Page 29 - Critical Political Economy of the Media

8 Mapping approaches and themes

communications and the conditions for realising democracy. These connect, in
turn, to two major influences: Marxism, and the theories and practices of
democratic politics.
Karl Marx’s work and legacy has had a profound influence on ways of
understanding power, domination and inequality within the CPE tradition.
Marx contributed to socialist and revolutionary politics but his major legacy is
derived from his elaboration of a materialist philosophy (historical materialism)
and critical analysis of capitalism. CPE draws on this complex legacy in analysing
capitalist production and social relations. Mansell (2004: 98) summarises ‘[i]f
resources are scarce, and if power is unequally distributed in society, then the
key issue is how these scarce resources are allocated and controlled, and with what
consequences for human action’. Critical political economy insists on connecting
the study of media to broader patterns of social existence and in particular to
questions of the allocation of resources. As British political economist Nicholas
Garnham argues, this means identifying how communication and culture relate
to processes of production and reproduction within capitalist society. The political
economy of culture needs to be situated within an overall analysis of capitalism
with ‘a political economy of mass communication taking its subsidiary place
within that wider framework as the analysis of an important, but historically
specific mode of the wider process of cultural production and reproduction’
(Garnham 1979: 123). Mosco (2009: 94–95) describes this approach as ‘decentering
the media’.
One key influence, then, is Marxism, although political economists have
grappled with the limitations and criticism of ‘classical Marxism’ to a greater
extent than many dismissive criticisms allow. In particular, the revising of a
Marxist tradition within political economy has occurred through the confluence
of two other influential currents – democratic theory/politics and cultural
theory/politics. Political economy shares many of the democratic aspirations of
liberal pluralist accounts of the media in serving citizens, but it challenges the
ability of corporate-owned media to adequately do so, and mounts a critique of
the capitalist market relations on which liberalism is contingent. Political economy
draws upon classical democratic theory’s insistence that democracy is based on
an informed, participating citizenry, to assert that such political culture can only
be generated by a more diverse, democratised media system. Shaped by Marx’s
critique of capitalism, the Western Marxist critique of commodification, reifica-
tion and the ‘culture industry’ (Adorno and Horkheimer 1997 [1944]), and by
theories of ‘strong’, participatory democracy, political economy criticises the
capitalist market system for its failure to deliver economic fairness, social justice
or the basis for a democratic polity (McChesney 1998, 2008; Mosco 2009;
Murdock and Golding 2005; Hardy 2010b).
The principle of democratic governance, rule by the many, has been a guiding
inspiration for critical scholars and a corrective to the ideas and legacy of
centralised state control exercised by Communist states under the influence of
the Comintern. Western Marxism embraced tenets of participatory democracy