The Cultural Apparatus of Monopoly Capital
An Introduction
[Note: Part 2 of this article will be released on Jul. 8th and Part 3 will be released on Jul. 15th.]
John Bellamy Foster is editor of Monthly Review and professor of sociology at the University of Oregon. His latest book, written with Robert W. McChesney, is The Endless Crisis: How Monopoly-Finance Capital Creates Stagnation and Upheaval from the USA to China (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2012). Robert W. McChesney is the Gutgsell Endowed Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois. He is the author most recently of Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet Against Democracy (New York: New Press, 2013).
The past half-century has been dominated by the rise of media to a commanding position in the social life of most people and nations, to the point where it is banal to regard this as the “information age.” The once-dazzling ascension of television in the 1950s and ‘60s now looks like the horse-and-buggy era when one assesses the Internet, smartphones, and the digital revolution. For social theorists of all stripes communication has moved to center stage. And for those on the left, addressing the role of communication in achieving social change and then maintaining popular rule in the face of reactionary backlash is now a primary concern. The Arab Spring and the media battles of the elected left governments in Latin America are exhibits A1 and A2. Any serious left critique or political program must account for and embrace communication or risk being irrelevant and impotent.
To address these emerging concerns, over the past four decades the “political economy of communication” has emerged as a dynamic field of study, and one where considerable radical scholarship has taken place. The field addresses the growing importance of media, advertising, and communication in advanced capitalist societies, examining how the capitalist structure of communication industries shapes their output, as well as the role of media and culture in maintaining the social order. In particular, the field explores the way media “depoliticizes” people, and thereby entrenches the privileges of those at the top. It highlights the importance of government policies in creating the communication system, and the nature of the policymaking process in capitalist societies. In North America the decisive founders of this area of research were Dallas Smythe and Herbert Schiller. In Europe a generation of scholars coming out of the 1960s launched the field, and there the work was more closely attached to a re-reading of Marx. Perhaps the most visible manifestation of the research in the United States has been the stellar critique of journalism produced over the years by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky. Countless left activists are versed in the material today, a testament to the field’s value and importance.
To no small extent, political economists of communication, including one of us, identified themselves as in the tradition of radical political economy, but with a sophisticated appreciation of media that had escaped their predecessors, locked in the past as they were. Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy were occasionally held up by political economists of communication as representing the sort of traditional Marxists who underappreciated the importance of media, communication, and culture. Because of the preeminent role of their 1966 book, Monopoly Capital, Baran and Sweezy tended to receive more criticism than other radical economists who were likewise seen as negligent in this area. Smythe’s seminal 1977 essay, “Communications: Blindspot of Western Marxism,” while acknowledging Monopoly Capital’s strengths and importance, devoted more criticism to it than to any other work. The pattern has persisted in subsequent writings.
We were never especially impressed by this criticism. To us, Monopoly Capital, and the broader political economy of Baran and Sweezy, far from ignoring communication, provided key elements for a serious study of the subject. Its emphasis upon the importance of giant corporations operating in oligopolistic markets provided a very useful way to understand media markets. Specifically, Baran and Sweezy’s take on the “sales effort” and the role of advertising in monopoly capitalism was and is the necessary starting point for any treatment of the subject. Few other economists came close to them in making advertising a central part of their political economy of capitalism. In doing so, they made the media and communication industries central components of modern capitalism.
