How do we address the mass media?

[Die Neue Zeit]

Because of the enormous influence that the privately owned mass media (i.e., media conglomerates and what not) has over the lives of ordinary folks, how should the mass media be approached on an immediate programmatic basis?

Some say it should be broken up:


What is the first response of any section of the petty bourgeoisie to what it considers a monopoly? It is to "break it up" into smaller businesses and organisms. Why? Because reversion to the "old means [i.e., forms, methods, concepts, etc.] of production and of exchange" allows for an expansion of the power of the petty bourgeoisie, even in today's modern economy.

Others say it should be "reappropriated" (control over communication, language, and information was emphasized by Hardt and Negri in their post-modernist Empire, with production playing second fiddle). At a national level, this would entail "national-democratization."

But what kind of demands outside of "reappropriation" are adequate?

[Psy]

Because of the enormous influence that the privately owned mass media (i.e., media conglomerates and what not) has over the lives of ordinary folks, how should the mass media be approached on an immediate basis?

Some say it should be broken up:



Others say it should be "reappropriated" (control over communication, language, and information was emphasized by Hardt and Negri in their post-modernist Empire, with production playing second fiddle). At a national level, this would entail "national-democratization."

But what kind of demands outside of "reappropriation" are adequate?
I kinda asked this in Art in a Communist society (http://www.revleft.com/vb/art-communist-society-t78626/index.html) but from the standpoint of how would a socialist society deal with art.

[Rusty Shackleford]

as of now, i think the nationalization of media would be the worst thing.

if the state controls the media, they control the democracy. most easy to abuse.

i think the media conglomerates/massmedia should be SMASHED utterly and completely. i dont know how to get the news to people on a national scale, but im sure that would be easily fixed.

let the stations just cover their locality. and let there be more than one voice per locality.

[piet11111]

i would say independent media is doing rather well seeing how more and more people resort to that kind of websites instead of newspapers (a dying media form)
and that is currently the best we can hope for.

not to say "news" channels like fox are doing a lot of the work for us in discrediting the mass media.

[ev]

All the media should be nationalized as an immediate step, I would prefer bureaucrats influencing the media than the bourgeois.

[mikelepore]

Internet technology is almost at the point where every organization and every individual can have their own television station, so the problem ceases to be the traditional form of monopoly ownership. The problem becomes one where your audience has to know that you exist before they can tune you in, and it's the large corporations that can advertise themselves. The city busses are covered with posters advertising Fox News, they have full page ads in popular magazines, etc. This is the problem that has to be solved before working class media will be able to reach the majority. Most people don't disagree with alternative media as much as they have never heard about their existence.

[JohnnyC]

Internet technology is almost at the point where every organization and every individual can have their own television station, so the problem ceases to be the traditional form of monopoly ownership. The problem becomes one where your audience has to know that you exist before they can tune you in, and it's the large corporations that can advertise themselves. The city busses are covered with posters advertising Fox News, they have full page ads in popular magazines, etc. This is the problem that has to be solved before working class media will be able to reach the majority. Most people don't disagree with alternative media as much as they have never heard about their existence.
Exactly, that is the biggest reason why internet, as a propaganda tool, has not yet been explored to maximum by revolutionaries.Until we develop a clear plan in what way we will propagate communism on internet and funds to advertise it I don't think we will see our media being popular in the near future.

[Rusty Shackleford]

Exactly, that is the biggest reason why internet, as a propaganda tool, has not yet been explored to maximum by revolutionaries.Until we develop a clear plan in what way we will propagate communism on internet and funds to advertise it I don't think we will see our media being popular in the near future.


propaganda like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3w_tOGgsGsU

get something like that as a little pop-up bug and bam, more views ^_^

[JohnnyC]

propaganda like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3w_tOGgsGsU

get something like that as a little pop-up bug and bam, more views ^_^
That's nice, but I haven't yet seen many pop-up bugs that link to socialist propaganda. :D

Youtube is a nice way to send massage, but even youtube isn't used enough for now.There aren't many videos, and from what I've seen, even those that exist are in great part made of pro Soviet Union propaganda.Our revleft channel has only 3 videos for example.

Something more organized like TV, Radio, or even socialist Video Game company would be more efficient, I think.But most parties and organizations (if not all) aren't interested to advocate socialism that way.We need more sites like this, in my opinion.
http://www.molleindustria.org/en/home
It's more fun and appealing to neutral than ordinary political talk but it also sends clear political massage.

[Rusty Shackleford]

molleindustria looks really cool. i like the header. and its pretty politicized but it doesnt really show it. it just gets you to think.

in videogames, maybe some modders could help socialize RTSs and TTSs haha.

theres other topics on here about guerrilla radio, pirate radio, and so on.

[mikelepore]

There is one leftist TV network in the U.S., called Link TV. See info at linktv.org . They probably don't call themselves leftist, but with the many interviews with activists, live coverage of demonstrations, etc., I feel it's accurate to call it a leftist network. But it's not available on most cable TV systems. It's available on the satellite services DirecTV (375) and Dish Network (9410), only because Link TV pays those satellite companies to carry it. I suggest a concerted effort by revleft users to petition all local cable companies to carry Link TV. In my own region, the Hudson Valley of New York, I'm going to petition the Optimum Cablevision company, and others should do something similar where they live. In a separate action, I'm also going to petition them to carry NASA TV because I like to watch live coverage of space missions. When I cancelled DirecTV and switched to cable in order to save money, I had to give up those two favorite channels of mine.

