“It’s media violence, Jim. but not as WE know it.”*

By J L Samboma

The introduction to my theory of “communicative violence”

ABSTRACT:

This essay posits a theory of “communicative violence” to describe the role played by the media, communications and cultural industries in the legitimation, maintenance and reproduction of capitalist social relations.[1] In advancing this conception of the communications and cultural industries as agencies of bourgeois violence against subordinate classes and groups, I will reference the writings of Marx and Engels and also those of Galtung, Zizek and others. My methodology will be the historical materialist dialectic of the founders of Marxism. I will argue that the products of the communications industries are expressions and conduits of capitalist violence cloaked in fetishistic forms. I will maintain that only the standpoint of Marxian dialectics can reveal that cultural artifacts are also phenomenal forms of, and conduits for, the “objective” violence which mediates capitalist social relations. Finally, I will conclude that only the smashing of the capitalist state apparatus can successfully rid society of communicative and other forms of bourgeois violence.

1. INTRODUCTION

In 2018, while researching my book on the 2011 regime change in Libya (a book which demonstrated that the Arab Spring was a smokescreen for Muamar Gaddafi’s murder), I was struck by what appeared as functional equivalence between, on the one hand, the actions of the NATO backed Libyan “revolutionaries” and Western military assets and, on the other hand, corporate media coverage of the “crisis”. They appeared to me to be different sides of the same coin, not unlike the left hand and the right hand working in concert toward a common goal. “Western journalists were bona fide combatants in this war”, I wrote subsequently in The Dialectic and the Detective: The Arab Spring and Regime Change in Libya. “They fought in a formation we will call the Propaganda Brigade, Fourth Estate Division. They may not have personally killed and maimed civilians, or even fired a single munition, but they were just as complicit as their counterparts in military fatigues and fighter plane cockpits. The Propaganda Brigade was simply an asset to be strategically deployed, like any other in a military operation.”[2]

In a word, it was evident to me that, by promoting the West’s narrative of events before, during and after the murder of Colonel Gaddafi – including effectively campaigning for the bombing of Libya – the mainstream, corporate media had committed violence against the people of Libya. Their actions did not register as “simply” a form of violence; they were committing “violence”, period. I have dwelt on the matter since, trying to ascertain why society does not readily recognise such actions for what they are, namely, violent acts by media organisations and journalists which ultimately cause as much harm to people as the violence of easily identifiable felons – from war criminals to murderers and serial killers.

Admittedly, perpetrators of such “hidden” violence can be found in all walks of life, not just in the media and communications industries – from the company boss whose mass sackings of employees lead to suicides and destitution, to the victims of one or other form of prejudice who cannot find employment because they belong to the “wrong” group. It is not as if there have not been attempts to highlight the true nature of such “malicious” and “hidden” acts of violence that go under the radar because society fails to join the dots between their perpetuation and their subsequent outcomes. One of the earliest efforts to expose this “hidden” violence in a systematic way was Friedrich Engels’s The Condition of the Working Class in England.[3] In this seminal work, Engels wrote extensively on the devastating effects of early capitalism on the working class; he called it “disguised, malicious murder”. This ethnographic work can aptly be described as a treatise on what we now call structural violence, defined by Seth Holmes as: “violence committed by configurations of social inequalities that, in the end, has injurious effects on bodies similar to the violence of a stabbing or shooting.”[4]

The pages of Capital [5] are also peppered with passages where Marx chronicles countless deaths from disease, destitution and infant mortality – all of which were commonplace at the time. He quotes physicians’ reports of workers who “become prematurely old and are certainly short-lived” – from the inexorable logic of a system that sees people as expendable and workers as “nothing more than personified labour-time.” While Marx’s magnum opus does recount the drudgery and destitution of capitalism’s victims, it is to Engels’s explicit articulation of the “disguised” (structural) violence that capitalism inflicts daily on the proletariat to which I want to link the theory of “communicative violence” I advance in this essay. Writing at least two decades before the publication of the first volume of Capital, Engels had this to say about structural violence in 19th Century Britain.

