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Theories of Broadcast Media 27
the ‘essence’ of commodity exchange is really an (abstract) exchange of
labour, the source of social value, whilst to the individuals who exchange
this labour this only ever appears to them as the concrete relations
between things (in the form of price). Whilst this obscures the social char-
acter of labour, this essential reality is displaced to the sphere of exchange,
which becomes all the more real: ‘To the producers, therefore, the social
relations between their private labours appear as what they are, i.e. they do
not appear as direct social relations between persons in their work, but
rather as direct social relations between things’ (Marx, 1976: 166–7, my
italics). From this it may be seen that the ‘appearance’ is in a sense ‘real’,
especially because it is convincing. Real as it may be, Marx reminds us
that it conceals the essence, an essence which explains the appearance and an
essence which is not manifest to individuals: ‘... by equating their different
products to each other in exchange as values, they equate their different
kinds of labour as human labour. They do this without being aware of it’
(166–7). In other words, it is not necessarily ideas which represent the
world ‘inaccurately’; rather it is the nature of capitalism itself to present
itself in an inverted form.
In terms of the distinction between content and form that is to be
examined in relation to the media, Marx’s account of the commodity is
instructive. Later we shall see how it has influenced the work of Jean
Baudrillard and Guy Debord, in which the media themselves, in the form
of signs, become intrinsically bound up with the exchange circuits of com-
modities. In fact, for Baudrillard and Debord, the world of image and
spectacle becomes the ultimate form of commodity reification. This impor-
tant concept, which had its first comprehensive development in the work
of Lukács, denotes a phenomenon in which the relations between indi-
viduals are said to acquire a ‘phantom objectivity, taking on autonomous,
all-embracing and rational relations between things (Lukács, 1971: 83).
The production of commodities comes to dominate the whole of society
constituting appearances consisting of complexes of isolated facts. It per-
meates the division of labour within the state, bureaucracy, industry and
especially science.
The final sense of ideology in Marx and Engels to be examined here
is that of ideological incorporation, formulated in their book The German
Ideology:

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, that is, the
class which is the ruling material force in society is at the same time its rul-
ing intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production
at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental pro-
duction, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack
the means of production, are subject to them. (Marx and Engels, 1970: 65)

The understanding of ideology that is purveyed here is one in which the
ideas of one group, the ruling group, become generalized to the whole of