--

Edit: typos

[Die Neue Zeit]

Aside from Mike's succinct yet informative statement above (getting one's message across), I'd like to address this:


as of now, i think the nationalization of media would be the worst thing.

if the state controls the media, they control the democracy. most easy to abuse.

That's the popular sentiment against public ownership of the mass media. I quoted Lars Lih in my blog:

I think that the socialist attitude toward political freedom needs serious attention. In my book, I stress the primordial importance of political freedom as a goal for Lenin and the Bolsheviks. But this is only half the story. The main reason the Russian social democrats wanted political freedom was to be able to spread their own version of the truth. When they got into a position of ‘state monopoly campaignism’, their drive toward political freedom turned (dialectically?) into its opposite: lack of political freedom for their opponents now helped them spread their own version of the truth.

And this is not just some Asiatic deviation of the Russian Bolsheviks. On the contrary, European socialism as a whole was sceptical about the benefits of political freedom in bourgeois society and did not really see much need for political freedom in socialist society. And their scepticism was, of course, highly justified, then as it still is today. So the solution is not just to say, ‘Let’s recognise the importance of political freedom.’ The proper attitude to adopt is a complex and difficult issue. But from where I sit I cannot see any real grappling with the problem.

He even went so far to say that "the undemocratic part of Lenin's legacy comes in large part from European Social Democracy, while the Russian context contributed to the democratic part" (http://www.revleft.com/vb/jules-guesde-lenin-t102192/index.html) - not the typical historian line, for sure:


The Soviet system was what Peter Kenez termed a "propaganda state." Campaignism--now conducted by a monopolistic state--was its life-blood. This central institution of the Soviet system was lifted straight from the practices of the European Social Democratic parties and from the cluster of assumptions that surrounded these practices--all well in existence by the time the young Ul'ianov became a Social Democrat in the early 1890s.

[Bilan]

All the media should be nationalized as an immediate step, I would prefer bureaucrats influencing the media than the bourgeois.

Then you simply don't get it.

[Lynx]

We want an independent, free press. This requires institutional reform to reduce conflicts of interest. A code of conduct for journalists and editors should also be discussed and agreed upon.

[Die Neue Zeit]

We want an independent, free press. This requires institutional reform to reduce conflicts of interest. A code of conduct for journalists and editors should also be discussed and agreed upon.

Comrade, could you please elaborate upon this? Methinks that what the left needs in regards to the mass media is the media equivalent of Kautsky's monumental and anticipatory response to the question "Does Social Democracy need an agrarian programme?" (http://www.cpgb.org.uk/worker/404/capital_and_land.html)

[pastradamus]

I think in a recent book I've read by an author of the name Thomas Frank called "One market under god" he does fantastically well and descriptively Orwellian (by this I mean the enjoyable use of simple English) in tackling the privatization of American Business' over a broad spectrum of Industry.Namely, He attacks in great detail the Communications sectors privatization over the Clinton regime. This is to say that he (Clinton) allowed wholesale private purchase over massive Communication grids throughout America and even gave corporations large discounts on grids in rural places such as the south and mid-west regions, the same is true for the American Power grid to an extent.

At face value one might overlook this as just another typically liberal reform. However we are talking about something of a PUBLICALLY OWNED propertyhere. Something that each and every tax-paying American has invested in and all of a sudden have been disenfranchised of their right to that property and its rewards. All in the name of progress.

So How did the American people react to this? I wont say they burried their heads in the sand because the media was already burrying them in it. In American of all countries in the world there is a worrying confusion between truth, freedom, honour and the media. From the word "Go" fox news called this move "progress" with CNN and NBC not commenting on this issue in its entirety. The Pen pushers and Journalists around America refused to comment except for one single critic from Kansas City who just happened to be very right-wing and said they didnt go far enough.

I think Jacob Richter did a great job of asking the very question of "how we address the mass media" as its a question we, as logical and free-thinking people have a right to ask. This debate covers a whole range on leftist-concerned issues.

One such issue is the US-IRAQ war and its connotations in the media. If your an American, Sitting down to watch your daily segment of news at 6pm you come home from work tired and there on front of you is "the war on terror" and "the war on freedom" as well as "the axis of evil" being drilled into your sub-conscious time upon time until it becomes the corrosive enemy of Reason and Logic. The American People themselves are suffering at the hands of Multi-National millionaires and billionaries who use Media not only as a means to profit but the twart public opinion towards their opinions and indoctrinate people en-masse. I believe Benito Mussolini said it best with coining the phrase "Tell a lie often enough and it becomes the truth".

This horrid tyranny of mass media is even attacking our very identity as Leftists. How is this one might ask? Well In the US as In the UK & Ireland we hear of parties such as The Deomcrats (us) the Labour(uk) and the Green Party (Ire) being described as being on the left. This puts us as Marxists, Syndacalists and Anarchists into a boat with people whom we hate to the core.
This Identity theft and misinformation leads on a very touching, personal and wide-ranging issue such as abortion. When in the USA media sources categorise people as being Pro-Choice (pro-abortion) and Pro-Life (anti-abortion) as if its clean-cut and honestly that simple. It makes people who are Pro-Choice seem like murders when compared to the slogan of Pro-life. It as a slogan also ignored the wide-ranging issues in both camps and which questions should be asked such as "which trimester?" or "what about rape?" as indeed "what about if the mothers life is threatened?" as if simple slogans and camps automatically dictate what the individuals opinions are on the varying issues involved. These titles have spread across the atlantic and Pacific from American News sources and are now being used on non-american media sources constantly.

