The cultural apparatus of monopoly capital: An introduction

Monthly Review

Volumn 65, Issue 3, 2013, Pages 1-33

  Foster, John Bellamy ^a   McChesney, Robert W ^b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF OREGON   (United States)

^b UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA CHAMPAIGN   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 84881238215     PISSN: 00270520     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.14452/MR-065-03-2013-07_1     Document Type: Article

References (123)

1. See Robert W. McChesney, Digital Disconnea: How Capitalism is Turning the Internet Against Democracy (New Yoik: New Press, 2013).
2. For a longer discussion of the origins and development of the political economy of communication, see Robert W. McChesney, Communication Revolution: CriticalJunctures and the Future of Media (New York: New Press, 2007).
3. The critique tended to be more that Monthly ReYiew underplayed the importance of media and communication than that It was wrong about these matters. On the rare occasions that MR covered the political economy of communication, it was sympathetic and characterized the study as a necessary and logical part of monopoly capital. See the assessment of Herbert Schiller's work In Douglas Dowd, "Monopoly Capitalism and Mind Management", Monthly Review 26, no. 11(November 1974):32-36.
4. Dallas Smythe, "Communications: Blindspot of Western Maniism", Canadian Journal of Political and Social Iheory 1, no. 3(Fall 1977):1-27.
5. See Dan Schiller, How to Ihink About Information (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), chapter 1.
6. See Robert W. McChesney, "What Ever Happened to Cultural Studies?" in Catherine A. Warren and Mary Douglas Vavms, eds., American Cultural Studies (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 76-92.
7. Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy, Monopoly Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1966), 112-41. Many of the implications of Baran and Sweez/s analysis of the sales effort with respect to the development of modern marketing were developed in
8. Michael Dawson, The Consumer Trap (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005).
9. See Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy, "Theses on Advertising", Science and Society 28, no. 1(Winter 1964):20-30. Reprinted in this Issue.
10. The Labour Party, Rieport of a Commbsion of Enquiry into Advertising (London: Labour Party, 1966), 33-40, 201, 204; Baran and Sweezy's testimony was solicited through the influence of Nicholas Kaldor, who was a member of the Advertising Commission but was forced to resign in 1964 when he was appointed special advisor to the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Kaldor's work on advertising, which was closely related to that of Baran and Sweez/s, was heavily quoted In the final report.
11. Paul M. Sweezy (writing anonymously, no author listed). The Scientificlndustrial Revolution (New York: Model, Roland, and Stone. 1957), 7. To support himself on top of his professional salary and to obtain funds for research, Paul Baran occasionally wrote reports for the Wall Street firm of Model, Roland and Stone. He was commissioned to do a report on technology but was pressed for time so he asked Sweezy to do it for him. The resulting report was Issued by the firm with no author indicated, but Sweezy considered It one of his best pieces of writing. The original copy is in the Sweezy archives at Harvard University. Harry Bravemian made use of Sweez/s argument on the scientific-Industrial revolution in this pamphlet to construct much of his own argument on the scientific-technological revolution. See
12. Braverman, labor and Monopoly Capital (Hew io Monthly Review Press, 1999), 115.
13. See John Bellamy Foster, "A Missing Chapter of Monopoly Capital: Introduction to Baran and Sweez/s 'Some Theoretical Complications'", Monthly Review 64, no. 3(Julv-August 2012):3-17. The original draft of the culture and mental health (or "Quality of Monopoly Capitalist Society 11") chapter along with related papers was found in a file in the Sweezy papers at Harvard University. The final draft with Sweez/s edits were located in the Baran Papers (Monthly Review Foundation).
14. Another "missing chapter", on the theoretical issues arising from their model, was located at the same time and published in the July-August 2012 issue of Monthly Review. See Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy, "Some Theoretical Implications", Monthly Review 64, no. 3(July-August 2012):24-59.
15. C. Wright Mills, "Psychologyand Sodal Science", Monthly Review 10, no. 6(October 1958):204-9. Mills later designated himself as a "plain Marxist", working in Marx's own tradition, and thus associated himself with a broad group of independent socialist thinkers including: "Isaac Deutscher... Joan Robinson... William Morris, Antonio Gramsci, Rosa Luxemburg, G. D. H. Cole, Georg Lukács, Christopher Caudwell, Jean-Paul Sartre, the later John Strachey, Georges Sorel, Edward Thompsons, Lezio Kolokowski, William A. Williams, hul Sweezy, and Erich Fromm'
16. C. Wright Mills, The Manists (New York: Dell, 1962), 98.
17. On Miliband's relation to Mills see Michael Newman, Ralph Miliband and àe Politics of the New Left (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2002), 65-68.