Along these lines, one of our favorite pieces by Baran and Sweezy was their 1962 written testimony to the British Labour Party’s Advertising Commission, headed by Lord John Reith, the iconic former director general of the BBC. The Advertising Commission was established as part of the Labour Party’s reconsideration of the use of commercial advertising on British radio and television. Later published in Science and Society as “Theses on Advertising,” and largely unknown to this day, Baran and Sweezy’s testimony took the political-economic arguments concerning the role of advertising in contemporary capitalism, that were later developed in Monopoly Capital, and applied them foursquare to understanding media. The analysis of the deleterious effects of advertising on media operations and content, as well as society as a whole, is powerful and ages well. The piece also suggests that Baran and Sweezy, far from being determinists who thought any struggle for reform was a waste of time unless or until capitalism was overthrown, had a keen sense of the importance of media policy fights in the here and now. The Advertising Commission Report was finally published in 1966, and reflected the views of Baran and Sweezy with respect to the key roles played by oligopolistic markets, the decline of price competition, and the role of “the monopoly power of established firms” in the rise of modern mass media advertising.
In addition, Baran and Sweezy had sensitivity to the importance of technology and its capacity for changing the nature of capitalism and the nature of society that was mostly unrivalled among economists, left, right, and center. Their work placed emphasis on examining those “revolutionary” technologies, like the steam engine, electricity, and the automobile, which provided the basis for capitalist expansion for generations and turned the world upside down in the process. In 1957 Sweezy characterized the United States as being in the midst of a sweeping “scientific-industrial revolution,” due to the confluence of the corporate expansion into directing research and the rise of permanent militarism in the 1940s. In a careful review of economic history, contemporary scientific and technological developments, and with a look toward the horizon, Sweezy put the invention of the computer and the emerging communication revolution at the center of a technological revolution that would be every bit as profound as that wrought by the steam engine. To those who found this hypothetical, if not preposterous, Sweezy responded: “Come back in another thirty years. The transformation of society implicit in the new technologies will then be in full swing and you will be able to see signs of it on every hand.”
Yet, to read Monopoly Capital one was left, somewhat paradoxically, with little sense that communication per se was of much interest to its authors.
This changed in 2011 when we discovered a missing chapter written for Monopoly Capital on culture, communications, and mental health, “The Quality of Monopoly Capitalist Society II.” This chapter was originally drafted by Baran and was later edited and revised by Sweezy following the death of his coauthor. It had been intended as the penultimate chapter of Monopoly Capital. Baran tragically died of a heart attack in March 1964 with a planned redrafting of this chapter undone. Sweezy was therefore left with the task of editing and completing the chapter, to which Baran had meant to add more material related to the mental health section, which was only loosely related to the culture section. Sweezy worked extensively on the chapter in November 1964 and perhaps later, editing the manuscript, cutting out considerable material from the original draft, and adding some new material related to communications. He gave this later version the title “The Quality of Monopoly Capitalist Society: Culture and Mental Health.” In the end, however, he elected to leave it out of the book, recognizing that there were issues that the two of them had not sufficiently worked out together.
But when we read this missing chapter, we immediately saw that the portion on culture was based on serious research and important theoretical insights. It also demonstrated a commitment to a “political economy of communication” before the field had even crystallized and far beyond what anyone, including ourselves, had imagined possible. It also provided a quite different perspective on Baran and Sweezy’s goals for Monopoly Capital. Focusing on monopoly capital’s creation of a mass society culture, it was in some respects intended to be the logical culmination of the book’s argument. Its point was to provide an understanding of the political culture of monopoly capitalist society, and the implications for radical social change. Consequently, we have decided to publish the first two-thirds of this missing chapter for the first time in this issue, excluding the last third on mental health and re-entitling it “The Quality of Monopoly Capitalist Society: Culture and Communications.”
Our motivation in publishing this piece is more than antiquarian. As we reviewed the work of Baran and Sweezy on culture and communication, as well as other pieces that appeared in Monthly Review in the late 1950s and ‘60s, it became clear that the missing culture chapter in Monopoly Capital was not an isolated occurrence nor an anomaly, but, rather, part of a broader emerging intellectual school. We discovered that some exceptional related work was done during this period by several major radical and Marxist intellectuals—people like C. Wright Mills, Herbert Marcuse, E.P. Thompson, Ralph Miliband, Eric Hobsbawm, and Raymond Williams, who were in regular communication with each other. All of these thinkers contributed to the critique of the cultural apparatus.