The recent Swine-flu pandemic has been blown-up to resemble the Spanish Flu or the Black Death as some diesese that will wipe out humanity and is being used, as the September 11th attack to create a wide-ranging panic and hysteria which does none else but put people at the doorstep of the Ruling regime begging for action to be taken - which leads voters right into the arms of their ignorant rulers (as seen after Sept 11th) ensuring them further control of Governance. I find it increadibly appaling and oppurtunistic that Some local media sources throughout America, Especially in the South are using Swine Flu to appeal to Racist people and promote racism in general by accusing "Mexicans and Illegal immigrants of bringing it in". Again frightening people into an opinion.

Everybody here can contribute to the Defeat of Mass Media by taking simple critical steps when watching the Media and switching off from it. Reading other balenced articles from decent newssources is something we can all do here with the new technology of the Internet and Televison/radio stations. Stick with something Informative and balenced rather than sinister indoctrinating propaganda . Stop feeding the octupus.

Pastra.

[Die Neue Zeit]

I'd like to throw some programmatic measures in the mix (though I really hope comrades will add to this list later on):

1) National-democratization of the communication-industrial complex outside of media enterprises;

2) The capture of all economic rent in the broadcast spectrum (Michael Hudson the Georgist made comments regarding the application of classical economics to the broadcast spectrum - Google Michael Hudson broadcast spectrum (http://www.google.com/search?&q=michael+hudson+broadcast+spectrum)) by first means of instituting the "land value tax" equivalent to the broadcast spectrum;

3) The application of the funds derived from #2 towards exclusively public purposes, including non-selective encouragement of, and unconditional economic assistance (both technical and financial) for, pre-cooperative worker buyouts of existing media enterprises and media enterprise operations.



Programmatically speaking, #2 and the first part of #3 would fit in quite nicely between the demand to abolish intellectual property laws (and all restrictions on the non-commodity economy of P2P, open-source programming, etc.) and the last demand for pre-cooperative worker buyouts with unconditional public assistance (evoking Lassalle, Bebel, and Wilhelm Liebknecht).

[Lynx]

Comrade, could you please elaborate upon this? Methinks that what the left needs in regards to the mass media is the media equivalent of Kautsky's monumental and anticipatory response to the question "Does Social Democracy need an agrarian programme?" (http://www.cpgb.org.uk/worker/404/capital_and_land.html)
What did you take from that article as being equivalent to a reform of the mass media?
A free, independent press should have a mandate to provide factual coverage of events. When providing analysis, there should be a requirement for balanced perspective(s). The content of news broadcasts and press releases should never be subject to external interference.
The gathering and production of news is not an inherently democratic process (as far as I can tell), hence decentralization might be preferable. Greater competition implies more perspectives.
The broadcast spectrum can be optimized towards greater sharing of resources. Airtime can be divided into the News, Education/Documentary, and Entertainment fields.

[Die Neue Zeit]

What did you take from that article as being equivalent to a reform of the mass media?

This:


Just to cap off the programmatic section, there is ‘The social revolution and the expropriation of landowners’, which concludes the whole work. It is quite interesting in the light of subsequent historical events - I am not talking about Kautsky’s own evolution, but about the Soviet Union. He almost seems to anticipate the debates caused by Stalin’s actions, about the relationship between the state and the peasantry.

He states emphatically that the transition from capitalism to socialism does not involve expropriating the landholding peasants. He insists that is not what socialists are advocating. That small peasants not only have nothing to fear from socialism. They will be the beneficiaries of it - in some ways more so than sections of the proletariat itself. As I have said, market conditions had created a smallholding class that was even more downtrodden. Nationalisation of mortgage companies, etc, would mean that smallholders and semi-proletarians could deal with the state, and not with these private bloodsuckers.

Such things as changing money payments into payment in kind would bring massive relief to smallholders, and the state would found cooperatives with the large-scale provision of modern equipment. This would provide a massive practical incentive for the peasants to participate in them. In this context any idea of the expropriation of the peasantry is, in Kautsky’s words, “inconceivable”. In fact he makes the point that even under socialism some areas and branches of production in agriculture may still be better served by small private enterprise. In any case state loans at very low interest rates would be available to facilitate rational forms of cultivation.

I want to end with a quote from Kautsky that sums up the benefits of socialism for the peasantry. He says: “In present-day society a peasant is constantly faced with the dilemma either of resisting progress, which means general decline, or of being swept away by the expropriating force of capital. Only socialism offers the possibility of participating in social progress without falling victim to expropriation. Socialism will not only not mean expropriation, but also offers the most certain protection from the threat of expropriation presently constantly hanging over the peasant.”

The supersession of small, petty bourgeois forms of private property in a voluntary and rational way is something that we, as Marxists, are in favour of, and such an approach was implicit in what Kautsky advocated.

Kautsky reiterated this in The Social Revolution. It's not so much an equivalent of a reform of the mass media as it is an equivalent of what *not* to do with the mass media at the present time.

[Die Neue Zeit]

Because it's bedtime in this neck of the woods, I've completed only the first and by far easier part of this section, quoting from this article (http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_6976/is_4_7/ai_n28430632/):



Die Medienfrage: The Mass Media Question

"The undemocratic part of Lenin's legacy comes in large part from European Social Democracy, while the Russian context contributed to the democratic part." (Lars Lih)

What is normally emphasized in history classes on the Soviet era is the tradition of Russian authoritarianism since the first czar, Ivan the Terrible. What does the quoted refutation of the norm, then, have to do with the mass media? Towards the end of the introduction to broad economism, I quoted a brief criticism by Lars Lih on the socialist attitude (or a certain deficit of such) towards political freedom. Unfortunately, this deficit has a rather deep history:

This complex of assumptions--the revolution will come only if the proletariat is convinced of its mission, "the socialist party must educate the proletariat, not the opposite," the workers' acceptance of their mission is nevertheless only an affaire du temps--gave rise to an innovative political strategy that can be labeled campaignism. Campaignism was a central feature of the German SPD and its attempts to create an "alternative culture" (the evocative title of Vernon Lidtke's classic study on the subject). Like the SPD, the Parti Ouvrier carried on a permanent campaign, including the written word, the spoken word of rallies and study circles, and active protest demonstrations.