18. E. P Thompson, "last Dispatches from the Border Country: Raymond Williams, 1921-1988", The Nation, March 5, 1988, 310.
19. Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), x;
20. Ralph Miliband, Parliamentary Socialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1964; original UK edition 1961).
21. Raymond Williams' famous essay "Culture is Ordinary" ppeared in Norman MacKenzie, ed.. Conviction (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1958), 74-92.
22. E. P Thompson, "The Segregation of Dissent", in Thompson, Writing by Candlelight [Mon. Merlin Press, 1980), 8.
23. On Baran as the political economist of the Frankfurt School, see M. C. Howard and J. E. King, A History of Mancian Economics, vol. II (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 114-15. Pollock himself, of course, was the main economist associated with the school, but Baran's woric was to far eclipse him. Sweezy was less directly influenced by the FranHurt School, but he had eariy on taken on many of the propositions on history and dialectics of Georg LukJcsandKariKorsch.
24. In focusing on culture as a general way of viewing literary, artistic, and intellectual work Baran and Sweezy were, in Williams's terms, using the concept in "one of its predominant twentieth-century senses' and the one most related to Questions of power. They differentiated This from more capacious anthropological uses of the term to refer to a definite way of life. See Raymond Williams, What I Came to Say (London: Hutchinson Radius, 1989), 199.
25. Paul A. Baran (writing under the pseudonym Historicus), "Better Smaller But Better", Monthly Review 2, no. 3(July 1950):85-86.
26. The notion of the 'apparatus' as representing the material conditions of art can already be seen in Hegel's philosophy of art where he refers to the "apparatus of its [art's] merely material nature." G. W F. Hegel, Introduction to Hegel's Philosophy of Fine Art (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, and Co., 1886), 72.
27. Rowitha Mueller, Bertolt Brecht and the Theory of the Media (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 15-16;
28. Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre (New Yoric: Hill and Wang, 1964), 34. (Note: the word culture in round brackets follows the Mueller quote, despite the fact that current conventions would have required It being placed in square brackets, as it is not to be found in Brecht's statement) According to Mueller, "the term apparatus' in Brecht is "a bmad category that includes "every aspect of the means of cultural production, from the actual technological equipment to promotion agencies, as well as the class that is in possession of the means of production"
29. Mueller, Berto/(8rec/it, 15.
30. Brecht Brecht on Theatre, 34-35.
31. Brecht Brecht on Theatre, 23, 48.
32. Paul A. Baran, The Longer View (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1969), 32;
33. Mueller, Bertolt Brecht and the Theory of the Media, 24;
34. Astrid Oesmann, Staging History Brecht's Social Concepts of Ideology (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005), 107.
35. Walter Benjamin, Understanding Brecftt (London: New Left Books, 1971), 87, 102. It should be noted that Benjamin's key essays on Brecht including "The Artist as Producer", were not published until 1966 and were not available to Baran when he drafted the chapter on culture for Monopoly Capital, though he would have been familiar enough with these ideas through his knowledge of Brecht's worii and the Frankfurt School discussions ofthe early 1930s.
36. Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, 47-52.
37. Erich Fromm, The Crisis of Psychoana/ys/s (Greenwich, CT: Fawcett Publications, 1970), 158-60;
38. Axel Honneth, The Oitique of Power (Cambridge, MA. MIT Press, 1991), 23-26;
39. Eike Gebhardt "Introduction to a Critique of Methodology", In Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt eds., The Essential Frankfurt School Reader (New York: Urizen Books, 1978), 387-88. The concept of "cultural apparatus" was not specifically defined in Fromm's essay, but he was later to use the category mainly in the Brechtian sense.
40. See Erich Fromm, The Sane Society (New Yoric: Rinehart and Co., 1955), 163. It is noteworthy that Baran and Sweezy thought Fromm's eariy work (no doubt including his 1932 essay) was so important that they considered translating ft for Monthly Review Press ("Notes on Planned Translations from the German", Monthly Review Press, no date, circa 1957, Baran Papers, Monthly Review Foundation).