Mills, Miliband, and Williams, in particular, were all close to Sweezy and Monthly Review in this period. A key section of Mills’s The Sociological Imagination (1959) was published first in Monthly Review. Upon Mills’s death, it was Miliband who wrote the memorial piece for Monthly Review. As for Williams, he confided to Thompson in the 1960s that while he belonged to no faction or section, he “felt closest to the American Monthly Review.” Williams’s 1960 article for Monthly Review was incorporated in his book The Long Revolution, while Miliband’s early articles in Monthly Review undoubtedly influenced his Parliamentary Socialism (published in the United States by Monthly Review Press).
On the one hand, the work of this period demonstrates a creative and open-minded Marxism or radical social criticism that embraced the issue of communication and plunged into the problems it posed for social theory. It animated much of what would be most impressive about the New Left that was about to explode into prominence. On the other hand, the examination of communication gravitated from criticism of the deleterious effects of capitalist culture to being concerned with the politics of culture, and how control of communication systems was becoming a necessary political battlefield for the democratic left. As early as 1961, Thompson observed: “The task of creating an alternative means of communication has, from the start, been a major preoccupation of the New Left.” In this sense these works anticipated many of the issues that concern the left today and the approach offers a clarity and insight that has considerable value for activists worldwide.
For that reason we decided it best not only to publish the missing chapter on culture from Monopoly Capital, but also to reprint a handful of related works on culture and communication from this period, by authors who were working along similar lines. In this introduction we will provide context for the times and the issues, as well as an explanation for the pieces we have elected to include. As we will suggest at the end of this introduction these works can be seen as providing some of the crucial foundations for a political economy of the media, helping us to construct the critical responses we need today in the age of the Internet, social media, and the ongoing attempts in Latin America and elsewhere to repossess the cultural apparatus of society.
Brecht, the Frankfurt School, and the Concept of Cultural Apparatus
In retrospect, the basis of Baran’s, if not Sweezy’s, concern for and awareness of culture and communication issues is obvious. Baran worked as a researcher under Friedrich Pollock, the associate director of the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, before fleeing Germany in 1933, following Hitler’s accession to power. His experiences and associations in Frankfurt were to exert a strong influence on his writing; so much so that he is sometimes characterized as the foremost political economist associated with the Frankfurt School. During the 1950s and early ‘60s, when he was a professor of economics at Stanford, Baran met with and corresponded with other figures whom he had known at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt in pre-Hitlerian Germany, such as his close friends Herbert Marcuse and Leo Lowenthal, and kept up with the writings of Erich Fromm, Max Horkheimer, and Theodor Adorno.
Central to the Frankfurt School’s concerns was the relationship of mass culture to politics and social change. Baran read widely and carefully in this area, and it was his passion for the subject that likely was the impetus for the prospective chapter in Monopoly Capital. He approached culture and communication as encompassing art, literature, entertainment, education, media, and the role of intellectuals. His main concern was the undermining of affirmative culture, as a necessary form of human development, due to the relentless process of commodification promoted by monopoly capital. As he stated in 1950:
We have to understand the ideologically overpowering impact of bourgeois, fetishistic consciousness on the broad masses of the working population…. The heart-breaking emptiness and cynicism of the commercial, competitive, capitalist culture. The systematic cultivation of devastatingly neurotic reactions to most social phenomena (through the movies, the “funnies,” etc.). The effective destruction in schools, churches, press, everywhere, of everything that smacks of solidarity in the consciousness of the man in the street. And finally, the utterly paralyzing feeling of solitude which must overcome any one who does not want to conform, the feeling that there is no movement, no camp, no group to which one can turn.