The reader will guess where I am heading. The Soviet system was what Peter Kenez termed a "propaganda state." Campaignism--now conducted by a monopolistic state--was its life-blood. This central institution of the Soviet system was lifted straight from the practices of the European Social Democratic parties and from the cluster of assumptions that surrounded these practices--all well in existence by the time the young Ulyanov became a Social Democrat in the early 1890s.

[…]

We academic specialists on Russia like to stress the Russian roots of Soviet communism, a claim that increases the value of our own intellectual capital. We also automatically assume that Russian particularity will help explain the undemocratic distortions of what has been borrowed from Europe. When I compared the picture of international Social Democracy that emerged from my research on the Iskra period with the French perspective of Angenot and Stuart, however, I found something quite different. The Russian context caused the local Social Democrats to lay heavy stress on an aspect of Social Democracy that had a much lower profile in the French context. I refer to "political freedom," a term that referred specifically to rights of speech, of assembly, of association, and the like. The crucial role of political freedom can be appreciated only if we keep it analytically distinct from republicanism, parliamentarism, and even democracy.

These freedoms were absolutely necessary for the entire Social Democratic strategy of a nationally organized party carrying out intensive propaganda and agitational campaigns and playing a visible role in national politics.

[…]

I can illustrate my point by comparing What Is to Be Done? to State and Revolution. These two Lenin productions are sometimes taken as emblematic of the bad, hard-line Lenin of 1902 versus the good, "libertarian" Lenin of 1917. From the point of view of political freedom, this standard contrast looks quite different. Precisely because of the Russian context, What Is to Be Done? stresses the centrality of political freedom. Precisely because State and Revolution marks a return to the European context, it downplays political freedom and breathes an atmosphere hostile to it.

[…]

Thus anyone for whom political freedoms have high or intrinsic value should be sympathetic toward the Russian Lenin of What Is to Be Done?, who operates in a context that highlighted the role assigned by Social Democracy to political freedom in the fight for socialism. By the same token, they should be wary of the European Lenin of State and Revolution, who fully embraces Social Democracy's blind spot about the role of political freedom in the good society.

In modern times, there is popular discontent over the concentration of private ownership of what is known today as the “mass media” (for the purposes of this section, the less contentious questions of communication infrastructure, telephone companies, and so on are left for discussion in another section). This concentration has irrefutably led to less representation of views held by society as a whole, and to the expression only of views held by the media moguls (which in the recent economic crisis includes the bailing out of this group by means of corporate welfare), thus enhancing what the Marxist Antonio Gramsci called “bourgeois cultural hegemony.” On the other hand, there is widespread hostility towards any sort of “public ownership” over the mass media, and this hostility is not based on the typical musings of administrative incompetence by bourgeois governments, but rather on the ever-atomizing individualism that goes against perceived notions of the state telling people what to think. One cannot be but reminded of a Soviet joke about only two channels in the country – Channel One being the agitation and propaganda channel, and Channel Two broadcasting a state security official warning the viewer to turn back to the first channel.

So, in accordance with a more accurate title translation of Lenin’s 1901 work, “What To Do?”

[DancingLarry]

All the media should be nationalized as an immediate step, I would prefer bureaucrats influencing the media than the bourgeois.

Under current circumstances, you can have both at once. The fusion of bourgeois and bureaucracy in the Corporate State is highly advanced in certain sectors, particularly in the large-scale mass media such as the broadcast and cable networks.

[pastradamus]

I'd like to throw some programmatic measures in the mix (though I really hope comrades will add to this list later on):

1) National-democratization of the communication-industrial complex outside of media enterprises;


Im afraid Im a little bit lost on what you mean here. Are you referring to the Nationalisation of Communication-Industrial complex's such as, say telecommunications?

As a Marxist I feel Nationalisation of the Communications Industry is Important but as a free-thinker I believe we should also encourage Independant Media.

[Lynx]

This:
Kautsky reiterated this in The Social Revolution. It's not so much an equivalent of a reform of the mass media as it is an equivalent of what *not* to do with the mass media at the present time.
Are you in favor of decentralization?

[Die Neue Zeit]

Im afraid Im a little bit lost on what you mean here. Are you referring to the Nationalisation of Communication-Industrial complex's such as, say telecommunications?

As a Marxist I feel Nationalisation of the Communications Industry is Important but as a free-thinker I believe we should also encourage Independant Media.

I did say "outside of media enterprises" for a reason. Now that you have my programmatic work-in-progress, you'll note that this "national-democratization" demand is actually in a different chapter than the one on the minimum program (because of national considerations).

What I'm referring to here is something like the privatized communications infrastructure that you mentioned. I'm also referring to elements of this "communication-industrial complex" such as telephone businesses. I don't think taking these into public ownership will cause as much uproar as opposed to what you and I have referred to: the cable companies, broadcast networks, etc.


Are you in favor of decentralization?

I don't have an attitude either or towards decentralization here, per se. The big con is that it means less access to the hearing and viewing public as a whole. Perhaps someone can offer arguments to counter this con? :confused:

[Lynx]

Decentralization in conjunction with increased support for public broadcast services. This will also cause an uproar.