41. Max Horkheimer, "Authority and the Family", in Horkheimer, Critical Theory: Selected Essap (New Yoric: Continuum, 2002), 59-60, 67-68.
42. Herbert Marcuse, "33 Theses", in Marcuse, Collected Papers, vol. 1 (London-Routledge, 1998), 221. On Marcuse's use of the concept of cultural apparatus, see also
43. Herbert Marcuse, Ems and Civilization (New Yortc: Vintage Books, 1955). Eartierin his 1941 article on 'Some Social Implications of Modem Technology", Marcuse had presented what he called "the technical apparatus of industry, transportation, and communication" as the crucial, if partial, mediating factot of modem mass alienation. He stated that "the term 'apparatus' denotes the institutions, devices and organizations of industry in their prevailing social setting." There was, he said, "no personal escape from the apparatus." Yet a social escape was perhaps conceivable, requiring a struggle over the cultural apparatus in particular.
44. Herbert Marcuse, "Some Social Implications of Modem Technology; In Arato and Gebhatdt, eds., The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, 138, 143, 180.
45. Honneth, The Critique of Power, 23-26.
46. Honneth, The Critiqueof Power, 18.
47. Erich Ffomm, The Revision of Psychoana/ysis (Boulder: Westview Press, 1992), 56.
48. Fromm, The Sane Society, 163;
49. Paul A. Baran to Paul M. Sweezy, November 28, 1956 (Baran Papers, Monthly Review Foundation).
50. Stanley Aronowitz, Taking It Big: C. Wright Mills and the Making of Politial lnteilectuals (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 241-42.
51. C. Wright Mills, The Politics of Tnith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 204, 263.
52. Mills, The Politics of Truth, 217-18, 221.
53. Mills, The Political of Truth, 213.
54. Thompson quoted In Daniel Geary, Radical Ambition. C Wright Mills, the Left. and American Social Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, y009), 196.
55. E. P Thompson, "The New Left", The New Reasoner, no. 9 (Summer 1959), 1-17, http://man/ists.org. Thompson's submission to the Pilkington Committee was listed in the report as connected to the publication New University and as having dealt with "Minority Interests and broadcasting", presumably referring to the Issue of political minorities. Such issues were taken up in the Pilkington Report in sections on "Party Political Broadcasting" and "The News." Thompson's 1961 piece The Segregation of Dissent, 'written tor New University and addressing "minority causes" and "minority journals" fits this description. The New Left Review Ltd. also submitted a memorandum to the Pilkington Committee (published In New Left Review prior to the release of the Pilkington Report).
56. Thompson apparently saw the New Left Review Ltd's submission as overly culturallst and reformist, focusing on issues of popular culture more than media control and making too many concessions with respect to the latter. United Kingdom, Report of the Committee on Broadcasting, 1960 (London: HMSO, 1962), 92-101, 320, 327;
57. "Which frame of Mind? TV and Broadcasting: Evidence to the Pilkington Committee", New Left Review no. 7(1961):3048;
58. Thompson, Writing by Candlelight, 1-10;
59. Michael Kenny, The First New Left (London: Lawrence and Wishart 1995): 103-8.
60. Raymond Williams, Communications, third edition (London: Penguin, 1976), 180-89.
61. Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (London: Chatto and Windus, 1961), 338-39.
62. E. P. Thompson, "The Long Revolution-ll", New Left Review, 1/10, July-August 1961, 34-39.
63. E. P.' Thomfson, The Making of the English Workirig Class (New York: Vintage, 1963). For Thompson the English woricing class of the nineteenth century developed a "resistance movement" to the acquisitive society that was not just backward looking but tmly radical In its conception, and though it ultimately lost out in the struggle, partly through its Inability to gain control of the means of production, induding the means of intellectual production, and thus of the wellsprings of social and cultural existence. It nonetheless remained a "heroic culture"
64. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Oass, 832.
65. Baran and Sweez's use of the term "cultural Industry" in the introduction to their piece no iloubt reflected the influence of Frankfurt School cultural theon'st Theodor Adorno. See T. W. Adomo, "Television and the Patterns of Mass Culture", in Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White, eds., Mass Culture (Glencoe, IL The Free Press, 1960), 484. This essay by Adorno is cited in Baran and Sweez's chapter. Baran, a close reader of Horicheimer and Adomo, as indicated in his correspondence with Marcuse, was also undoubtedly familiar with the chapter in The Dialectic of Enlightenment on The Culture Industry Enlightenment as Mass Deception.'