When one individual inflicts bodily injury upon another such injury that death results, we call the deed manslaughter; when the assailant knew in advance that the injury would be fatal, we call his deed murder. But when society places hundreds of proletarians in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and an unnatural death, one which is quite as much a death by violence as that by the sword or bullet; when it deprives thousands of the necessaries of life, places them under conditions in which they cannot live – forces them, through the strong arm of the law, to remain in such conditions until that death ensues which is the inevitable consequence – knows that these thousands of victims must perish, and yet permits these conditions to remain, its deed is murder just as surely as the deed of the single individual; disguised, malicious murder, murder against which none can defend himself, which does not seem what it is, because no man sees the murderer, because the death of the victim seems a natural one, since the offence is more one of omission than of commission. But murder it remains.[6]

This “murder”, which appears as “an offence of omission”, Engels continues, is nevertheless a “disguised war which the bourgeoisie wages” … “to rob, plunder, murder, and burn!”. It is “a social war” which the “bourgeoisie perpetrates secretly, treacherously against the workers.” Further, he writes, “[T]his brutality was chiefly carried on under the mask of civilisation and humanity.” This Engelsian conception of “disguised, malicious murder”, this “social war” by the bourgeoisie against subordinate classes, I contend, is also being waged by the media and cultural industries – through the mechanism of communicative violence.

2. CRITICAL POLITICAL ECONOMY OF CULTURE

Critical political economy of the media (CPE), or Marxist media criticism, will be our point of departure in this investigation into the nature of violence when it is conceived as a mode of operation of the media of mass communications and the cultural industries as a whole. A study of its methods and paradigms will not only reveal its preoccupations but may also provide insights into issues such as why the concept of “media violence” is conceived almost exclusively in terms of the ways in which direct, or physical violence is codified in cultural texts[7] such as movies and computer games, but not as a mode of operation of the media or cultural industries themselves. CPE holds that the unequal distribution of power in society gives rise to media industries and other “arrangements whereby such inequalities are sustained and reproduced”[8] . As Murdock and Golding contend, “any adequate analysis of the distribution of power and of the process of legitimation must necessarily include an analysis of the mass media.”[9] The two major analytical frameworks which have dominated CPE over the last five decades are the Propaganda Model (PM) and the Audience Commodity (AC) model. The PM was theorised by Edward S Herman and Noam Chomsky in their celebrated work Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media.[10]

Proposing a set of five news “filters” through which the news passes “leaving only the cleansed residue fit to print,” Herman and Chomsky presented their model of how the ideologists of the neoliberal status quo “fix the premises of discourse and interpretation and the definition of what is newsworthy,” with the consequence that news dissemination amounts to little more than “propaganda campaigns”.[11] Their propaganda model was essentially a response to the problematic posed by Murdock and Golding about the necessity “to demonstrate how ideology is produced in concrete practice”.[12] The first filter of the propaganda model posits that only the big capitalists can afford to enter the “news-making” business (and precisely because it is a business, it is invested in the maintenance and reproduction of capitalist social relations). The second filter, under which advertising (and not sales revenue) is the primary income source, the pro-business, free market ethos of advertisers influences the news agenda. The third filter, reliance of the media on government- or business-accredited “experts”, ensures that the “right” “authority” sources are called upon to endorse establishment narratives. “Flack”, the fourth filter, comes into play when sanctions are imposed on non-compliant media and their journalists in order to whip them back into line; they range from letters and lawsuits to threats and punitive action. It may be organized centrally or locally, or it may consist of the entirely independent actions of individuals”.[13] The final filter is the ideology of anti-communism. The creation of a communist bogey by elites and the labelling as communism of any dissenting, even liberal views, has functioned to create the state ideology of anti-communism. This, via a process of socialisation, has seen journalists internalising ideological postures of elites, or otherwise engaging in self-censorship so they are not charged with the high crime of “communism”. Herman and Chomsky argue that this is how mass media function to “manufacture consent” for the smooth running and reproduction of capitalist social relations.

