WikiLeaks and the critique of the political economy

Abstract

In his seminal introduction to the field, Vincent Mosco defines the political economy of communication as the "study of the social relations, particularly the power relations that mutually constitute the production, distribution, and consumption of resources, including communication resources" (Mosco, 2009, pp.2).Terms that have been used for naming this field have been "political economy of communication" (Mosco, 2009), "political economy of communications" (Wasko, 2004; Wasko, Murdock, & Sousa, 2011), "political economy of culture" (Calabrese & Sparks, 2004), "political economy of information" (Garnham, 2011; Mosco & Wasko, 1988), "political economy of mass communication" (Garnham, 1990), or "political economy of the media" (Golding & Murdock, 1997;McChesney, 2008).Although the dominant outlook of this field is oriented on a critique and not an affirmation of both capitalism and the role of media, communication, information, and culture in capitalism, when naming the field, the term "critical," "Marxist," or "critique" is often not prefixed.Jonathan Hardy (2014) speaks in his introduction to the field of "critical political economy of the media" and includes under this term Marxist as well as other radical approaches, such as radical-democratic media studies that do not directly relate to Marx's work.Nonetheless, Karl Marx can be considered as a founding and grounding figure of all modern critical thoughts, and as such, he cannot be ignored if one wants to understand the media today (Fuchs, 2011;Fuchs & Mosco, 2012).Political economy is a broad field, incorporating also traditions of thinking grounded in classical liberal economic thought and thinkers like Malthus, Mill, Petty, Ricardo, Say, Smith, Ure, etc. that Marx studied, sublated, and was highly critical of in his works.His main point of criticism of political economy is that it fetishizes capitalism; its thinkers "confine themselves to systematizing in a pedantic way, and proclaiming for everlasting truths, the banal and complacent notions held by the bourgeois agents of production about their own world, which is to them the best possible one" (Marx, 1867, p. 175).They postulate that categories like commodities, money, exchange value, capital, markets, or competition are anthropological features of all society, thereby ignoring the categories' historical character and enmeshment into class struggles.Marx showed the contradictions of political economy thought and took classical political economy as starting point for a critique of capitalism that considers "every historically developed form as being in a fluid state, in motion" and analyses how "the movement of capitalist society International Journal of Communication 8 (2014) Critique of the Political Economy 2719 is full of contradictions" (ibid., p. 103), which calls for the "development of the contradictions of a given historical form" by political practice (ibid., p. 619) and means that Marx's approach is "in its very essence critical and revolutionary" (ibid., p. 103).Marx developed a critique of the political economy of capitalism, which means that it is: a) an analysis and critique of capitalism; b) a critique of liberal ideology, thought, and academia; and c) transformative practice.To be precise, one should speak of the Critique of the Political Economy of Communication, Culture, Information and the Media.Some authors realized this circumstance and stressed that a "Marxist theory of communication" (Smythe, 1994, p. 258) is needed, that critical theory means "Marxist or quasi-Marxist" theory (ibid., p. 256), and that "Critical Political Economy of Communications" is critical in the sense of being "broadly marxisant" (Murdock & Golding, 2005, p. 61).The dominant strand of the Anglo-American version of the political economy of communication, culture, information, and the media is certainly critical political economy.It is mainly conducting conceptually grounded empirical case studies and engaging in unsystematic critical conceptualizing, which means that it lacks a systematic critical theory of capitalism and a grounding in dialectical philosophy as its foundation.It has thus far hardly systematically engaged with Marx's works, which led Robert McChesney to conclude that there is a lack of reading "Marx systematically to tease out the notion of communication in its varied manifestation" (McChesney, 2007, pp.235-236).Karl Marx is the blind spot of the (critique of the) political economy of communication, culture, information, and media.The globalization of capitalism, its new global crisis, the new imperialism, and the role of knowledge and communication in capitalism (anticipated by Marx's notions of the means of communication and the "general intellect") has resulted in a renewed interest in Marx that should also be practiced in media and communication studies (Fuchs, 2011).In the German context, authors have spoken of a critique of the political economy of communication (see, e.g., Holzer, 1973(see, e.g., Holzer, , 1994;;Knoche, 2005).The problem is that these approaches, due to limited language capacities and limited resources, have hardly been translated into English, which has left their impact limited to national levels and resulted in a lack of international diffusion.At the national level, structures of intellectual oppression have furthermore resulted in a structural discrimination of the critique of the political economy of communication (Fuchs, 2014a).Horst Holzer (1994), who faced repression and lost his professorial job because of his political conviction as communist (Fuchs, 2014a), spoke of Marxian analysis as the forgotten theory of communication in the German world (Holzer, 1994).Holzer (1973, p. 131; 1994) and Knoche (2005) distinguish four functions of the media in capitalism:1. capital accumulation in the media industry; 2. advertising, publication relations, and sales promotion for other industries; 3. legitimization of domination and ideological manipulation; and 4. reproduction, regeneration, and qualification of labor power.

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