Mike Wayne's Marxism and Media Studies (2003)

Book Review from the December 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

Marxism and Media Studies. By Mike Wayne. Pluto Press.

The big media are owned by big companies, so naturally enough they present a pro-capitalist view of the world. You might think there wasn’t much more to say about the media, but in this book Mike Wayne says quite a bit more. Be warned, though, that it is intended as a university textbook, and this is presumably what makes it so full of jargon (reification, ideologeme, for instance). The second half, in particular, is strong on jargon but remarkably weak on insight.

Wayne begins by wrestling with the question of whether “cultural workers” (writers, actors, etc.) are working class or not. He accepts that they produce commodities that realise surplus value, and notes that scriptwriters on Coronation Street had to increase their productivity when the soap changed to three episodes a week (as the actors had to as well). He has a point that actors and musicians who are established faces/voices cannot be simply replaced with other wage workers, but draws from this the odd conclusion that “intellectuals” are somehow located between capital and labour. The fact is that, leaving aside a small number of very highly-paid performers, those who work in the media are dependent on selling their ability to work and so count as wage workers. Even film directors can get sacked if they step out of line.

So-called public service broadcasting (the BBC, for instance) is often seen as motivated by considerations other than profit. But Wayne remarks on the political context in which such organisations were set up: the 1920s and 30s were a time of increased state intervention in the economy, and “public” broadcasting arose in line with such developments, designed to serve the overall interests of the capitalist class. The overtly commercial media, of course, are run on straightforward capitalist lines. The amount of advertising on TV has increased, to a permitted average of eight minutes per hour (next time you watch ER, check how much advertising the show’s 60 minutes contains).

Media conglomerates such as Disney are almost a law unto themselves, and their companies repeatedly plug films made by other Disney subsidiaries. Disney’s boss Michael Eisner and the ubiquitous Rupert Murdoch lobbied for China to be allowed into the World Trade Organisation, as both have their eyes on the potentially enormous Chinese market. But many governments regard their country’s media as a special case, not to be open to overseas takeovers and so needing “protection”. US capitalists, in particular, have been pressing for the WTO to enforce “liberalisation” of European media, so that they can be sold to the highest bidder. For instance, when the Kirch media group in Germany collapsed in 2002, Murdoch was prevented from acquiring a controlling interest.

Wayne presents an analysis of Big Brother in terms of the base-superstructure model. But we’ll refrain from quoting any of the more pretentious formulations in this, on the grounds that it would be too easy a target.

Paul Bennett

Social capital? (2010)

Book Review from the May 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

Theories of Social Capital. By Ben Fine, Pluto Press, 2010

In Marxian economics capital only exists when the appropriate historical and social conditions are present. Specifically, when the means of production are generally used to exploit wage labour for profit. In capitalist economics capital is one of the ‘factors of production’ along with land and labour (and, in some definitions, entrepreneurship or management). Capital is money invested in production with the expectation of profit, though in capitalist economics capital is primarily a timeless asset. This is why those who have been exposed to capitalist economics will sometimes express bafflement at the socialist proposal to abolish capital. ‘But any society must have capital,’ they exclaim, as if we propose to physically destroy means of production. No, any modern society must have means of production (land, factories, railways, etc.), but it is only in the capitalist system of society that the means of production takes the form of capital. Socialists want to abolish capital by establishing common ownership of the means of production, replacing production for profit with production solely for use.

In the last 20 years or so, in an attempt to promote the illusion of the inevitability of capital, the term has been widened to include ‘social capital’. Fine defines social capital as ‘any aspect of the social that cannot be deemed to be economic but which can be deemed to be an asset’. It can be anything from your personal acquaintances, through communal or associational activity, to your identity or culture, and so on. The objective, whether clearly recognised as such or not, is to get the notion of profit into every aspect of our lives. It should come as no surprise that one of the main sponsors of the idea of ‘social capital’ is the World Bank, though its use is now well-established in certain academic disciplines, such as management studies.

