Page 87 - Critical Political Economy of the Media

66 Mapping approaches and themes

broadcasting, the main forms of social market intervention have been press
subsidies and grants and subsidies for other media and cultural industries.
In classical liberalism, private property rights are generally upheld but they
are not deemed to be the most beneficial way of organising all resources and
activities. There is a role for the state to protect the welfare of citizens, through
investing in defence for instance. The state should also provide various resources
for the wider public good, such as roads and transportation facilities. Of course,
such services may well be shaped to benefit private interests, from imperialist
armies to railway networks, but in principle they are organised to serve the
common good. Twentieth century welfarism built on this. Western European
democracies responding to the rise of socialist and communist movements,
financial crises and world wars, developed welfare states that included social and
welfare support, active labour market policies, and a significant role for the state
as actor and manager in market economies. The public provision of utilities,
based on ‘natural monopolies’ informed the provision of telecommunications
and other universal services. In Western Europe, for example, the notion of
public service broadcasting was developed from the 1920s, provided by ‘specially
mandated, non-commercially driven, publicly owned and funded and publicly
accountable’ organisations (Brants and De Bens 2000: 9). There has been a
profound change in the media policy landscape since the 1970s. The ascension
of policies of marketisation has been part of a paradigmatic policy shift whereby
Western European nation-states moved away from the Keynesian consensus of
the post-war years and began to adopt market-oriented strategies and policies
(chapters seven and eight).

Radical perspectives on state and media
Liberalism asserts the autonomy of the political and its separation from the
economic; classical Marxism insists on their integration. However, how the state
is understood in relation to the political sphere and the economic sphere has
been a major source of contention within Marxist thought, and between Marxism
and other state theories (Jessop 2008; Hill 1997; Dunleavy and O’Leary 1987).
Within Marxism the state is an instrument of class rule. State capitalism
describes a relationship in which the state promotes and serves the interests of the
dominant economic class, who own the means of production. The key differences
are between Marxist accounts that privilege economic relations of production and
see the state as a superstructural phenomenon serving capital (economism), and
approaches that seek to theorise the relative autonomy of the state and the
political sphere. In the 1970s and 1980s economist Marxists such as Clarke and
Holloway accused Poulatzas and others of ‘politicism’, according primacy in
theory and practice to the state and politics without grounding this in the ‘capital
relation’ and associated class struggle. This, they argued, took for granted the
‘bourgeois’ separation of the economic and political institutional order of
modern societies.