66. See, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adomo, The Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: Continuum, 1972), 120-67.
67. Huberman testimony in Leo Huberman and Paul M. Sweezy, "A Challenge to the Book Burners", Monthly Review A, no. 4(August 1953):161.
68. On the active struggles over the cultural apparatus in the 1930s, including In the realm of publication, and how this faded In the 1950s and after, see Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (London: Verso, 1997).
69. Mickey Spillane, The Mike Hammer Collection, vol. 2 (New York: New American Library, 2001), 132;
70. Roland Végs, The Naked Communist: Cold War Modernism and the Politics of Popular Culture (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 160-69;
71. Christopher La Farge, "Mickey Spillane and His Bloody Hammer", in Rosenberg and White, eds., Mass Culture, 176-85;
72. Frances Stoner Saunders, The Cultural Cold War (New York: New Press, 1999);
73. and Bryan Palmer, Cultures of Darkness (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000), 373-74.
74. Eric Hobsbawm, Fractured Times: Culture and Society in the Twentieth Century (London: Little, Brown, 2013), 262-63. Baran and Hobsbawm, who were good friends, had coauthored a critique of Walt Rostow's Stages of Economic Growth.
75. See Baran, The Longer View, 52-67.
76. Leo Huberman and Paul M. Sweezy, "Behind the FCC Scandal", Monthly Review 9, no. 12(Aprll 3y1958):401-11.
77. Leo Huberman and Paul M. Sweezy, "The TV Scandals", Monthly Review 11, no 8(December 1959):280
78. Huberman and Sweezy, "The TV Scandals", 281.
79. Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, 48-49. The influence of Brecht on Baran's thought was particularly evident as he was wont to quote him from memory. Paul A. Baran to Paul M. Sweezy, Febniary 20, 1962 (Baran Papers, Monthly Review Foundation). Nick Baran dimly recalls hearing Brecht's Dre'igrosdien Oper (Threepenny Opera) on his father's record player when he was a child. Nicholas Baran to John Bellamy Foster, April 24, 2013. It is not surprising then that the entire approach to tne cultural apparatus in the Baran and Sweezy chapter on culture can be seen (particulariy In the discussion of book publishing) as having a Brechtian emphasis, focusing on the relation of the artist to the apparatus and seeing the latter as an object of stnjggle.
80. United Kingdom, Report of the Committee on Broadcasting (Pilkington Report);
81. Jeffrey Milland, "The Pilkington Report: The Triumph of Paternalism?" in Michael Bailey, éd., Namting Media Histo/y (London: Routledge, 2009), 95-107.
82. Franz Kafka, The Tria/ (New York: Modern Library, 1964), 276. Mention of Kafka appears in Baran's correspondence.
83. See, for example, the excerpt from Paul Baran to Paul M. Sweezy, July 4, 1963 in Paul M. Sweezy and Leo Huberman, eds., Paul Alexander Baran (1910-1964): A Collective ft) rt/3;t (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1965), 61. In 1938 Benjamin wrote on
84. Brecht and Kafka: The decisive thesis of all of these plays [by Brecht] emerges clearly for the reader.... II can be summed up by a sentence from Kafka's prophetic novel The Trial: The lie is made into a universal system." Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 332.
85. In "If labour Wins", Miliband explained in Monthly Review 15, no. 6(October 1963):328 that no "deep structural changes' would result.
86. Ralph Miliband, "Review of C. Wright Mills, Power, People and Polities" British Journal of Sociology 5, no. 1(1964):79.
87. Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), xvii.
88. Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 66-71, 257.
89. These pessimistic conclusions were strongly criticized in Fromm's unpublished critique of Marcuse. See Fromm, The Revision of Psychoanalysis, 125-29.
90. Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 71. Marcuse drew on Baran and Sweez/s analysis of monopoly capitalism in his later work. See, for example
91. Herbert Marcuse, Counter-Revolution and Revoft (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972), 5.
92. Paul A. Baran to Paul M. Sweezy, October 10, 1963. On Marcuse's view of Baran see Herbert Marcuse, "Tribute to Baran", in Sweezy and Huberman, eds., Paul A Baran (1910-1964): A Collective Portrait, (New Yortc Monthly Review Press, 1964), 114-15.
