TV say if you’re poor, you must be slow and shiftless / But you pay ’em to say that so we don’t want it different – The Coup, ‘Lazymuthafucka’

The dreams have no dream - Adorno, Minima Moralia

This blog tends to focus on the propaganda function of contemporary news and current affairs media (that is, after all, where the biggest lies are to be found). Yet popular media formats also help to sustain capitalist hegemony. A brief consideration of some of the themes and concerns of contemporary lifestyle and reality television will help to illustrate how class-based discourses are diffused through popular culture.

Gilles Deleuze proposed that developed capitalist societies transitioned in the course of the twentieth century from ‘disciplinary societies’, in which capitalists manage workers through physical discipline and institutions, to ‘societies of control’, in which individuals voluntarily internalise the interests of their rulers. In the society of control, the media – and in particular the ‘domestic’ medium of television – play a major role in constituting us as capitalist subjects by manufacturing a social consensus based on bourgeois values. In 1962, in the wake of the Pilkington Report into the quality of British television, Raymond Williams noted in his article ‘Television in Britain’ that ‘majority television’ was ‘outstandingly an expression of the false consciousness of our particular societies’. Williams’s judgement remains eminently applicable to popular television today. In The Apprentice, contestants compete against one another for an internship with a business mogul, while in Dragon’s Den and High Street Dreams, ordinary members of the public seek to impress businesspeople and financiers with their entrepreneurial acumen. Other programmes fetishize the acquisition of houses (tellingly called ‘properties’ in lifestyle television-speak), while television programmes about obesity, exercise, cosmetic surgery and dieting encourage viewers to focus their attentions on their personal well-being and appearance. Indeed, the proliferation of ‘transformational’ reality television programmes in recent years – from home improvement shows to makeover programmes – reflect and reinforce a profound investment in disciplinary work and biopolitical self-regulation. In such programmes, as Adorno observed of contemporary capitalist society in Minima Moralia, ‘everybody must have projects all the time’, so that ‘the whole of life must look like a job’.

Such television programming also interpellates working class people as self-contained units of production and consumption, fostering what the Marxist writer Christopher Caudwell liked to call the ‘bourgeois illusion’ of individualism. Little wonder that so many people today believe that human beings are ‘naturally’ selfish – a proposition that has been refuted by scientists from Peter Kropotkin to Stephen Jay Gould – and that this supposed ‘fact’ precludes the possibility of communism. (It might be noted here that even if human nature were essentially characterised by selfishness, this would constitute an argument not against communism but in favourof it, since the fact of human selfishness would necessitate reciprocal social arrangements capable of preventing the exploitation of some human beings by others).

The entrenched individualism of these popular television programmes tends to vitiate any sense that the problems faced by working class people and communities can be overcome collectively. In each episode of Channel 4’s reality programme The Secret Millionaire, an undercover millionaire encounters several community-minded individuals, each with their own project designed to help a disadvantaged group of people. At the end of the episode, the millionaire reveals her identity, writing a cheque for one or more of the deserving causes she has encountered. Here, as in Slavoj Žižek’s ‘chocolate laxative’ paradigm, capitalism is posited as the remedy for the very problems it has caused. Channel 4’s How the Other Half Live operates on a similar premise: a wealthy family donates money to a poorer one, having first ensured that its members are deserving of support. In programmes such as these, working class people are urged to ‘better themselves’ through hard work. This in turn tends to deny agency to the working class as a class, implying that complex social problems can be rectified not by the collective action of the workers against their exploiters, but by a combination of individual effort and perhaps, for a lucky few, thedeus ex machina of benevolent philanthropic intervention – a proposition that chimes with the emphasis placed upon private charity in the Cameronian one nation fantasy of the ‘Big Society’. As for collectivity, we are left with the ersatz participation of the X Factor phone-in.