In Baran’s view, commodified culture comes to play a preeminent role under monopoly capitalism. The overarching critique is of the massive and growing gap between the actual quality of culture in the United States and what the society is capable of producing. This gap is both cause and effect of the absurdity of monopoly capitalism and evidence of its increasing destructiveness. It is a political-economic critique because it assesses the cause of the gap as being the capitalist nature of society and, more specifically, the capitalist nature of the “cultural apparatus.” Baran and Sweezy took seriously the close examination of the structures of media and communication industries.
It was the concept of the cultural apparatus, derived from Bertolt Brecht, Fromm, Horkheimer, Marcuse, and Mills, that formed the central organizing principle in Baran’s drafting of the discussion of culture and communications in Monopoly Capital. The earliest outlines for “The Quality of Monopoly Capitalist Society II” chapter had it covering the realms of the “mass media” and “mental health.” Baran was to transform this, however, into a treatment of specific media, particularly book publishing and broadcasting, as manifestations of what he and Sweezy called the development of “the cultural apparatus of monopoly capitalism.” Indeed, their analysis in the missing chapter printed below begins and ends with the concept of the cultural apparatus.
To understand the significance of this it is important to know something of the history of this crucial Marxian concept. The notion of the cultural apparatus owed its centrality in Marxian theory primarily to the work of Brecht beginning in 1932 (see Eleanor Hakim’s article in this issue). Brecht saw what he referred to as the cultural “apparatus” or means of production and of technical control of cultural processes as applying to every realm of cultural production, such as the theatre, opera, radio, book publishing, and film. The crucial problem of the artist, who did not control the cultural apparatus in capitalist society, was then to find ways to gain control or to subvert the apparatus in order to promote critical, dialectical, and revolutionary ends. However, Brecht was under no illusions and in his view the dominant role of the cultural apparatus in bourgeois society was to reinforce existing power relations. As Rowitha Mueller has stated: “Thus the terminology itself points up the connection between culture and politics.” In Brecht’s view, the cultural apparatus functions, among other things, to stabilize the existing social relations both politically and economically. He “saw this in terms of a selection process: ‘Society absorbs via the (cultural) apparatus whatever it needs in order to reproduce itself.’”
In Brecht’s view artists and intellectuals are not masters of the cultural apparatus, but rather their work is completely subordinated to it and capitalist objectives, and thus placed “out of their control.” “The intellectuals…are completely dependent on the apparatus, both socially and economically; it is the only channel for the realization of their work. The output of writers, composers and critics comes more and more to resemble raw material. The finished article is produced by the apparatus.” The capitalist order got in “the habit of judging works of art by their suitability for the apparatus without ever judging the apparatus by its suitability for the work.” The result naturally was that “[cultural] work amounts to so much merchandise, and is governed by the normal laws of merchandise trade. Art is merchandise, only to be manufactured by the means of production (apparati).”
Brecht concretely explored various forms of the cultural apparatus—theatre, radio, film—with the idea of carrying out a kind of guerrilla war that would end up appropriating them for purposes of revolutionary change. He believed that ultimately “the socialization of these means of [cultural] production” was “vital for art.” The goal then was to develop strategic approaches to asserting control over the various apparati, which were currently “wholly capitalist.” This required empirical research and a deep understanding of the various ways in which the artist and intellectual could employ leverage. Brecht’s drama was explicitly designed to subvert the apparatus of the theatre in this way. As he wrote: “When I read Marx’s Capital I understood my plays.”
The artist and the intellectual in this perspective had a crucial role to play in the struggle over the cultural apparatus that was so vital to society. In Brecht’s plays this took the form, to use a phrase of Baran’s, of “the confrontation of reality with reason,” through various dialectical devices. Brecht employed the concept of “inploitation” (a kind of reverse or internalized exploitation) to describe the complex, contradictory role of the consumer of the products of the cultural apparatus, who was simultaneously both a victim and a kind of complicit exploiter in the context of the struggle of the cultural producer or artist with the owners. The role of the artist and intellectual as revolutionary was to reestablish the relationship between the consumer and producer of cultural work by undermining the estrangement from human needs and capacities enforced by the bourgeois society.
