything if Americans are given half a chance.’7 As I write this in early October 2001, American and British forces are bombing Afghanistan; their Doctor Moreau this time is not Saddam Hussein as in the Gulf War (1991) or Slobodan Milosevic (as in Kosovo), but Osama bin Laden. Public support for their action (such as it is) depends fundamentally on Western politicians and institutions being able to say that there is a qualitative moral difference between their actions and those of their foes. And this in turn requires suppressing the similarities, alliances and complicities between them and their foes just as the continuities between Moreau and Prendick were suppressed in Stanley’s script. In this context then, we can perhaps see that Stanley’s experiences are part of a continuum of cultural struggles which have enormous implications for public debate (or lack of it) and for the diversity (or narrowness) and sceptical (or credulous) quality of the cultural imagination. The industrial nature of film and television production has allowed capital to monopolise it in ways which are quite distinct and it has also cemented a division of labour in which working-class access to these arms of cultural production has been, relatively speaking, largely restricted to the technical and manual components of the labour process. The middle class meanwhile have dominated the creative side and provided the key mediating agency in the cultural process as well as the political unconscious irradiating through the finished cultural product (even if in dialogue with capital and labour). This domination of capital and the intelligentsia is relative and distinct when compared to the music industry. There did exist, for example, in American cinema a small black independent cinema during the decades of the Hollywood studio system, but it was incomparably marginalised in its cultural influence compared with black music. It was not until briefly in the 1970s, around ‘blaxploitation’ films, and in a more sustained and more authentically black manner in the late 1980s that black talent on-screen, and in creative positions behind it, really broke through. It is because of the specific qualities of music, its production and consumption that it could act as a conduit for black talent and



Wayne 01 chaps



27/5/03



10:51



Page 31



Class and Creative Labour



31



creativity in a way which the film industry has only very recently begun to aspire to, if not match. In an ocular culture, black filmmaking was bound to remain specifically tied to black representation, black ‘issues’ and black audiences. But part of the impact of black music, both on other cultural producers and audiences, has been its ability to cross the racial divisions of America. The mode of consumption in public places, bars and cafes, mixes music with other activities, giving it a social reach that outstrips the more dedicated activity of film consumption. Furthermore, while film (until the advent of video) could only be consumed in the public spaces of the theatre, the domestic consumption of music meant that one actually bought the product, on vinyl and then tape, rather than just the experience of the product (as with film) in specialised venues. This vastly expanded the retail outlets and distribution possibilities of music, making it much harder to establish white-owned monopoly positions within the industry. Domestic consumption also meant that music was interwoven into everyday life far more powerfully than film. Dr Dre, hardcore hip hop artist and formerly of the band Niggaz With Attitude, remembers how he would ‘put on a record at my mother’s card parties, and people would scream out or get up and dance. I just loved stirring people up.’8 Music has thus been integral to American black working-class life in a way that film has not. In addition, the same piece of music tends to be consumed multiple times, while a film, more narrative-based and less amenable to being combined with other activities simultaneously, tends to be subjected to far fewer reiterated acts of consumption by the same person. These cultural skills and knowledges then could be acquired outside formal education, and, what is more, the relative cheapness of musical cultural production (when compared to the capital intensive nature of the film industry) has opened the medium up to black talent and particularly black working-class talent. Hip hop has been one manifestation of this, with varying cultural politics, from the social realism of Grandmaster Flash in the early 1980s, to the black nationalism of East Coast rappers such as Public Enemy, to the controversies around so-called ‘hardcore’ hip hop, or gangsta rap, such as the music of the West Coast band Niggaz With Attitude whose 1988 debut album, Straight Outta Compton, featured songs like ‘Fuck tha police’, and went double platinum (2 million sales).9 Even less likely to appear in a Hollywood film are the sort of sentiments articulated by Marxist hip hop band The Coup. On the



Wayne 01 chaps



32



27/5/03



10:51



Page 32



Marxism and Media Studies



album Party Music (2001), singer Boots Riley tells his baby daughter something of the power structures of the world she is growing up in: The World ain’t no fairy tale And it’s run by some rich white scary males To make it simple for you Let’s call them the bosses They take your money while The people take the losses Sold black folks from Africa to work for free And we still barely get paid enough to eat. (© The Coup/75ARK, 2001) Black cultural production in music (although unfortunately not its Marxian strand) did contribute in the early 1990s to a small expansion of black films, such as New Jack City (Mario Van Peebles 1991 US), Straight Out of Brooklyn (Matty Rich 1991 US), and Boyz N the Hood (John Singleton 1991 US) although these films are by no means unproblematic (McCarthy 2000). But for all the reasons listed above, black musicians have been able to turn themselves into producers, highly successful petit bourgeois businessmen (they usually are men) with their own record labels. In one stroke this helps to secure their own positions, making them less dependent on corporate support, while also crucially helping to reproduce the next wave and generation of black music by opening up access to new talent. Yet if hip hop has been the product of the ghetto, and hip hop artists have been ‘organic intellectuals’ (Gramsci’s term for knowledge workers who emerge out of and retain a direct link to the social and productive life of a class), success catapults black musicians out of the class and culture which informs their music, turning them in a way into ‘traditional intellectuals’ (Gramsci’s term for intellectuals who over time, through the division of labour or the ascendance of new class forces, lose touch with the ongoing dynamics of social and economic life). This trajectory produces class specific tensions and ambivalences in their work and their relations to their public. The trajectory of success raises fundamental questions for the musicians involved. Some, like the members of The Coup, choose in various ways to resist class assimilation, others, like Sean ‘Puff Daddy’ Combs, now found hobnobbing with the white social elite,10 welcome their social trajectory more uncritically.



