>I wouldn't dismiss Bourdieu so quickly. His book Distinction contains a welter >of phenomenological insights into how the ruling class is able to reproduce its >hegemony. > >Sam Pawlett Sam, I enjoy media critics and have read Mark Crispin Miller, Mark Hertsgaard and Neil Postman with great relish. I have James Ledbetter's book on PBS at home that I wish I had the time to dig into. My problem is with the middle-class reformism that undelies much of this criticism. For example, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) and the Nation Magazine in the US have campaigned against concentration of ownership by CAPS-City, Westinghouse, Disney, Murdoch et al. I donated hundreds of dollars to FAIR in the 1980s when it was on the frontlines attacking biased coverage about Nicaragua. Nowadays it seems rather pointless to get involved with anti-monopolistic fights to include a "leftist" viewpoint on mainstream television, since this agenda has been met (Hitchens, Alterman, etc.) with paltry results. When you think about it, why should it have made a difference to begin with? The model for FAIR and the Nation is the sort of anti-monopolist crusades of the turn-of-the-century. It has lots in common with Ralph Nader's crusade against Microsoft and other such neo-progressivist efforts. What they seem to miss is that concentration of capital is not a function of greed, but the iron laws of capital accumulation. Bourdieu comes at this problem from a rather esoteric position, one based on the spurious notion of "cultural capital," but it shares with mainstream liberals the belief that something else besides capital accumulation is the problem. He writes: "From the choices made by French writers under the Occupation can be derived a general law: The more a cultural producer is autonomous, rich in specific capital from a given field and exclusively integrated into the restricted market in which the only audience is competitors, the greater the inclination to resist. Conversely, the more producers aim for the mass market (like some essayists, writer-journalists, and popular novelists), the more likely they are to collaborate with the powers that be - State, Church, or Party, and, today, journalists and television - and yield to their demands or orders." You'll notice that this approach puts ownership of the means of production (real capital) into the background and puts a bogus notion of capital into the foreground. Campaigning against mindless television seems a rather utopian project. It would be like picketing the Catholic Church for practising sexism, or the convention of the American Association of Psychoanalysts for taking patients' money without providing relief of their symptoms. Marxism makes clear that the ruling ideas of any society are the ideas of the ruling class. These ideas are not directly transmitted from the ruling class directly into the working class, since they are too busy making decisions about whether or not to let Brazil go down the toilet, or to bomb Serbia, etc.. What they do is hire middle-class intellectuals to do the job for them. This is where Gramsci is most useful, in explaining the hegemony of the ruling class through the mechanism of intermediate layers. What's interesting about this middle class is that it has to have illusions about its intellectual freedom or else they would go off and get useful jobs like programming computers or cooking. So they allow a certain margin for counter-hegemonic ideas, such as Eric Alterman on CNBC. (Warning: you are entering irony territory.) This broad intellectual milieu has its feet in both classes and reflects the discontent emanating from both sectors. >From the ruling class, it propagates the notion that the subordinate classes are too prejudiced and stupid to rule society. From the working class, it echoes outrage about police brutality, ecological ruin, B-52 bombings, etc., but from the standpoint of moralism rather than class politics. Reduced to its essence, it is a plea for the ruling class to stop being evil. Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
