The Use-Value of News. Part 2.

In the opening three chapters of Marx’s Capital we famously learn that capitalism is a society in which production for exchange predominates; something produced for exchange Marx calls “commodity”, in other words, capitalism is a society of generalised commodity production. The commodity can be broken down into three components (its dialectical structure): use-value, exchange-value, and value. Neither one causes the other (dialectics are an attempt to think beyond the limits of empirical, linear causality), but all are necessary moments of the capitalist commodity; they hang together, often uneasily. Of these three Marx is most interested in exchange-value and value, i.e, the underlying commonality between all commodities, that they are produced by labour, that they therefore have value; and the mode of mediating this commonality in the marketplace, exchange-value, price.

 

He leaves use-value be in Capital Volume 1. But use-value is really the crux of the problematic of consumer capitalism, and this reaches an apex when it comes to the “news commodity”. Irrespective of some kind of (ideal) objective uses for a commodity it is crucial that capitalists hawking their wares create the perception of usefulness. Often, as we all experience, this perception of usefulness is a thousand miles away from reality; like the deodorant advertisements which suggest their commodity will make you irresistible to sex partners, but in reality they just minimally mask your stink and your ability to get laid remains basically unchanged.

 

The news-commodity relies upon “consumers” who buy into the idea of news, consumers who feel that there is something called news which is worth having. There is perhaps some kind of sense that “being informed” is a good in-itself, and our poverty lies in the fact that our information comes filtered, as it does, through the machinations of capitalist value production, and the securing of hegemony for a ruling class. In fact, the use-value of the news commodity is very clear from a bourgeois, ruling perspective: making money is one great use; another is securing one’s rule through the dissemination of ideas conducive to that rule. In fact this can and does take precedence over making money – the BBC would be situated at this point, not that it exactly “looses” money either, or that being a BBC boss is not hugely lucrative.

 

The use-value for the masses of the news is less clear. Being “informed” and being dominated and exploited by ideological hegemony pass over into one another. There are moments, however, when the news has been profoundly revolutionary, even literally revolutionary. What unites Marx, Lenin and Castro? They were all lawyers, for one thing, but they were also all journalists too (Castro still is). They were/are all intellectual labourers, “culture industry” workers.

 

Marx was pushed into politics (and exiled from Germany) as the editor of a radical newspaper. He loathed being a hack, doing it just for some cash, but some of his great underappreciated work (on Ireland in particular) is contained in the articles he wrote for the New York Tribune. Lenin famously paved the way for the 1918 revolution by editing the paper Iskra from London, and getting it smuggled to workers in Russia. Castro claimed he would have been a journalist at Granma were it not for running the country; even so, for years he made the three minute walk from his government office, accross Havana’s Plaza de la Revolución, to Granma’s building, to host his meetings. The Cuban national hero, arguably much more of an influence on Castro than any Marxist, is Jose Martí, who, twenty years before Lenin, was sending incendiary pamphlets from his exile in New York to those sick of Spanish rule back in Cuba, helping ignite Cuba’s rebellion in the Spanish-American War. Moreover, in that great text, The Making of the English Working Class E.P. Thompson devoted the chapter “Class Consciousness” to the way illiterate working people learnt to read, gathered ideas, and became increasingly politically engaged through literacy/reading groups centred on radical, anti-State newspapers. As in many places, in England there would be no radical politics we would recognise without radical presses and their histories. We could go on, but suffice it note, every radical in the world probably has their own examples of that important link between reportage and political practice.

 

We could say, actually, that this is really the link between intellectuals and revolutionary movements. The division of labour under capitalism creates social positions whose products are ideas, and whose social, or public roles are to be intellectuals (in politics, art, science, etc.). Contradiction and antagonism within capitalism itself provide kindling for the production of ideas which are not simply conducive to ruling class power. Use-value in the dissemination of information thus cuts both ways, it can help secure hegemony for the ideas of the ruling classes, but equally if this security relies on a mass feeling that something called “news” is a good in-of-itself, then that mass sensibility can be put to service to counter the ideas of the ruling class. The strap-line of Forbes magazine was famously “the capitalist tool”; In the last post we saw that Media Lens actively press a critical theory into the practical service of an intervention in the capitalist tool of the mass media. They want journalists to live up to the intrepid, free-thinking ideal they’re supposed to have.

 

I can’t, however, end things here on such an optimistic note; we first have to return to Marx’s dismissal of use-value in the opening pages of Capital:

 

As use values, commodities are, above all, of different qualities, but as exchange values they are merely different quantities, and consequently do not contain an atom of use value…

 

If we make abstraction from its use value, we make abstraction at the same time from the material elements and shapes that make the product a use value; we see in it no longer a table, a house, yarn, or any other useful thing. Its existence as a material thing is put out of sight. Neither can it any longer be regarded as the product of the labour of the joiner, the mason, the spinner, or of any other definite kind of productive labour. Along with the useful qualities of the products themselves, we put out of sight both the useful character of the various kinds of labour embodied in them, and the concrete forms of that labour; there is nothing left but what is common to them all; all are reduced to one and the same sort of labour, human labour in the abstract.

