CONSUMER SOCIETY:Role of mass media in alienation, Summary of Marxism

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Theories of Communication MCM 511

LESSON 26

CONSUMER SOCIETY

Role of mass media in alienation

Mass media plays a crucial role. They provide momentary gratifications for the alienated spirit, they

distract the alienated individual from his or her misery and with the institution of advertising, and they

stimulate desire, leading people to work harder and harder. There is a kind of vicious cycle here. If as

Marx argues, work in capitalist societies alienates people, then the more people work, the more they

become alienated. In order to find some means of escaping their alienation they engage in various forms

of consumption, all of which cost money, so that they are forced to work increasingly hard to escape

from the effects of their work. Advertising acts at the chief means of motivation people to work hard.

Consumer Society

As we have discussed advertising is an essential institution in advanced capitalist societies because it is

necessary to motivate people to work hard so they can accumulate money, which they can use to buy

things. But in addition people must be driven to consume, must be made crazy to consume, for it is

consumption that maintains the economic system. Thus the alienation generated by a capitalist system is

functional, for the anxieties and miseries generated by such a system tend to be assuaged by impulsive

consumption. There is nothing that advertising will not do muse or co-opt to achieve its goals. If it has

to debase sexuality, co-opt the women's rights movement, merchandise cancer (via cigarettes), seduce

children, terrorize the masses, or employ any other tactics it will. One thing that advertising does is

divert people's attention from social and political concerns and steer that attention toward selfish and

private concerns. Thus the immediate mission is to sell goods, the long range mission is to maintain the

class system. In order to sell goods, advertising has to change attitudes, lifestyles, customs, habits, and

preferences while at the same time, maintaining the economic system that benefits from these changes.

According to a German Marxist, Fritz Haug, that those who control the industries in capitalist societies

have learned to fuse sexuality onto commodities and thus have gained greater control of that aspect of

people's lives that is of most interest to the ruling classes- the purchasing of goods and services. He

argues that advertising industry, the servant of capitalist interests, has learned how to mold and exploit

human sexuality, to alter human need and instinct structures.

So according to him the power of the advertising industry to use the appearance of products as a means

of stimulating desire for them is now a worldwide phenomenon, and have intervened in the imaginations

of people through their cultures. And so people have the illusion that they make their own decisions

about what to purchase and what to do, but according to Haug, these decisions are made for them to a

remarkable degree. Their acts turn out to be almost automatic responses to stimuli generated by

advertisers and the commodities themselves.

The irony is that we are all convinced of our freedom to make our choices, because we believe our

minds are inviolable, when in fact our choices have been imposed on us , in subtle ways, the advertising

industry, this illusion of autonomy makes us all the more susceptible to manipulation and exploitation.

So advertising is part of what Marxist scholars call the mind industry .The main function of the this

mind industry is to not to sell its product but also to sell the existing order, to perpetuate the prevailing

pattern of man's domination by man, no matter who runs the society and by what means. Its task is to

expand and train our consciousness in order to exploit it.

Summary of Marxism

We have discussed that Marx work locates the role of mass media in the context of the operation of the

capitalist economy, and emphasis the relationship between economy and communication and culture.

Marx's view of the connection between the economic organization of society and the process of mass

communication is characterized by a famous passage from his works:-

The ideas of the ruling class are, in every age the ruling ideas: i.e. the class, which is the dominant

material force in society, is at the same time its dominant intellectual force.

Theories of Communication MCM 511

The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over

the means of mental production.. Insofar as they rule as a class and determine the extent and compass of

an epoch, they do this in its whole range, hence among other things they regulate the production and

distribution of the ideas of their age; thus their ideas are the ruling ideas of the epoch.

So according to Marx the capitalist class the bourgeoisie the control the `production and

distribution of ideas, because of their control of the means of material production. As a result it

is their ideas their views and accounts of the world and how it works, that dominate the outlook

of capitalist society '

These are emphasized through the means of mental production at the expense of other views

and accounts of how the world works.

The outcome is that the ideology of the bourgeoisie becomes the dominant ideology of the

society thereby shaping the thinking and action of all other classes in society including the

working class or proletariat.

This ideological domination is crucial in the maintenance of the inequality between the social

classes. It enables the capitalist class or ruling classes to legitimate the established order by

hiding the social, political and economic disparities of capitalist society.

Marx referred to the creation of a false consciousness in the minds the other classes about the

political and social realities of capitalist society.

Marx, therefore makes a direct connection between the domination of the economic

organization society and the exercise of ideological control, the control of the ways in which we

think.

Ideological domination is the outcome of the relentless logic of the capitalist system.

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