The radical critique of ‘reality’, ‘aspirational’ and lifestyle television formats should in no way involve a moralistic objection to consumerism; after all, in contrast with the gloomy ressentiment and anti-consumerism of left-liberal politics, the communist demand is nothing if not a demand for more. The criticism is rather that lifestyle television’s exhortations to social mobility and consumerism serve to occlude both the reality of exploitation and the potential for collective socio-political action. They also disregard the increasing poverty of the working class. As the ‘wealth gap’ widens and social mobility rates stagnate, average wages and living standards for workers in ‘developed’ capitalist societies have fallen in recent years, as even the capitalist news media are sometimes compelled to acknowledge.

The increasingly fragile fantasy of upward mobility finds expression in many other popular media forms today. It is a convention of hip-hop videos, for example, to be set dually ‘on the street’ and ‘at the mansion’. In the dream-like logic of the music video, celebrity rappers transition effortlessly between these two settings. Association with ‘the street’ allows even the most sybaritic celebrities to maintain a reputation as ‘authentic’, ‘real’ and ‘cool’. The mythologisation of easy social advancement, meanwhile, furnishes an aspirational ideal while eliding the economic constraints that preclude social mobility for the majority of people in the real world. As such examples suggest – and as any advertising executive knows – capitalist hegemony is maintained not only through the assertion of nationalist symbolism and state propaganda, but also through the reconfiguration of human dreams, desires, aspirations and emotions.

As well as encouraging individualism and voluntarism, many popular media forms ridicule of working class people who attain media prominence: witness the outpouring of class hatred in tabloid television’s treatment of working class – especially female – ‘chav’ or ‘white trash’ celebrities, such as Jade Goody, Kerry Katona and Britney Spears, who are often censured for their emotional instability, stupidity, vulgarity, corpulence or maternal incompetence. It is precisely such undisciplined and recalcitrant working class people that the experts and gurus of ‘rehab’ reality television aim to instruct in the virtues of self-restraint and hard work. In BBC3’s Young, Dumb and Living Off Mum, young working class people are mocked for their indolence and cajoled into taking low-paid, service sector jobs. In Channel 4’s Benefit Busters and The Fairy Jobmother, meanwhile, presenter Hayley Taylor mobilises a mixture of moral censure and therapeutic rhetoric in an attempt to wean working class families ‘off benefits’ and ‘into work’ – as though unemployment were, to use the phrase of the Conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne, a ‘lifestyle choice’.

But it is perhaps in the treatment of crime that the anti-working class nature of these popular media formats is most evident. The police force is all but venerated in reality television documentaries, while working class criminals, from violent gangs to ‘hoodies’ and ‘chavs’ are excoriated in the news media and in television docusoaps such as Bravo channel’s Street Crime UK and its replacement Brit Cops. And while largely juvenile, anti-social crime does constitute a genuine blight on society (one whose impact is felt most keenly in working class communities), what Marcuse termed ‘the mature delinquency’ of the ruling class – such as brutal invasions and bombings, lethal sanctions on food and medicines, health and safety violations – are either simply not classified as crimes or ignored; indeed, corporate and political crimes barely feature in crime-related television programming. The truth is that the most pernicious and chronic threats to the well-being of working class people are posed not by other workers, but by what Žižek calls the ‘objective’ or systemic violence of capitalist social relations, which finds expression in work-related ‘accidents’, poverty, ‘stress’, environmental damage, genocide and warfare. But there’s not much entertainment value in discussing any of that.

In recent years, the British media’s treatment of China and the Chinese has been less than friendly. BBC2’s recent two-part documentary The Chinese Are Coming! (8 and 15 February 2011) seems to have been yet another exercise in China bashing. The first episode began in upbeat mode with presenter Justin Rowlatt acknowledging China’s stupendous economic growth. And the programme was not without comic relief: its Louis Theroux moment came in the second episode when Rowlatt met a motley group of imbecilic US Sinophobes who objected to the teaching of Mandarin in a Californian school. Nonetheless, the programme painted a highly negative view of the global influence of China. While Rowlatt managed to avoid the phrases ‘yellow peril’ and ‘Fu Manchu’, one of the most prominent words in his voiceover was ‘threat’.