 

Why does Marx begin by such a bracketing of uses? He gives two reasons: firstly, because he claims the study of use-value is the work of history – and he is here to critique liberal economics, not history. Secondly, bracketing, or abstracting from use, is what happens in exchange, in trade, that is, the real guts of economy rely on this “real abstraction” (Sohn-Rethel), an operative abstraction. That human “labour in the abstract” which Marx mentioned can be quantified; playing with, and profiting from, these quantities is the game of capitalism. David Harvey, reading these pages of Capital gives a third reason: use-value is the messy realm of consumer desire.

 

Perhaps we could say, then, that use-value is not the object of history, but the object of critical theory. This use-value is particularly open to a critical theoretical study because it concerns a favourite topic of that field, knowledge and knowing. The mass media is one of the Ideological State Apparatuses, in Louis Althusser’s phrase, which “interpellate” us, call us forth as subjects of capital and State. The news media calls us to think in a particular way, a way conducive for the continued reproduction of capital and its power relations.

 

Sometimes this interpellation simply fails: a famous example is the city of Liverpool. Rupert Murdoch’s newspaper, the Sun, which is “demographically aimed” at the white working classes does not sell in Liverpool. It does not sell there, because it very unfavourably covered the Hillsborough Disaster in the city – a football stadium crush in which 96 people died and nearly 800 were injured. The Sun claimed Liverpudlians were stealing from the corpses; the city remembers this, and is therefore one place in which Murdoch’s dissemination of ideas partly fails. The other famous, and more general example is strikers, who often go to the picket for good reason, only to find themselves either vilified or ignored by the news media which they happily consumed just the day before – a gap very consciously opens up between their perception and that of intellectual labourers in the news media.

 

But if real life can sometimes burst through the dominant knowledges presented to us by the “filtration” of the news through the Propaganda Model Chomsky and Herman theorised, there is a dark underbelly to this as well. Franz Kafka was mobilised by the philosopher Slavoj Žižek in his first English book, The Sublime Object of Ideology, to counter any easy conflations between ideology, knowing, and the subject. In two of Kafka’s major stories, The Castle and The Trial, we are presented with large “apparatuses”, which indeed “call”/interpellate the protagonist; that the call fails to fully “colonise” the protagonist, however, is part of the problem, not simply an opening to radical, politicised opposition. In both stories the protagonists become enraptured by the apparatuses which have called them; the apparatuses, the castle and the court process, become objects of passionate attachment to the protagonists, who are actually undone as much by this attachment, as by the processes of apparatuses themselves. What Kafka suggests is that is is not simply an inner knowledge that these apparatuses possess which is problematic (the knowledge of why the protagonist was called to the castle, or what the protagonist has been charged with in court), but the frenzied fixation on the apparatus as knowing, and powerful in its knowing.

 

What does this mean in “real life”? For one thing, Žižek forgot his own analysis drawn from Kafka when he met Julian Assange of Wikileaks in their media spectacle last summer. Wikileaks presents us with revelations about States, but the question is not the revelation of truth, but what we do with it. On the one hand, did we really need to see White House cables to understand that States engage in two-faced realpolitik? On the other, what States have collapsed because of these revelations? Žižek would (usually) point out that having the truth is not enough – we can always disavow it, cling to some fetish object which allows us to at once acknowledge the truth, and at the same time functionally ignore it.

 

Which brings us to the difficulty of the use-value of the news-commodity. Often there we have the opposite problem, one closer to that outlined by Kafka. There we know that these terrible Right-wing apparatuses peddle propaganda and half-truths; we know that the Murdochian apparatuses are full of lies, and there simply to peddle an ideological line; we know the BBC is an establishment corner-stone; we know that the “news” is carefully selected and exclusivist, and yet we cling to it nonetheless.

 

Until recently it was Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers which confounded industry trends and remained very profitable. It would be too easy to say his readers are simply idiots and dupes. As if they are blind to tabloid sensationalism, the sexism, the racism, the banal celebrity chit-chat; as if they’re too stupid to “get” that this isn’t “the whole truth”. What’s more disconcerting is that this is what they want; the Sun, for example (Fox News occupies a similar place in the US) is targeted at working people, but at every turn propagates ideology against the interest of working people. What is much harder to reckon with than “uncovering the lies” is the Stockholm Syndrome of people’s passionate attachment to their captor. Bringing the “truth” to the masses is not the primary difficulty here – the truth is not hugely, or even at all concealed. The primary difficulty is therefore not intervening in untruth on behalf of truth; it is the much harder task of intervening in the structures of disavowal and fetish. It is the task of disrupting the tangle of desires in use-value itself.