By Joe Langabeer, Lincoln Labour CLP member
As pride month begins, we see a constant number of corporations changing their logos to the colours of the pride flag. More disturbingly, we have seen corporations change their logos and pictures to the black square in solidarity of George Floyd.
The reason as to why I suggest disturbingly is the blatant historic racism and homophobic actions that these corporations have actioned with time and time again. It sets a dangerous precedent. One that Louis Althusser, Theodor Adorno, Antonio Gramsci, Georg Lukacs and even Marx predicted themselves. The commodification of culture and the ideological state apparatus seeps through our society and has become a dangerous marketing tool for the capitalists to exploit.
A video game company called Bethesda Game Studios recently changed their profile picture on Twitter to their logo with the pride flag colours. They did not however, change the colour of their logos in Russia or their Middle East accounts. One Twitter user asked, “Isn’t the whole point of pride to push for actual gay rights where gays actually need them?”.
Undervaluing LGBTQ+ and race rights
There are examples of this with much more detrimental circumstances and turns to undervalue both LGBTQ+ and race rights. There are many references in Marxist history to the commodification of culture and some examples are examined here.
In Adorno’s and Max Horkheimer’s book Dialectic of Enlightenment, a chapter entitled The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception challenges popular culture; both authors describe it as a mass-produced factory of books, films and magazines (among other forms of commodity entertainment) to allow capitalism to pacify society. This was all part of the teachings at The Frankfurt School and their frequent discussions of aesthetic theory and the culture industry.
The major exploitation of media communications allows people to become docile and apolitical, making them helpless to any form of radical change whatever their economic circumstances. Marx also spoke about the culture industry and ‘Commodity fetishism’ with its relationships for the commodity goods and not the interpersonal relationships that produce them. It observes the theory of social relationships in production. The grounding of the theory can all be read in Capital but is important to note it here.
Needs for docile audiences
These needs for docile audiences satisfy the demands of capitalism and help evade exposures of their crises. This even becomes reflected within the labour movement, although not produced by it, with the Che Guevara T-shirt becoming popularised and yet a lot of people tend to only know the name.
An article by Chris Berg in the Australian newspaper The Age entitled Che chic: you’ve ignored the horrors, now buy the T-shirt, comments on the same economy that Che worked hard to dismantle was the same entity that makes and sells T-shirts with his face. Although I do not agree with all of this article, it is important to note the role of capitalism in developing docile political thought. Capitalism has romanticised the role of Che Guevara, and in so doing rendered people at least partially apolitical.
Commodity entertainment, which includes merchandising and brand types, can turn potential political consciousness into apolitical thought. This can make many people completely unaware of what they really are experiencing.
This leads us to the next stage of capitalist psychological brain-washing, so-called Ideological State Apparatus (ISA) which is a termed coined by Louis Althusser and accounts for the methods of the establishment to manipulate workers by assuming apparently ‘liberating qualities’ to mask capitalist ideology.
Lenin, Gramsci and ‘hegemony’
Althusser believed that large sections of the working class were afraid of being socially rejected or outcast, so that they would subconsciously to fit in with the dominant ideology of the ruling state. This idea is put forward in his essay Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses. The term ‘hegemony’ was expanded on by Antonio Gramsci, from the works of Lenin, and is broken down in The Dictionary of Marxist Thought. Hegemony is how the capitalist class can establish and maintain control over the working class. Cultural hegemony, therefore, was the process whereby capitalists could dominate the working class on social and moral values.
Lenin believed that the way to counter capitalist hegemony was through purely political objectives. Gramsci believed that it had to be born out of moral leadership and an alliance of forces to overcome the dominant ideological thinking. My opinion? I would agree with Lenin because of the inevitable crises of capitalism and the rising consciousness of workers through events.
But it is important to recognise that the dominance of capitalist ideology is embedded through our modern cultural values, because they have been able to subliminally manipulate us at every opportunity. A lot of this domination has recently been made through the technological revolution. Social media plays a very important role for the establishment and that is why the social media giants allow parties to pay for political campaigns.
A very recent example of this was the 2019 general election and the amount of funding poured by the Tories into their social media campaign. This was reported by The Economist with an article entitled How the Conservatives won the social media campaign. The mantra of “Get Brexit Done” was echoed throughout the media corporations and therefore subconsciously manipulating layers of the working class.
Facebook not ‘arbiters of the truth’
As socialists, we should always be wary of these social media outlets for they are representatives of the capitalist ideology. Mark Zuckerberg, boss of Facebook, said that FB “will not be the arbiters of truth”. This was a response to Twitter’s fact-checking of Trump’s comments on mail-in voting in the United States Presidential Election.
Coming back to ISA, examples of this are seen time and time again throughout capitalist society. We see how the media can contradict themselves to manipulate opinion within the working class. John Boyega, a black actor who appeared in the new Star Wars trilogy, came out with a passionate speech during the BLM protests that resonated with all sections of society. Disney, the owners of the Star Wars brand backed him, calling him “a hero”. This is some high level hypocrisy when you consider that Disney have allowed racist stereotypes to be in all their movies across the decades and have actively refused to remove these films from their archives. Their streaming service Disney+ recently came under fire for allowing racist stereotypes from previous movies to be allowed on the streaming platform. The company responded, but not by removing them, by adding disclaimers that there are racist stereotypes in these movies before watching it.
Disney also had controversies with John Boyega over the shrinking of his character in one of the latest Star Wars movies posters in China. There had been no relevant explanation as to why this happened and it can only lead to certain assumptions. The list for Disney’s problems with race is endless and you could sit and watch racist stereotypes from Disney for hours. Disney like to give the illusion that it is “inclusive and diverse” but when it comes to damaging profits, they would happily give up liberal attitudes.
Manipulate sections of the working class
If there were a list of how many companies and corporations were contributing to this falsehood, the list would be endless. I have linked Adorno’s theory and Althusser’s theories together because they both relate to the manipulation of the consciousness of sections of the working-class. Adorno’s theory deals with the commodification of cultural values and how it lays a blanket of ‘passivity’ on the masses, enabling the ideological state apparatus to manipulate our way of life and invoke a passive acceptance of the values of capitalism.
If you look at the example of the mobile phone industry, all smartphones including i-phones and Google, have pre-installed news feeds which go straight to your phone and feed you information. The problem is that it includes outlets like The Daily Mail and the Sun. Rather than relying on objective news outlets, the phones have set preferences based on the majority of users that read the most shared articles. This makes The Daily Mail and the Sun popular on these apps if people share them.
You cannot delete this app, and you can decline to recommend an article, but the newspaper will still send you updates. The capitalist commodification comes from the power of mobile phones and their manipulative marketing strategies. The ISA comes from the app, updating with you with right-wing media outlets.
An i-phone will not protect your job
The question that Marxists must ask is how do we resist the ideological apparatus and the mass commodification of capitalist culture? In truth, there is not much that can be done other than events. In the final analysis, as Marx said, conditions determine consciousness and as events move quickly, as we are seeing in this pandemic, there will be a reaction to the failures of the capitalist economy.
An iPhone will not protect your job, and a Hollywood film will not stop te workers from striking. A time will come when the state apparatus will not be able to manipulate public opinion. But for now, Marxists should be aware of the cultural basis of capitalism and should be aware of the manipulation being inflicted on others. The labour movement itself, in its structures and struggles and in its close association with workers, is the only organisation that offers a different form of culture to capitalism. In so far as the labour movement reflects the democracy, the unity and the aspirations of workers for a different society, it can be considered as the embryo of a new, future culture within the womb on the old, rotten one.
June 13, 2020