93. Raymond Williams, "Class and Voting in Britain", Monthly Review 11, no. 9(January 1960):333.
94. Paul M. Sweezy, "Paul Alexander Baran: A Personal Memoir", in Sweezy and Huberman, eds., Paul A Baran, 48.
95. Baran and Sweezy, Monopoly Capital, 339, 363.
96. Baran and Sweezy, Monopoly Capital, 366.
97. F. O. Matthiessen, "Mareism and literature", Monthly Review 4, no. 11(March 1953):398-400.
98. Leo Mara, "Notes on the Culture of the New Capitalism", Monthly Review 11, no. 3(July-August 1959):111-16;
99. Huberman and Sweezy, "The TV Scandals." Monthly Review seemed particulariy lacking in the critique of the news media. It is true that there were occasional forays into this area. In May 1964 the magazine published a piece entitled "Newspapers? by former journalist Alexander Crosby. Crosby argued that 'the press has been going down hill steadily" for decades as it became increasingly monopolistic and profit-obsessed. The result was a dull and reactionary news, all but worthless for a vibrant democratic society. Newspapers 'have no heart and no energy'
100. See Alexander L Crosby, "Newspapers?" Monthly Review 16, no. 1(May 1964):43-46.
101. Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, 96.
102. Raymond Williams, Britain in the Sixties: Communications (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962);
103. Williams, The Long Revolution, 366.
104. The Labour Party, Report of a Commission of Enquiry into Advertising (London: Labour Party, 1966), 33-40, 201, 204;
105. Raymond Williams, Communications (New Yoric Barnes and Noble, 1967). 155-56. While Baran and Sweezy provided written testimony to the Labour Party's Advertising Commission, Williams was listed as a submitter of oral evidence.
106. Williams, Communications, 156.
107. The Pilkington Report indicated that Williams's memorandum to the Committee on Broadcasting had addressed the following topics: "BBC and ITA; Existing Senrices: Ucense Fee. Third television programme: Regional broadcasting-Local sound broadcasting: ITA to collect advertising revenue direct Broadcasting and Television Council: Educational Broadosting: Consumer Research programs." Report the Commmee on Briadcasting (Pilkington Committeel 329. Since Williams' memorandum to the Pilkington Committee vos completed at the same time that he was woridng on his "Existing AHematives to Communications' (reprinted in this issue) and on his book Communications, his Pilkington Committee memorandum likely reflected similar concems (as suggested 1 the Committee on Broadcasting's listing of its contents here) Williams also refened to the labour Part/s Advertising Commission Report (to which he and Baran and Sweezy had given testimony) in the second edition of his book; however, it was released while the book was in press, so he was only able to add a footnote indicating that 'its majority recommendations amount to a useful shorttemiprogrammeof action and ought, in my view, to be firmly supported.'
108. Williams, Communication, 156.
109. Williams, Communiations, 17-19.
110. Williams, Communiations, 129-30, 166-73.
111. Williams, Communications, 156-58.
112. The long-run response to the Pilkington Report and the decline of the BBC-centered system are described in Nicholas Gamham, Capitalism and Commumca-(London: Sage 1990), 128-32.
113. Jürgen Habermas, The Stmctural Transhrmation ofthe Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA: MITPress, 1989), 249-50.
114. Nicholas Gamham, Structures of Television, revised edition (London: British Film Institute, 1980), 14 First published in 1973.
115. Williams, Communiations, third edition (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), 184.
116. Williams, Communiations, third edition, 186-87.
117. Gamham, Structures of Television, 9.
118. Williams, Communiations, third edition, 183.
119. Roger Burtiach, "A Cuban Spring?" Counterpunch, April 13, 2013, http://counterpunch.org.
120. See John Bellamy Foster and Robert W. McChesney, The Endless Crisis: How Monopoly-Finance Capital Produces Stagnation and Upheaval from the USA to China (New Yoric Monthly Review Press, 2012).
121. Baran, The Longer View, 436.
122. See John Bellamy Foster and Robert W. McChesney, The Endless Crisis: How Monopoby-Fmme Capital Produces Stagnation and Upheaval from the USA to China (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2012).
123. Baran, The Longer View, 436.