Page 43 - Critical Political Economy of the Media

22 Mapping approaches and themes

Criticisms of critical political economy
We can understand the relations between CPE and its others better by assessing key
critiques. Critics of political economy accuse it of reductionism and economism,
reducing the complexity of forces shaping cultural expression and communication
to an underlying economic explanation derived from the dominant forces and
relations of production. Reductionism means attributing ‘complex cultural events
and processes’– such as a film, TV show or new output –‘to a single political-
economic cause, such as the interests of the social class that controls the means of
production’ (Hesmondhalgh 2007: 47). This is, in large part, a critique of the
conceptual foundations of Marxist thought on which CPE is deemed to lie and
so requires some elaboration. Charges of reductiveness and economism are
traceable to a criticism of determinism. In its most ‘vulgar Marxist’ form, this
posits that the ‘superstructure’ (the state and political, societal and cultural
institutions including the media), reflects the economic base (the economic forces
and social relations arising from the dominant system of organising production),
leading to an account of the media as a transmitter of ruling class ideology and a
usually impoverished account of media output and performance being determined
by state power (serving the capitalist class) or by the economic and political
interests of capitalist media owners and advertisers. Such ‘vulgar Marxism’ was
strongly rejected by scholars who shaped and defined the CPE approach.
Golding and Murdock (1979: 200–201) reject as reductionist the view that mass
media are instruments of the capitalist class such that media products are
regarded ‘as a more or less unproblematic relay system for capitalist interests
and ideologies’. They argue that this reductionist formulation had its heyday in
Britain between the 1930s and 1950s. In their 1973 essay ‘For a Political Economy
of Mass Communication’, they propose a systematic analysis of the processes of
corporate consolidation and the implications of commercial power, but they insist
that ‘[to] describe and explicate these interests is not to suggest a deterministic
relationship, but to map the limits within which the production of mediated
culture can operate’ (Murdock and Golding 1974: 226). CPE approaches do lay
claim to determination (see below); however, the major contributions within
CPE have been much more acutely aware of the problems of reductive analysis
than critics allow. Golding and Murdock define CPE in opposition to two
tendencies in Marxist analysis, a crude model of base–superstructure (instru-
mentalism) on the one hand and the theoreticist form of Marxism inspired by
the work of Louis Althusser (structuralism) on the other.

Base and superstructure
Idealist thought regards reality as constructs of ideas and creations of the mind.
By contrast Marx argues that the way we think is intimately connected with
what we do, with what kind of animal we are, and with the social conditions of
our existence. As Eagleton (2011: 135) summarises ‘[f]or Marx, our thought