There will come a time when it must be made clear that nationalization does not equal government control.

[Revy]

I support socialist media being more available, having a wide circulation (if in print). We have to use grassroots methods, and try making the most out of the Internet.

Now the situation is, print newspapers are falling out of favor, in the eyes of many a "dying medium". But maybe that just leaves a hole to be filled with socialist print publications that aren't as frequent, cheaper and deal with the "big issues" rather than daily events. This may sound a bit off the wall, given how stereotyped socialists are, but perhaps we aren't doing enough to promote our socialist media....

The Internet holds a lot of potential and we should try to utilize it.

[communard resolution]

The Internet holds a lot of potential and we should try to utilize it.

True, but as a previous poster pointed out, we simply haven't got the financial means to advertise the fact that we even exist. So many websites, so much conflicting information, so many differnent agendas, so many lies, so many conspiracy nuts on the internet - and since everybody is a journalist or a blogger nowadays, it's even harded to tell who's really behind a particular 'news item' and whose interests it represents. I'm distrustful of 99% of the info I find on the web, and by now the majority of the population has grown accustomed to the fact that most of the info on the internet is shit.


Now the situation is, print newspapers are falling out of favor, in the eyes of many a "dying medium". I can only speak from a local point of view. Like most people in my city, I use public transport to get to work. The first piece of information I am exposed to in the morning is the free newspaper handed out, nay, shoved my face at the underground train station: London Lite. On the train, I will find another free paper called Metro. These papers are incredibly right-wing (London Lite more unabashedly so while Metro is more 'neutral' in tone). Everybody who travels to work in the morning reads these to pass the travelling time.

In the morings, my co-workers will talk about news items they just read - sometimes, a topic will repeatedly crop up during the day, and more often than not, my coworkers believe every word they read. These papers are their main source of political information, and influence their opinions much more than whatever they may find on the internet when coming home tired in the evenings.

Both Metro and London Lite are owned by the same media conglomerate that publishes the Daily Mail - I don't think I need to elaborate on the DM? It's a very clever thing they're doing with their free, 'neutral' newspapers broken up by generous amount of celeb gossip - it amounts to a daily right-wing propaganda assault on most of the working public.

Running danger of sounding incredibly naive, why not claim a little bit of this crucial space by regularly leaving leaflets, copies of socialist newspapers that we've finished reading, and other materials on public transport so other workers can pick them up the same way they might pick up a copy of London Lite? People are grateful for any free reading material on their way to work, and my impression is that they're the most receptive to political news in the mornings. It may just give them an alternative point of view they would have otherwise never been exposed to.

[Stranger Than Paradise]

I can only speak from a local point of view. Like most people in my city, I use public transport to get to work. The first piece of information I am exposed to in the morning is the free newspaper handed out, nay, shoved my face at the underground train station: London Lite. On the train, I will find another free paper called Metro. These papers are incredibly right-wing (London Lite more unabashedly so while Metro is more 'neutral' in tone). Everybody who travels to work in the morning reads these to pass the travelling time.

In the morings, my co-workers will talk about news items they just read - sometimes, a topic will repeatedly crop up during the day, and more often than not, my coworkers believe every word they read. These papers are their main source of political information, and influence their opinions much more than whatever they may find on the internet when coming home tired in the evenings.

Both Metro and London Lite are owned by the same media conglomerate that publishes the Daily Mail - I don't think I need to elaborate on the DM? It's a very clever thing they're doing with their free, 'neutral' newspapers broken up by generous amount of celeb gossip - it amounts to a daily right-wing propaganda assault on most of the working public.

Running danger of sounding incredibly naive, why not claim a little bit of this crucial space by regularly leaving leaflets, copies of socialist newspapers that we've finished reading, and other materials on public transport so other workers can pick them up the same way they might pick up a copy of London Lite? People are grateful for any free reading material on their way to work, and my impression is that they're the most receptive to political news in the mornings. It may just give them an alternative point of view they would have otherwise never been exposed to.

I do totally agree with the free papers. Both are controlled by the right wing Daily Mail which using this method aims to indoctrinate the countries working people. Because they are shoved in our faces and often on the train it can get very boring we are almost forced to read these things. It is a clear strategy of theirs. I like your idea as I think of many similar ideas myself but I have always been very naive in thinking that we would be able to publish enough. I think it would have a great impact if we were able to print enough so that we were half of what the metro printed but I don't think it is possible.

[Psy]

Again this was covered in "Art in a Communist society" (http://www.revleft.com/vb/art-communist-society-t78626/index.html)

Were I posted

"I've been think about this again and the question is how do we decide what large artistic projects get produced and by what large scale studio (and by what artists). Small studios would mostly be doing small projects with short production cycles meaning they would be less of a issue as each project they take on won't be taking up that much resources per project and with the Internet artists can already have a audience before approaching small studio's (to where they would be getting more resources). The question becomes about managing the production of large studio's, most artist would rather their project be done at a large studio with a long production cycle and large production values so the question becomes what artists would have access to the large studio's, of course the logical solution is to have artist built up their career so by the time they start getting involved in large studio projects they have a lot of smaller works under their belt yet then there is the question of would they given free reign over the studio or would non-artists have some say over their projects (since these artists would be consuming a significant chunk of non-artistic labor power and tying up a significant chunk of the means of production)."

It is not a question of if we have small scale media outlets or large outlets, it is a question of how we decide what artists have the privilege of working on large project.

