Page 44 - Critical Political Economy of the Media

What (is) political economy of the media? 23

takes shape in the process of working on the world, and this is a material
necessity determined by our bodily needs’. Marx (1980 [1859]: 181) outlines
what became known as the infamous base and superstructure doctrine as
follows:

In the social production of their existence, men invariably enter into definite
relations which are independent of their will, namely relations of production
appropriate to a given stage in the development of the material forces of
production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the
economic structure of society, the real foundation on which arises a legal
and political superstructure, and to which correspond definite forms of
social consciousness.

Superstructures for Marx include institutions like the state, law, politics, reli-
gion, education and culture, whose function is to support the ‘base’, including
through generating ideas which legitimate the system. Marx and Engels assert
the connections between ruling ideas and the interests of their advocates, and
highlight the formation of what Foucault calls discursive regimes. However,
while challenging idealist thought, the base–superstructure formulation is overly
mechanistic. One of the problems with the model – really a metaphor – is that it
places culture and the economic on different levels. This was an impediment to
understanding the integration of the cultural and the economic. The cultural
industry model of Adorno and Horkheimer addresses this problematic by
describing the collapse of the superstructure of twentieth century industrialised
cultural production into the economic base (Garnham 1979: 130).
In ‘vulgar’ Marxism or Marxist functionalism the ‘superstructure’ reflects the
economic base: it is enough to know how the media are organised as economic
entities to ‘read off’ their content and symbolic meaning. To regard cultural
expression in this way is an example of economism, the meaning and significance
of culture being located in the determining structures of the forces and relations
of production. According to this view media content (symbolic meaning) must be
explained as expressive of fundamental ways in which the economic structure of
society is organised. Media content may be understood by the primary function
of media as the transmission of the ruling values and ideologies (functionalism).
Such an interpretation informs Miliband’s (1977: 50) account of Marx and
Engels’s theory of ideology: ‘But the fact remains that “the class which has the
means of material production at its disposal” does “have control at the same
time of the means of mental production”… Nor is the point much affected by
the fact that the state in almost all capitalist countries “owns” the radio and
television – its purpose is identical’. This overly mechanistic and instrumental
notion of ideology was challenged in turn by structuralist Marxism. For critical
cultural scholars the main attraction of structuralist Marxism was that it rejected
crude models of economic determination. Its account of ideology addressed the
psychic dimensions of identity formation and regarded ideological processes as