Page 157 - Critical Political Economy of the Media

136 Critical investigations in political economy

Processes: commodification and commercialisation
Commodification is the process of transforming objects, products and services
into commodities, things that can be bought and sold for money. In Marxist
terminology commodification is the process of transforming use value into
exchange value, the process of transforming ‘things valued for their use into
marketable products that are valued for what they can bring in exchange’
(Mosco 2009: 2). Once commodities circulate with a price they attain exchange
value, with money serving as their universal equivalent (Marx 1983: 93). Marx
famously begins his major work Capital with analysis of the commodity, which
congeals but also conceals the labour and social relations of its production. A key
task for Marxian analysis is to uncover these, to peel back the ‘onion skin’ of the
commodity’s manifest form in order to reveal the humanly engineered system of
production that produced it and to challenge the expropriation and exploitation
of labour that sustained it. For Marx, products take the form of commodities
when their production is organised through principles of exchange. Under
capitalism, labour also takes on the properties of a commodity as workers are
induced to exchange their labour power for wages that do not fully compensate
for the labour they sell. Capitalists purchase the commodities of labour power
and other means of production but create surplus value by selling the total
output for more than the original investment, generating capital.
Commercialism (or commercialisation) is the orientation of activities towards the
goal of increasing commercial revenue for profit. Commercialism describes one of
the most overt and widespread phenomena in modern media, yet its usage is
problematic, fusing sedimented layers of normative evaluation and critical
debates about privileging profit-making over artistic or other values. Some
writers narrow commercialisation to the ‘creation of a relationship between an
audience and an advertiser’ and favour commodification as the more encom-
passing term (Mosco 2009: 132). However, there are good grounds to reverse
this. Commodification refers to the processes of incorporation into commodity
form. Commercialisation includes all ways in which the pursuit of commercial
transactions shapes communication content and behaviour. It is the diffusion of
a commercial logic across media shaped historically by civic and non-market
values that defines a shift to ‘hypercommercialism’ (McChesney 1999). CPE
examines both the intensification of commercialism and the extension of commo-
dification into activities influenced by a different social logic, such as public
access or sharing, but does so best with a historically attuned analysis that avoids
prelapsarian overtones.

Political economic approaches to advertising
A political economy of advertising explores advertising’s ‘funding, production,
distribution and regulation’ (Golding and Murdock 1979: 18). This requires
study of ‘economic’ dimensions – how advertising and media sectors function in