Fine has also written, along with Alfredo Saad-Filho, a highly recommended work on Marxian economics called Marx’s ‘Capital’. Now in its fourth edition (2003) it is a remarkably succinct summary (216 pages) of Marx’s multi-volume Capital.

Lew Higgins

Top, Middle and Bottom (2016)

Book Review from the February 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

'Social Class in the 21st Century', by Mike Savage et al. Penguin £8.99

This book is based on the findings of the Great British Class Survey (see www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22000973), previously discussed in the Socialist Standard in May 2013. This was launched on the BBC website in 2011, and the analysis here derives from an impressive first round of 161,000 responses, supplemented by further face-to-face interviews, as those who took part in the online survey were disproportionately higher up in the social scale and living in England.

The authors distinguish three kinds of capital (this term is not used in the Marxist sense of means of production used to employ wage labour for the sake of profit). Economic capital is a person’s income and wealth (savings and the value of their home). Cultural capital, a concept taken from the work of Pierre Bourdieu, is a matter of a person’s tastes and interests, and is divided into two kinds: highbrow (going to art galleries, eating in French restaurants, liking jazz, etc) or emerging (using the internet, going to the gym, spending time with friends and so on). Social capital relates to your social networks, the kinds of people you know and how well you know them (knowing ‘the right people’ may help you get a job with a law firm but won’t help with a job in IT).

Based on these criteria, no fewer than seven social classes are identified: elite, established middle class, technical middle class, new affluent workers, traditional working class, emerging service workers and precariat. A person’s place in this is determined by their income and savings, their ‘score’ for the range of people in different occupations they know (boosted by knowing those in higher status jobs), and their cultural capital. For instance, new affluent workers will have on average household income of £29,000 and little in savings (so ‘affluent’ is something of a misnomer), and be roughly in the middle in terms of the value of their house. But they score quite highly for their range of social contacts and they have rather more emerging than highbrow cultural capital. Though social class in the way used here is not directly linked to occupation, the authors have stated elsewhere that members of this class might well work as electricians, postal workers and catering assistants, among others.

The classes falling between the elite and the precariat do not form a simple hierarchy, but are clearly distinguished from those at the top and bottom. The precariat, forming about 15% of the population, have an average household income of just £8,000 and very little in savings, and get low scores for cultural and social capital. They are often stigmatised, and women in this class were well aware that they were at the bottom of the heap, while men were ‘more resistant’ to consideration of class.

In contrast, the elite had average household income of £89,000, with sizeable savings and valuable houses; they had extensive social contacts and scored particularly highly for highbrow cultural capital. They form about 6 percent of the population, so they are far more than just the top 1 percent (compare Thomas Piketty’s discussion of the ‘9 percent’, those in the top 10 percent but not in the top 1 percent, who they are clearly distinguished from). This income (which is for the household and so may include more than one wage) is well above the average but of course is very small when compared to the really top incomes, of millions a year, for those who may have billions in wealth and several large mansions. And assets accumulated from the past (whether savings or houses) are far more important than current income. There is relatively little mobility into this elite, and also little down from it. As the richest get even richer and pull away from the rest of the population, so those lower down have much farther to go to get to the top (a larger hill to climb, in the metaphor used here).

The volume contains a lot of other interesting points, some related to changes in society. Highbrow cultural capital is increasingly confined to an older age group, and there are links between class and age: new affluent workers and emerging service workers are much younger on average than those in the traditional working class. Attending a prestigious university such as Oxford, Cambridge or the LSE is still a real help in joining the elite and so amassing large savings. Most people have more wide-ranging social ties than fifty years ago. Less than a third of respondents thought of themselves as belonging to a social class, though when pressed 62 percent ‘gave themselves some kind of working class identity’.

But the classes identified here do not have shared interests as against the rest: nobody is ever going to say ‘New affluent workers of the world, unite!’, nor will they ever form a class for itself (Marx’s term for a class conscious of its status and interests, mentioned in the Introduction). And, when all is said and done, an approach which puts dentists in the elite alongside multi-millionaires is missing quite a lot. 

Paul Bennett