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26 COMMUNICA TION THEORY
within the media, and its influence in the reproduction of forms of
consciousness that accord with the reproduction of capitalist social rela-
tions. In this section, we will therefore be surveying the idea of ‘ideology’
as the content of broadcast apparatuses rather than as implicated in the
very structure of broadcast, which will be examined in the next section.
Whilst Marxist perpectives largely subscribe to the argument that the
media offer an extension, by reflection, of social relations, this is only so in
a distorted form. In a class society, it is quite normal that the ‘true’ character
of social relations, of power and of inequality, is misrepresented. In class
societies, wealth is distributed away from its producers, but, more impor-
tantly, this process is usually masked in some way. This, at least, is the
‘false consciousness’ argument of orthodox Marxism – the earliest Marxist
10
formulation of the concept of ideology. The ‘false consciousness’ thesis
posits ideology as a distorted, inaccurate representation of the world,
which is cultivated by the ruling class and its managerial servants against
the interests of the working class. This early formulation persists today in
the ongoing concern that some Marxists have with the ‘ownership and
control’ of broadcasting and, in particular, its recent globalized form.
However, this theory has been widely criticized as being based on a
correspondence theory of truth – the notion that ideas should transpar-
ently reflect the ‘real’ world. In fact this doctrine of false consciousness
has many more continuities and affinities again with liberal-idealist con-
ceptions of ideology than with later Marxist and cultural theory.
In Marx and Engels’ writings a number of more sophisticated senses
of ideology appear, which were subsequently developed by twentieth-
century Marxists for studying media. 11
Firstly, there is the idea of ‘commodity fetishism’, a definition found
in Marx’s later work which laid the ground for a theory of what Georg
Lukács was later to call ‘reification’. Unlike ‘false consciousness’, which
some Marxists have attempted to apply to all kinds of class society,
Marx’s theory of fetishism is specific to the capitalist mode of production.
In turning to Marx’s major late work Capital, we find a conception of
ideology that is related to a fundamental distinction between essence and
appearance. In Capital, economic relationships as experienced in everyday
life do not ‘reflect’ or correspond to the underlying structural mechanisms
of which they are an effect. Here, the appearance of capitalism as it actu-
ally presents itself obscures from individuals the systemic inner forces
which govern their lives. The important point here is that the misrecogni-
tion of the ‘true’ character of social relations is not a ‘defect’ of the subject;
rather it is a result of how social relations present themselves.
Thus in Marx’s discussion of the fetishism of commodities in Volume I
of Capital the fact that individuals exchange their labour-power (as a
commodity) for other commodities is experienced as an equal exchange
around which an entire realm of legitimation is erected – what Marx calls
the ‘noisy sphere, where everything takes place on the surface in full view
of everyone’ (Marx, 1976: 279; see also Hall, 1977: 324). Marx argues that