The programme followed China’s economic expansion in Africa (episode one) and the Americas (episode two). Rowlatt claimed that China’s production of cheap goods was ‘raising standards of living for us all’. But while the programme's argument had a veneer of formal balance, its judgement on China was damning, especially as the documentary progressed. China, we were told, is devastating the African environment. China opposed the British sanctions against Zimbabwe. China has a ‘dubious’ human rights record. And as Rowlatt noted in the documentary’s final section, China is developing weapons whose capabilities exceed what is required for its defence (as Rowlatt’s interviewee, the US Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, Michèle Flournoy, warned, China must abide by ‘international law’ and respect ‘the rules of the road’).

All of this, we might acknowledge, is more or less true; but some context is in order here: environmental destruction is endemic to capitalism, not just China; the sanctions against Zimbabwe have had appalling consequences for that country’s population; and as for China’s record on human rights and military aggression, the scale of the US operations in Iraq and Afghanistan make China’s domestic oppression and military adventures look tame by comparison. As the geographer Emma Mawdsley has recently written in an article in Political Geography, the West is 'a most unsatisfactory arbiter of what "responsible power" should look like'. Indeed, for much of the world, the question is not so much when are the Chinese coming, but when is the US leaving.

The one-sidedness of the programme’s argument is not accidental. The Chinese Are Coming! illustrates how the capitalist media are locked into a nationalist worldview that permits criticism of powerful competitor states, but which cannot acknowledge the fundamental inhumanity of the capitalist system itself.

"If you keep on repeating, repeating a word / It becomes increasing, increasingly absurd" - Wire

During the so-called Green Revolution in Iran in 2009, the conservative blogger Andrew Sullivan wrote breathlessly that:

"You cannot stop people any longer. You cannot control them any longer. They can bypass your established media; they can broadcast to one another; they can organize as never before. It's increasingly clear that Ahmadinejad and the old guard mullahs were caught off-guard by this technology and how it helped galvanize the opposition movement in the last few weeks."

The 'revolution will be twittered', wrote Sullivan, sparking off the notion of the 'Twitter/Facebook revolution' - although it seems that mobile phones played a far greater role than social media and microblogs in the organisation of the uprising.

The recent uprisings in Tunisia and now Egypt raise the question again: what role can the so-called 'new media' (already a somewhat dated phrase) play in bringing about social change? In a recent interview, the philsopher Mehdi Belhaj Kasem suggested that during the Tunisian events,

"When the official media told a lie, within the next half hour it was disproved by civil society on the Internet: a thousand people, ten thousand, a hundred thousand saw the real images, the state’s manipulation, the deceptions, etc. In short, for the first time in history it was the media – television, radio or newspapers – that played catch-up to a new kind of popular, democratic information. And the same thing is going to happen everywhere. It's even possible that journalism as such will end up being unnecessary."

A recent article by Noureddine Miladi gives an equally optimistic answer to the question of the role new media in political change. Miladi argues that the new media have played a key role in helping to bring about a 'revolution' and a democratic 'second republic' in Tunisia, circumventing the strict state censorship of the mainstream media. Perhaps all too revealingly, he also compares the new media's role in the Tunisian events to the part it played in securing the election of the US president Barack Obama in 2008.