[Tower of Bebel]

Workers' control + "social" tax (in order to provide the funds for local, smaller undertakings) are the point of departure. And what about a struggle against restrictions concerning copyright?

[Die Neue Zeit]

I do hope more brainstorming comes about. I've incorporated about five or six key aspects into the solution thus far (workers' control / workplace democracy, "balance of content" beyond just news and analysis, economic rent tax, "state aid" for mass media co-op startups and not just related buyouts, decentralization as an aim, and anti-inheritance).

Just as an addition:

http://socialistparty-usa.org/platform/civilrights.html


Media and Intellectual Property
An ever-smaller band of huge corporations controls virtually all news and entertainment media. The Socialist Party stands for the right of ordinary people to express opinions and communicate freely by vastly extending the public sector of all forms of mass media. Ultimately, a genuine democratization of the mass media will require a democratic socialist transformation of society. Within such a society, free expression will flourish, allowing for the broadest expression of viewpoints and perspectives.

1. We support the breakup of large media companies so that no one company or individual owns more than one newspaper, radio or television station, or television channel. We call for the re-regulation of the communications industry (in particular, the assertion of public ownership rights over radio and television frequencies).
2. We call for government ownership of satellite and cable companies with revenues generated by these operations allocated to a publicly controlled fund to finance innovative visual and audio programming (including movies), over the air radio and television, and cable and satellite programming. The fund would also greatly increase the money going to community cable programming.
3. We support public funding of newspapers and magazines. Any non-profit organization that publishes a journal would receive public funding in proportion to its paid subscriber list.
4. We oppose all efforts to trim "fair use" rights, such as the right to excerpt a copyrighted work in a review.
5. We call for the repeal of all existing copyright extension laws.
6. We oppose legislation to force electronics manufacturers to build "Digital Rights Management" into computers and appliances.
7. We oppose private ownership of the Internet backbone. We call for direct public ownership of at least 50% of the total bandwidth and for democratic ownership and control of the Internet domain naming system.

[Psy]

I do hope more brainstorming comes about. I've incorporated about five or six key aspects into the solution thus far (workers' control / workplace democracy, "balance of content" beyond just news and analysis, economic rent tax, "state aid" for mass media co-op startups and not just related buyouts, decentralization as an aim, and anti-inheritance).
Well distribution of media is no longer an issue, digital broadcasting means it is easy to broadcast a large amount of content at the same time (making it technically possible to have thousands of channels).

Large centralized studios would be much less of an issue if the public has more say in what they produce and worker's control of the studio equipment producers like JVC and Sony would do more for expanding the number of studios then breaking up the existing large studios, professional studio equipment is inflated under capitalism since JVC and Sony knows studios run them for at least 5 years if not into the ground (that would 10-15 years). If upstart studios could get their hands on cheap DV and DAT decks along with cheap editing systems it would make it a lot easier for a group of artists to start their own studio.

[redarmyfaction38]

Because of the enormous influence that the privately owned mass media (i.e., media conglomerates and what not) has over the lives of ordinary folks, how should the mass media be approached on an immediate programmatic basis?

Some say it should be broken up:



Others say it should be "reappropriated" (control over communication, language, and information was emphasized by Hardt and Negri in their post-modernist Empire, with production playing second fiddle). At a national level, this would entail "national-democratization."

But what kind of demands outside of "reappropriation" are adequate?

it should be "nationalised" under democratic workers control.
all democratic parties given the chance to air their views etc.
reappropriation?
since when was the media under public or democratic control to start with?

[Hit The North]

I'd like to throw some programmatic measures in the mix (though I really hope comrades will add to this list later on):

1) National-democratization of the communication-industrial complex outside of media enterprises;

2) The capture of all economic rent in the broadcast spectrum (Michael Hudson the Georgist made comments regarding the application of classical economics to the broadcast spectrum - Google Michael Hudson broadcast spectrum (http://www.google.com/search?&q=michael+hudson+broadcast+spectrum)) by first means of instituting the "land value tax" equivalent to the broadcast spectrum;

3) The application of the funds derived from #2 towards exclusively public purposes, including non-selective encouragement of, and unconditional economic assistance (both technical and financial) for, pre-cooperative worker buyouts of existing media enterprises and media enterprise operations.

Programmatically speaking, #2 and the first part of #3 would fit in quite nicely between the demand to abolish intellectual property laws (and all restrictions on the non-commodity economy of P2P, open-source programming, etc.) and the last demand for pre-cooperative worker buyouts with unconditional public assistance (evoking Lassalle, Bebel, and Wilhelm Liebknecht).
I don't think I understood a single word of that post.

The question of what media we use for disseminating our ideas is linked to, and should not be separated from, the organisation of the revolutionary party.

Because we cannot hope to match the capitalists for financial muscle, our media needs to be intimately connected to our agitation inside the class.

As Lenin argued, the role of the revolutionary newspaper is to be a "tribune of the people". But not only that, it should be sold by one worker to another worker; not through a vendor or newsagent.

He goes on to write:
The role of a newspaper, however, is not limited solely to the dissemination of ideas, to political education, and to the enlistment of political allies. A newspaper is not only a collective propagandist and a collective agitator, it is also a collective organiser. In this last respect it may be likened to the scaffolding round a building under construction, which marks the contours of the structure and facilitates communication between the builders, enabling them to distribute the work and to view the common results achieved by their organised labour. With the aid of the newspaper, and through it, a permanent organisation will naturally take shape that will engage, not only in local activities, but in regular general work, and will train its members to follow political events carefully, appraise their significance and their effect on the various strata of the population, and develop effective means for the revolutionary party to influence these events.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/may/04.htm

Now, although I don't denigrate the use of digital media and recognise the propaganda value of such, whether it can operate as an organiser in the sense Lenin gave, is open to question.

