Page 26 - Critical Political Economy of the Media

What (is) political economy of the media? 5

contrasts with subsequent efforts by ‘neoclassical’ writers to establish economics
as a mathematics-based science, by bracketing out history, politics and ethics.
Yet the classical political economists in nineteenth century Britain were asso-
ciated with cold calculus themselves, from Nassau Senior’s opposition to welfare
relief during the great Irish famine, Thomas Malthus’s arguments for population
control and John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarian moral philosophy.
Their limitations and pro-capitalist class bias are repudiated in Marx’s Capital,
presented as a ‘critique of political economy’.

Neoclassical economics
Initially broad in scope, classical political economy influenced the scientific study
of economics developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that
focused on the efficient satisfaction of wants in markets, known as neoclassical
economics. Its founders included Alfred Marshall, Vilfredo Pareto, Francis
Edgeworth and Leon Walras. Thus mainstream economics evolved largely as a
discipline professing value neutrality, while taking existing social relations as a
given, and in general supporting core principles of market-based systems, namely
that consumer and citizen welfare is best achieved through efficient market
mechanisms. Classical political economy had expounded the labour theory of
value, which located wealth creation in the surplus value extracted from workers
(Smith, Ricardo, Marx). Neoclassical economics propounded a new theory of
value derived from consumer preferences exercised in markets. This bypassed
the attention to social class divisions and injustice in the distribution of wealth
and income, which Marx had made central to his account of the exploitative
social relations of capitalism. Taking consumer preferences to be preformed
and beyond dispute helped to justify the narrowing of economic analysis to a
mathematical-deductive system studying supply and demand in markets.
While neoclassical economics became the orthodox approach in capitalist
systems, elements of more classical political economy persisted, alongside Marxian
and social welfarist approaches. Some neoclassical tenets are repudiated in
behavioural economics, whose analysis of irrationality in markets dethrones
rational economic ‘man’. There are also more socially oriented economists such
as the development economist Amartya Sen and Elinor Ostrom, who won the Nobel
Prize for economics in 2009 for her distinguished work on economic governance
and common ownership, which informs analysis of the digital ‘commons’.

Positive political economy
Today ‘political economy’ can refer to a range of contending approaches. One
such approach, antithetical to Marxism, is that of the so-called Chicago School,
also known as constitutional or ‘positive’ political economy, or as public choice
theory (Mosco 2009: 28). This neoliberal approach is associated with Ronald
Coase, Gary Becker, Richard Posner and George Stigler. Their work applies