The other major CPE paradigm, the Audience Commodity (AC) model, was proposed by Dallas Smythe, which theorises media audiences as commodities that are sold to advertisers by those who control the “means of mental production” in the consciousness industry.[14] Audience members are compelled to work for those who buy advertising space in the various media. This unpaid work is performed when the audience pay attention to the adverts, thus recognising and creating needs and desire for the advertisers’ products. While the PM perceives the media and cultural industries as working “peacefully”, or at least “non-violently” to manufacture a consensus for the perpetuation of bourgeois social relations, the AC paradigm theorises the consumers of cultural products as actively working to internalise bourgeois ideology as contained in media artifacts. As Brice Nixon has noted, “[In] Smythe’s method of theorizing individuals are seen to labour in the production of their own consciousness (and the whole process is seen as social).”[15] And, just as in the PM, the AC model operates in a “peaceful” and “orderly” fashion, without any hint of direct or physical violence to force or compel individuals to conform or labour actively in the production, maintenance and perpetuation of bourgeois social relations.

While the PM does acknowledge the application of “undue pressure” under the fourth and fifth filters (“flack” and “anti-communism”), violence is hardly a headline feature of the model and, crucially, this “flack” is not directed at readers and viewers; rather, it only affects journalists or media workers, those whom Miliband has called “cultural workmen”[16]. In a word, the CPE tradition has been dominated in the last half-century by paradigms that seek to comprehend and explain the class struggle at the level ideas using tools which highlight the allegedly peaceful, “steady-as-she-goes” operations of the means of ideological production. Thus, if we define critical (or Marxian) media scholarship as one dominated by those two paradigms, we can say that the school has not traditionally perceived modes of operation of the media/communications/cultural industries as violence, even if their social impact may have been otherwise categorised as malign, dangerous, or even evil. As such, it is my contention that, even as these paradigms have provided and continue to provide insights into the political economy of the cultural industries, it would be a productive exercise to also study the cultural industries as they are objectively and materially – that is, as agencies of bourgeois violence against the lower or subaltern classes

• Enforcing Concent: The Theory of Communicative Violence and How it operates in the Media and Cultural Industries by Julian Lahai Samboma is available here.

Notes

[1] The communications, cultural and media industries are relations; they are used interchangeably.

[2] Julian Lahai Samboma, The Dialectic and the Detective: The Arab Spring and Regime Change in Libya (London: eBeefs.com, 2018), 107.

[3] Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the English Working Class, 1845, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/condition-working-class-england.pdf. Accessed 22/03/21.

[4] Seth Holmes, Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers in the United States, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013.

[5] Karl Marx, Capital Volume I, 1867, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Capital-Volume-I.pdf. Accessed 22/03/21.

[6] Friedrich Engels, op. cit.

[7] “Texts” is used here as the collective name for media content and cultural “works” of all kinds, ranging from newspaper reports to films, advertisements and music tracks. See Hesmondhalgh, D. (2019). The Cultural Industries. Fourth Edition ed. London: Sage Publications Ltd, p. 5)

[8] Jonathan Hardy, Critical Political Economy of the Media: An Introduction (London; New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2014), 6.

[9] Graham Murdock and Peter Golding, For a Political Economy of Mass Communications (London: The Socialist Register, 1973)

[10] Edward S Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988)

[11] Ibid.

[12] Graham Murdock and Peter Golding, For a Political Economy of Mass Communications (London: The Socialist Register, 1973)

[13] Herman and Chomsky, op. cit.

[14] Dallas Smythe, Communications: Blindspot of Western Marxism, Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory/Revue canadienne de theorie politique et sociale, Vol. 1, No. 3 (Fall/Automne, 1977).

[15] Brice Nixon, Dialectical Method and the Critical Political Economy of Culture (London: Triple-C 10(2): 439-456, 2012, ISSN 1726-670X)

[16] Ralph Miliband, The State in Capitalist Society (New York: Basic Books Inc, 1969), 19.