As Walter Benjamin, who was enormously influenced by Brecht, argued, the question of “the author as producer” was not so much a question of the “position [of the artist’s work] vis à vis” the various forms of the cultural apparatus, as “what is its position within them?” The fundamental problem in cultural change then became “adapting the apparatus to the ends of the proletarian revolution.”
Brecht argued that the struggle over the cultural apparatus was not confined to those forms such as film and broadcasting that were new, but extended to the entirety of communication forms, all of which were being increasingly mechanized, commodified, and transformed. This included traditional forms such as printed books and the theatre. “The changes wrought by time leave nothing untouched, but always embrace the whole.” A crucial aspect of this was “the mechanization of literary production,” which could not “be thrown into reverse.” The goal then has to be to refunctionalize or reconstruct the existing cultural apparatus to prevent these increasingly complex media from being removed further and further from the development of human needs and capacity and “the new possibilities of communication.”
The concept of the cultural apparatus played a formative role in the work of the Frankfurt School. As early as 1932 it occupied a central place in Fromm’s article, “The Method and Function of an Analytic Social Psychology”—published in the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung and seen as the foundational work integrating historical materialism and psychoanalysis. As Axel Honneth explained the importance of this piece: “Within the intellectual circle of the Institute for Social Research, Fromm was entrusted with the task of working out a psychology that could be linked with economics without any fissure.”
Fromm wrote that “the creation of the [governing] norms” in society was “not left to chance,” but rather that “one whole basic part of the cultural apparatus serves to form the socially required attitude in a systematic and methodical way.” The “cultural apparatus” was depicted as driving, in the language of psychoanalysis, the “libidinal structure of society”—or what Fromm later called “social character”—channeling it so that it was no longer a threat to the status quo. With respect to the working class, the cultural apparatus played a key role in forming what Fromm termed the social cement meant to counter the effects of alienation.
Writing in a similar vein in 1936 in Authority and the Family, Horkheimer discussed how revolutionary periods remove some of these cultural controls depriving them of power, while in periods of restoration and reaction an “outmoded cultural apparatus as well the psychic makeup of men and the body of interconnected institutions acquire new power. Then there is a need to investigate the culture thoroughly.” As a structure of power the cultural apparatus seeks to bond the population to the status quo by means of the promotion of particular ideas and ways of life, which are internalized within the psyche. In Horkheimer’s words:
One function of the entire cultural apparatus at any given period has been to internalize in men of subordinate position the idea of a necessary domination of some men over others, as determined by the course of history down to the present time. As a result and as a continually renewed condition of this cultural apparatus, the belief in authority is one of the driving forces, sometimes, productive, sometimes obstructive, of human history.
But it was in Marcuse’s “33 Theses” (written in 1947 and found in draft form in Horkheimer’s archives, appearing only posthumously in Marcuse’s Collected Works) that the issue of “the cultural apparatus of monopoly capitalism” was first raised. There Marcuse wrote, in thesis 15:
The phenomenon of cultural identification demands that the problem of “cultural cement” (Kitt) be discussed upon a broader basis. One of the most important factors involved here is the leveling of the former avantgarde-oppositional forces with the cultural apparatus of monopoly capitalism (the transformation and application of psychoanalysis, modern art, sexuality, etc. in the work and entertainment process). First and foremost the effect of “Kitt” within the working class should be investigated: “scientific management,” rationalization, the interest of the worker in increased productivity (and with it, in the intensification of exploitation), strengthening of nationalistic sentiments.
The concept of cultural cement, as articulated by Marcuse here, followed Fromm and Horkheimer. For Horkheimer it was this cement that was at all times the crucial object of analysis, since it “artificially held together the parts tending towards independence.” The intent of Marcuse’s fifteenth thesis was to underscore the necessity of empirically researching how this cementing of workers to the dominant order was actually accomplished (in contradictory fashion) by the cultural apparatus of monopoly capitalist society.