[Tower of Bebel]

From this week's issue:

The choice

As I argued in 2006 (http://www.cpgb.org.uk/worker/634/sleaze.htm), the strategic solution to the problem of media corruption is not media nationalisation or other forms of state control. In terms of programme, what is needed is the demand for an end to capitalist subsidies to news media, both directly and in the form of commercial advertising. If the media were forced to rely on sales, subscriptions, individual donations and those subsidies which could be obtained from supporting political parties for the whole of its income, it might well be the case that there would still be a mass market for Tory media - even after the working class had taken power in the form of a democratic republic and the accompanying destruction of the deeper structures of the capitalists’ political power. There would certainly be a niche market for it. But this would not in itself be a form of capitalist political power, since it would not be political power created by the ownership of the means of production.23


Both more fundamental and more practical is the point that we need democratic gatekeepers of public speech, as opposed to capitalist gatekeepers of public speech. And that means that we need political parties. I emphasise the plural: a one-party state gives merely a state-controlled party.


Specifically, under capitalism, the working class needs its own party: one not controlled by the capitalists through corruption or the state, but controlled by the working class itself through democratic discussion and the struggle of platforms and factions, and committed to the general interests of the working class, not loyal to the United Kingdom constitution, class-collaborationism or the labour bureaucracy. Strategically, that means that we need a mass Communist Party.


With the formation of the Labour Party, masses of British workers went halfway to the idea of an independent workers’ party - and stopped at that halfway mark, with a bureaucratic, loyalist-nationalist and corrupt party, half-integrated in the British state: but one which nonetheless by its name and its links to the trade unions asserted the idea of an independent workers’ party.


Maggie Thatcher set out to break the Labour Party by destroying the fighting power of the unions and the autonomy of local government. In the end, she did not succeed in breaking Labour. The trade union leaders and their chosen political representatives, from Kinnock and Smith through Blair to Brown, have accepted Thatcherism. By doing so they have come close to destroying not merely the Labour Party, but also the idea of a Labour party. The Telegraph’s and Cameron’s rightwing populist campaign hopes to break the working class from the idea finally, in favour of complete control of politics by the capitalist media.(link is mine. Don't know if it is the article he refers to)

[Die Neue Zeit]

I forwarded my musings to you, comrade. Although they haven't been published this week for obvious reasons (the overall defense of their position re. the social-corporatist Labour party), hopefully when the summer kicks in the theory will get into high gear.


What is needed is the demand for an end to capitalist subsidies to news media

Wouldn't "state aid" of the kind that I write still qualify as a "capitalist subsidy" (coming from the bourgeois state)? Another way of curtailing and ending such subsidies has been formulated by Michael Hudson above: heavily taxing economic rent in the broadcast spectrum (probably on a progressive basis, so as to not hurt the local media outlets and co-op startups).


If the media were forced to rely on sales, subscriptions, individual donations and those subsidies which could be obtained from supporting political parties for the whole of its income

Depending on the responses to my own musings, I may shoe-fit this into the commentary.



Now, re. the 2006 link:

http://www.cpgb.org.uk/worker/634/sleaze.htm


The hidden secret in this argument is also the secret of Blair’s relationships to Murdoch and to businesses and rich figures. It is this. The whole debate is conducted on the assumption that spending money on advertising - giving visibility and coverage - can make a difference to election campaigns. This is not entirely clear where the difference in spending is marginal - say, between Labour and Tories - but it is pretty clearly true where the differences are on a large scale. The SDP of the 1980s, and the UK Independence Party more recently, showed that lots of media exposure can produce dramatic results in election performance. Respect, or the Socialist Alliance before it, might get a lot of votes if it got the same exposure as the major parties.

[...]

Our Draft programme contains no proposals on the problem, though it is one which was discussed widely in the Labour Party in the 1970s and 80s. These Labour left discussions generally pointed towards the sort of nationalist regulatory regimes of control of media ownership found in some continental countries. It should be clear enough that this leads only to a form of censorship and does not affect the underlying capitalist control of the press.

It is a widespread belief among people influenced by anarchism that the internet provides the solution, replacing centralised media by decentralised and ‘networked’ arrangements. But the web’s infrastructural core involves capital investment comparable to railways. The Chinese government has shown that considerable state control of internet content is possible; and the US Congress is currently considering legislation which would allow commercial differentiation in speed of service - the first step towards full commercial control. Already service providers are mainly commercial operators and there are significant signs of their beginning to use the control they have to police content.

[...]

There is, of course, no immediate practical chance of obtaining legislation against subsidies from capitalist business and commercial advertising in news media. But what certainly is possible, because it has been done before, is for the workers’ movement to break the capitalist monopoly of the means of information. To do so does not mean in the first place setting up a competing commercial national daily run by the Labour or trade union bureaucracy or their nominees: this has been tried before and the result is utterly boring. The core of the answer is to revive democratic face-to-face and door-to-door politics at the base: the original basis of the workers’ movement and a practice still successfully exploited by the Lib Dems and the Greens.

That last bit sounds like Hardt and Negri's "reappropriation" of knowledge, information, etc.

[Die Neue Zeit]

[Post #20 above (http://www.revleft.com/vb/do-we-address-t109089/index.html?p=1449770) is the first section of my chapter section or article. This one is the last section. Since the CPGB's website has been hit with a viral attack, I am presuming that my submission of this article to them is on their backburner.]