Wayne 01 chaps



27/5/03



10:51



Page 33



Class and Creative Labour



33



THE ABSTRACTION OF LABOUR I want to end this chapter by turning to a more ‘philosophical’ discourse in order to understand what it is about human labour that makes it so central to us as human beings. And I also want to examine what happens to this central human activity under capitalism. This will in turn help us understand the special quality and role of cultural labour and the particular problems posed for capital to set cultural labour in motion profitably. The crucial concept here is that of abstraction. The ordinary, dictionary definition of the word abstract refers to thought which has lost contact with material objects and examples; thought which is not concrete, thought which lacks detail and attention to particulars, to light and shade, to variety. However, for Marx, under capitalism, it is material reality itself which exhibits the most powerful abstraction. It is material reality that has lost contact with the concrete and the particular. The concrete and the particular that concerns Marx are about labour. For Marx, labour is not just an activity; it is an essential part of what it is to be human (what Marx calls our species-being). Labour is production without which there would be no human progress, no human societies, and no culture. Through labour, human beings transform the natural and social world around them, thus, simultaneously, transforming themselves. It is in the ‘Nature-imposed condition of human existence’ (Marx 1983:179) to be part of nature while at the same time transforming it and opening up the vistas of human history. This is why, as Marx notes, although the ‘bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells … what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality’ (1983:174). Thus humanity escapes the cycle of nature and blind instinct. In labour, human beings make choices and decisions; human labour is of its essence practical creativity. In escaping the blind dictates of nature, even as it continues to depend on nature for the resources of life and living, human labour demonstrates the conscious control and transformation of our world. Thus, ‘the exercise of labour power, labour, is the worker’s own life-activity, the manifestation of his life’ (Marx 1973:49). Yet, under capitalism, labour yields control to capital (selling its labour power), to the personifications of capital. The practical effect of this is that the worker’s own ‘life-activity’ is put at the disposal of others who arrange it and control it in ways that maximise profitability. Life for the worker



Wayne 01 chaps



34



27/5/03



10:51



Page 34



Marxism and Media Studies



now begins outside their ‘life-activity’, consuming the products and services of other workers engaged in similarly life-denying activities. For Marx it is the material process of labour that has become abstract. The activity of labour has lost touch with the concrete particularity of labour. For capital, labour power is a source of appropriated surplus value which, via the circulation of capital as commodities and money, will be turned into profit. Everything about the labour process and the products it produces must be subordinated to this aim. What is abstract then is the very real dominance of the profit motive. The profit motive is rather like the monster in The Blob (Chuck Russell 1988 US), absorbing everything it touches into its own homogeneous structure. Such ‘blobification’ – the reduction of everything to the same goal – is intimately connected with the domination of money, of financial calculations, of quantitative assessment criteria which overwhelm qualitative ones, and these economic priorities are a manifestation of the social domination of capital and its personifications. To explore a little more the idea that it is the particularity of labour which is made abstract under capitalism we need to understand Marx’s concept of value. The substance of value is the capacity of labour power to produce social wealth; value is congealed in the products of human labour. Value is thus a very abstract concept. But, it is important to note that it is only a concept. Marx noted that Aristotle had groped towards a concept of value in ancient Greece. Aristotle saw that the value of one commodity could be made equivalent in quantitative proportion to another commodity. Thus for example: 5 beds = 1 house (clearly this was before the housing market spiralled out of control). Such a comparison implies some equality between them, some measure of comparison. But, asks Aristotle, how can ‘such unlike things ... be commensurable?’ (Marx 1983:65). His answer is that it is merely a convention, ‘a makeshift for practical purposes’. Marx’s answer is that they are commensurate because they are both products of labour. Aristotle could not, Marx argued, formulate the concept of value because Aristotle lived in a society which required slave labour, which is to say a society where labour was manifestly not commensurate or equal. To say that what a bed and a house share is that they are both examples of human labour is of course an example of abstract thought. The particularities of making a bed, working with particular materials in particular ways for particular human needs, and making a house, are lost from view. Still, there is no harm necessarily done,