Taken on its own terms, Miladi's analysis is sound. But for those who disagree with its political premises, the optimistic view of the political role of the new media is more difficult to maintain. A Marxist analysis of the so-called 'jasmine revolution' must consider the class forces at play in this situation. Rather as Barack Obama's election in 2008 can be seen not as an advance for the working class, but a setback (amongst other things, Obama's administration can be argued to have intensified the level of conflict in the Middle East), so the recent regime change in Tunisia can be seen not as a triumph for radical or 'grassroots' politics, but ultimately as the imposition of a capitalist settlement better able to manage the increasingly violent manifestations of social 'unrest' by adopting a democratic facade. As the International Communist Current's article on the bourgeois media reporting of the events points out, the mainstream news media in many countries - having effectively blacked out news of the uprising for weeks - have now begun to show footage of the demonstrations and to praise the dawning of a new democratic era (although in China there has been a complete news blackout). But from a working class political perspective, the overthrow of Ben Ali's regime - brutal and all-controlling as it certainy was - does not necessarily represent a long-term political gain for the working class. Although undoubtedly driven along by a strong proletarian protest against poverty and unemployment, the Tunisian movement also contained reformist elements. And while the Tunisian events have clearly shaken the country's ruling class, the capitalist state in Tunisia remains intact. We should therefore be wary of embracing either the hegemonic assumption that Tunisia has undergone a 'revolution' or the celebratory account of the new media's role in producing it. 

The demonstrators in Tunisia clearly used a variety of new media - mobile phones, Twitter, Facebook, etc. - to organise themselves, although there is nothing new about this situation. We might compare the role of social media here with that of the telegraph network in the 1848 revolutions that swept across Europe far more rapidly than the present uprisings have done in north Africa and the Middle East. In fact, as a 'revolutionary' technology, the telegraph beats the Internet hands down. As Ha-Joon Chang calculates in his book 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism, the introduction of telegraphy in the nineteenth century speeded up the transmission of a 300-word message across the Atlantic by a factor of 2,500; contrast this with the Internet, which is only five times faster at the same task than its technological predecessor, the fax machine.

Clearly the new social media do present headaches for capitalist states the world over. But there can be no doubt that the ruling class is hiring the best brains it can find to overcome these challenges and regain control of the digital domain. As Miladi himself notes, the Tunisian state disrupted certain social networking sites such as Facebook during the unrest. Moreover, access to new media technologies is very limited in many parts of the world. At most, only 1 in 4 Tunisians is a Facebook user (the figure is much lower for Egypt) and only around 34% of the world's population has Internet access. Use of the Internet is carefully monitored in most states. In extreme circumstances, in fact, the state can always withdraw Internet services - as has now happened in Egypt. The potential of new media to challenge the institutional hegemony of the traditional media should not therefore be overstated. 

A slew of recent books, including Matthew Hindman's The Myth of Digital Democracy and Evgeny Morozov's The Net Delusion have seriously questioned the potential of new media to precipitate radical social change. As Morozov shows, new media are manipulated by the state for propaganda purposes to a far greater extent than many cyber-utopians are prepared to acknowledge. One thinks, for example, of the way in which YouTube videos exposing social problems in countries like the US and Britain are used on channels like Iran's English-language news channel Press TV in order to undermine those states - a good thing in itself, perhaps, but hardly a radical use of new media when the critiques are being levelled by apologists for Iran's theocratic regime. One thinks, too, of the way in which Facebook has been used by the state to encourage participation in capitalist democracy through the placement of an 'I Voted' button on every Facebook user's profile page on election days.

Finally, we must not forget the propaganda value of the idealised figure of the 'netizen' for capitalist politicians. The image of plucky crusaders using social networking sites for democratic ends has enormous propaganda potential and is readily exploited by representatives of the state when it suits their interests: commenting in a Radio 4 lunchtime news bulletin (27 January 2011) on the Egyptian demonstrations that followed the Tunisian events, the British Foreign Secretary William Hague warned that it would be 'futile' for the Mubarak regime to try to prevent the free expression of public opinion via new media - although the British state itself suspended certain websites during the student protests in December 2010. 'Power to the People' is an easily recuperated slogan.

I hope to write more on this topic in future, but in general I think we should be sceptical of celebratory accounts of the potential of new media for radical political organisation.