In 1899, Kautsky tackled die agrafrage (“the agrarian question”) using certain immediate demands in the Erfurt Program and the most revolutionary political economy in order to answer the question “Does Social Democracy Need An Agrarian Programme?” In similar fashion, it is most appropriate that this chapter is concluded not by commentary on workplace democracy, local autonomy, inheritances of productive and other non-possessive property, economic rent, or even cooperative startups, but rather by commentary on the mass media, since a programmatic solution entails aspects of all these and more. The alignment of this programmatic conclusion with the relevant reform demands that already “make further progress more likely and facilitate other progressive changes” (Hahnel) as well as enable the basic principles to be “kept consciously in view” (Kautsky) is the immediate solution to die medienfrage:

1) Firstly, there should be workplace democracy over mandated balance of content in news and media production. The originally liberal-bourgeois concept of an independent press covers the obvious need and mandate for factual coverage of events. However, balance of content in news also means minimizing, if not totally eliminating, bias in providing analysis (to prevent the degeneration of such into so-called “spin”). Four or more decades ago, the news media in the most developed bourgeois regimes had, albeit relative to the politically correct mainstream, this journalistic balance. Balance of content in other media production primarily refers to the quality of, and airtime allocated for, documentaries and other educational programs (probably at its qualitative peak in the immediate post-Cold War period), cultural programming, of course sports and entertainment. As for workplace democracy, the least it can do is minimize the arbitrary power of news editors and programming coordinators.

2) Secondly, there should be heavy appropriation of economic rent in the broadcast spectrum (that part of the electromagnetic spectrum most suitable for telecommunication, from radio broadcasting to high-definition television). There are obvious parallels here between railroad land grants for privatized economic rent in land since the 19th century and the corporate commodification of the broadcast spectrum. Although frequencies are still generally not yet privatized officially (as opposed to huge swaths of communication grids in some countries), they are leased for token change in various murky arrangements. Most “profits earned” by mass media companies are in fact economic rent in the classical sense (as discussed in a later section).

3) Thirdly, pre-cooperative worker buyouts of existing mass media enterprises and mass media operations should be extended to all mass media cooperative startups, again with unconditional “state support” (or, more notoriously phrased, “state aid”) in both technical and financial aspects. Again, even the anarchist Michael Bakunin that such a measure could turn the tables on the media moguls. Meanwhile, such economic assistance would undoubtedly be funded by appropriated economic rent in the broadcast spectrum.

4) Fourthly, local autonomy would be enhanced beyond obviously political and economic concerns if media decentralization were one of the aims of the aforementioned economic assistance. Concentrated private ownership and control in the mass media is mainly ignorant of local issues and local culture, unless the relevant localities are at least somewhat metropolized.

5) Lastly, anti-inheritance measures regarding the mass media should be aimed explicitly at transforming the relevant private property into cooperative property. Notwithstanding the continued proliferation of heirs to various media empires, the appropriation of the relevant private property for, on the one hand, the sake of mere auctioning would be a step sideways and, on the other hand, for the sake of complete “public ownership” under the control of bourgeois-capitalist states would only strengthen the bourgeois cultural hegemony, or dominance.



REFERENCES:



Marc Angenot, Jules Guesde, ou: Le Marxisme orthodoxe by Lars Lih [http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_6976/is_4_7/ai_n28430632/]

Fighting For Reforms Without Becoming Reformist by Robin Hahnel [http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/6588]

The Class Struggle (Erfurt Programme) by Karl Kautsky [http://www.marxists.org/archive/kautsky/1892/erfurt/ch05.htm]

How Privatization Sterilizes Culture: An Interview with Michael Hudson by Standard Schaefer [http://www.counterpunch.org/schaefer02142004.html]

Programme of the Social-Democratic Workers’ Party of Germany (Eisenach Programme) by August Bebel [http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/sub_document.cfm?document_id=688]

Programme of the Socialist Workers’ Party of Germany (Gotha Programme) by Wilhelm Liebknecht [http://history.hanover.edu/texts/gotha.html]

A Critique of the German Social-Democratic Program by Michael Bakunin [http://libcom.org/library/a-critique-of-the-german-social-democratic-program-bakunin]

[CommunityBeliever]

Well of course we should ignore the capitalist media and try to work to destroy it to prevent it from effecting other people.

One thing that I sort of like the idea of is this en.wikinews.org website because it allows anybody to go in an edit a story (even us) so I think that in comparasion to say Newsweek or something that, that would be a better news source. What do you guys think of this wikinews website? Could this be a good idea for a future socialist news source?

[Nothing Human Is Alien]

The question of what media we use for disseminating our ideas is linked to, and should not be separated from, the organisation of the revolutionary party.

Because we cannot hope to match the capitalists for financial muscle, our media needs to be intimately connected to our agitation inside the class.

As Lenin argued, the role of the revolutionary newspaper is to be a "tribune of the people". But not only that, it should be sold by one worker to another worker; not through a vendor or newsagent.

He also wrote: "The necessity to concentrate all forces on establishing a regularly appearing and regularly delivered organ arises out of the peculiar situation of Russian Social-Democracy as compared with that of Social-Democracy in other European countries and with that of the old Russian revolutionary parties. Apart from newspapers, the workers of Germany, France etc. have numerous other means for the public manifestation of their activity, for organising the movement -- parliamentary activity, election agitation, public meetings, participation in local public bodies (rural and urban), the open conduct of trade unions (professional, guild), etc., etc. In place of all that, yes, all of that, we must be served -- until we have won political liberty -- by a revolutionary newspaper, without which no broad organisation of the working-class movement is possible."

Emphasis added.