Wayne 01 chaps



27/5/03



10:51



Page 35



Class and Creative Labour



35



it is merely a way of making certain generalisations as to the pervasiveness of human labour stored up in the world we make around us. But what happens when the world around us is actually organised as if there really is, in practice, no difference between different kinds of labour, their products and the needs and uses they satisfy? What happens is that you get people like Michael Green, Chairman of Carlton Communications. More than two thousand years after Aristotle puzzled over the very thought of making ‘unlike’ things commensurable, Green reveals that he is very happy to abolish the unlikeness of things and make them commensurable in practice: ‘I think of television as a manufacturing process’ he once said. ‘What is the difference between a television programme and this lighter?’ (Tracey 1998:12). As Marx argued, under capitalism, ‘the abstraction of the category “labour”, “labour in general” … the starting point of modern political economy, becomes realised in practice’ (1973: 49). Under capitalism, all the concrete different types of labour that constitute the productive life of society become ‘practically abstract labour’ (Murray 2000). The substance of value (social wealth derived from labour) is made abstract. Labour is materialised into products (a general condition of human labour throughout history) but materialised according to an abstract and systemic logic of profit accumulation (a logic specific to capitalism). This does not, however, produce an ‘equality of exploitation’ for reasons that I will spell out at the conclusion of this chapter. For Marx then, socialism involves the emancipation of labour from the abstract tyranny of capital. For Marx material production would have to be quantitatively transformed (massively shortening the working day) and qualitatively transformed, which is to say that there is great scope for making material production a far greater realm of participation and satisfaction than it currently is. But still, material production would remain tied to the realm of necessity insofar as the requirements to sustain life according to a historically acceptable level remained. Thus Marx associated genuinely free labour with cultural play and production. It is here, once material needs have been satisfied, that the greatest scope for realising what Marx called the ‘development of human potentiality for its own sake’ resides (1980:166). This chapter has set two models of class in contention with one another and criticised the sociological model from a Marxist perspective. Mainstream sociology’s repression of the capitalist class and the dynamics of accumulation is profoundly problematic, but I have also



Wayne 01 chaps



36



27/5/03



10:51



Page 36



Marxism and Media Studies



allowed that the sociological attention to the differential distribution of assets raises certain questions for the Marxist model of class. In particular I drew attention to the question of the middle class (and their ‘knowledge assets’), or, as I have preferred to call them, following Gramsci, the intelligentsia. We have seen that their position in the class structure is contradictory, buffeted by and trying to differentiate themselves from capital on the one side and labour on the other. They play a central role in co-ordinating production, in developing new techniques of production and applications, and in generating values, beliefs, knowledge and public discourses and representations of the world we live in. We have seen that within media production the question of autonomy for the intelligentsia versus the question of controlling and rationalising the intelligentsia for capital is a crucial dynamic. The accumulation logic of capital can be grasped by its abstract indifference to the particularity of human labour (and human needs). One of the key implications of making labour abstract, commensurate and equivalent is that individual members of the labour force become equivalent and interchangeable, thus weakening their bargaining power vis-à-vis capital and making them easily replaceable. The interchangeability of labourers is a key feature of abstraction. But insofar as the cultural worker is not easily or as easily interchangeable with other cultural workers, this sets up certain problems for capital’s command and control structure over creative labour. The abstract quality of capitalism’s accumulation logic does not produce an equality of exploitation, that is all labour being exploited to an equal degree and in equal ways. This is for three reasons. First, the endless search for competitive advantage means that capitalism seizes on any social or natural differentials that can be built on to increase profit margins. Second, the resistance to capital’s imperatives are uneven. Third, despite capital’s abstract indifference to the materiality of human life, in practice it has to respond to and work through the differentials which the particularities of material practices produce. This can work to its advantage when, for example, the differential qualities of knowledge workers allow them to suppress their identities as wage-labourers. But it also opens up differential prospects and spaces for resistance to the logic of capital. So, for example, we have seen that the distinct materiality of the cultural practices of film and music offers different possibilities and limitations for black and working-class cultural producers. The proposal that capitalism is a practical abstraction of the real concrete materi-



Wayne 01 chaps



27/5/03



10:51



Page 37



Class and Creative Labour



37



ality of social practices is an important theme in this book. If by abstraction we mean a systematic indifference to the details and particularities of material life, than capitalism is a kind of dematerialising materialism, an idea that we will return to especially in Chapter 7, on commodity fetishism. But, throughout this book, this dematerialising or abstract materialism behoves a critical theory like Marxism to walk a tightrope, constantly seeking to grasp the sheer generality of capital’s accumulation/competition dynamic while remaining attentive to the concrete materiality of practices where difference and resistance are to be found.



Wayne 01 chaps



2



27/5/03



10:51



Page 38



Mode of Production: Technology and New Media



Historical systems … are just that – historical. They come into existence and eventually go out of existence, the consequence of internal processes in which the exacerbation of the internal contradictions leads to a structural crisis. Structural crises are massive, not momentary. They take time to play themselves out. Historical capitalism entered into its structural crisis in the early twentieth century and will probably see its demise as a historical system sometime in the next century. Wallerstein, Historical Capitalism [C]apital … is an essential relationship for the development of the productive forces of society. It only ceases to be so when the development of these productive forces themselves meets a barrier in capital itself. Marx, Grundrisse If a record company has spent millions to develop and control the works of musicians, banking on their value as consumer goods … company officials might be shocked to discover what they hope to sell and control ha