Page 133 - Culture Society and the Media

CULTURE, SOCIETY AND THE MEDIA 123
this liquor-journal stand under the ruling rod of the Earl of Shaftesbury and
that Shaftesbury is Palmerston’s son-in-law. (Marx and Engels, 1974b, p.
124–5)

By pointing to the various links between newspaper editors and proprietors and
the Palmerston circle, Marx usefully underscores the need to see the ownership
and control of communications as part of the overall structure of property and
power relations. (As we shall see, this is an important point of difference
between Marxists and the proponents of ‘the managerial revolution thesis’, who
tend to focus on the balance of power within media corporations.) At the same
time, however, Marx’s argument illustrates the fundamental problems with this
kind of instrumentalist approach.
He begins the article by asserting that the fact that the London newspapers had
faithfully followed every twist and turn in Palmerston’s policy provides clear
evidence of his control over the press. But this argument mistakes correlation for
causality. By showing that there is a close correspondence between Palmerston’s
views and press presentations, Marx simply poses the question of control; he does
not offer an answer. Nor is one provided by his description of the economic and
social ties linking press personnel to the Palmerston clique. While this exercise
points to potential sources of control and influence and identifies possible sources
along which it might flow, it does not show whether this control was actually
exercised or how it impinged on production. This problem of inference, from
patterns of ownership and interconnection to processes of control, has dogged
every subsequent analysis of this type. For as Connell has rightly pointed out:

Studies of networks of directors and family ownership provide evidence not
of organisation itself, but of the potential for organisation. From inferring
that they could function as systems of power within business, it is a long
step to showing that they do. This requires a case-by-case study. (Connell,
1977, p. 46)

Marx himself, however, never relied solely or even mainly on this type of
analysis, and alongside the action-oriented strands in his work he developed a
powerful structural approach.
Analysis at this level is focused not on the interests and activities of
capitalists, but on the structure of the capitalist economy and its underlying
dynamics. For the purposes of structural analysis, it does not particularly matter
who the key owners and controllers are. What is important is their location in the
general economic system and the constraints and limits that it imposes on their
range of feasible options. As Marx put it in a wellknown passage:

The will of the capitalist is certainly to take as much as possible. What we
have to do is not to talk about his will, but to inquire into his power, the limits