This reflected the central problem governing the research program of the Frankfurt School. As Honneth has put it,
A major portion of the theoretical construction and social research of the Institute during the 1930s was an attempt to provide an empirical answer to the problem expressed in this tension [between exploitative socioeconomic conditions and cultural stability]. Its guiding motif is formed by the question “What psychic mechanisms have come about that enable the tension between the social classes to remain latent, even though it borders on conflict as a result of the economic situation?” The program of an interdisciplinary social science, outlined by Horkheimer at the beginning of the 1930s, is tailored to the investigation of this phenomenon.
Fromm was later to describe the “cultural apparatus” as a “filter” conditioning what entered society’s “social unconscious.” As he wrote in The Sane Society in 1955 (a book that strongly impressed Baran): “Eventually, he [the alienated industrial worker] is under the influence of our whole cultural apparatus, the advertisements, the movies, television, newspapers, just as everybody else, and can hardly escape being driven into conformity, although perhaps more slowly than other sectors of the population.”
…[to be continued]
Part 2 of this article will be released on Jul. 8th and Part 3 will be released on Jul. 15th.
Notes
- ↩ See Robert W. McChesney, Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism is Turning the Internet Against Democracy (New York: New Press, 2013).
- ↩ For a longer discussion of the origins and development of the political economy of communication, see Robert W. McChesney, Communication Revolution: Critical Junctures and the Future of Media (New York: New Press, 2007).
- ↩ The critique tended to be more that Monthly Review 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.
- ↩ Dallas Smythe, “Communications: Blindspot of Western Marxism,” Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory 1, no. 3 (Fall 1977): 1–27.
- ↩ See Dan Schiller, How to Think About Information (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), chapter 1.
- ↩ See Robert W. McChesney, “What Ever Happened to Cultural Studies?” in Catherine A. Warren and Mary Douglas Vavrus, eds., American Cultural Studies (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 76–92.
- ↩ Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy, Monopoly Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1966), 112–41. Many of the implications of Baran and Sweezy’s analysis of the sales effort with respect to the development of modern marketing were developed in Michael Dawson, The Consumer Trap (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005).
- ↩ 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.
- ↩ The Labour Party, Report of a Commission 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 Sweezy’s, was heavily quoted in the final report.
- ↩ Paul M. Sweezy (writing anonymously, no author listed), The Scientific-Industrial 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 Braverman made use of Sweezy’s argument on the scientific-industrial revolution in this pamphlet to construct much of his own argument on the scientific-technological revolution. See Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1999), 115.
- ↩ See John Bellamy Foster, “A Missing Chapter of Monopoly Capital: Introduction to Baran and Sweezy’s ‘Some Theoretical Complications,’” Monthly Review 64, no. 3 (July–August 2012): 3–17. The original draft of the culture and mental health (or “Quality of Monopoly Capitalist Society II”) chapter along with related papers was found in a file in the Sweezy papers at Harvard University. The final draft with Sweezy’s edits were located in the Baran Papers (Monthly Review Foundation).
- ↩ 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.
- ↩ As Sweezy wrote in the preface to Monopoly Capital: “Whatever was drafted by one of us [for the book] was criticized at length by the other, and in most cases redrafted and recriticized more than once. Everything now in the book had been through this process before Baran’s death. Apart from putting together the entire manuscript into finished form, the only thing I have done has been to leave out material that would have been two additional chapters. This material was in rough draft at the time of his death, but in each case one or the other of us had raised important questions which still remained to be discussed and resolved. Since neither chapter was essential to the theme of the essay as a whole, the best solution seemed to be to omit them altogether. I reached this conclusion the more easily since even without these chapters the book turned out to be longer than I had expected or we had originally intended.” Paul M. Sweezy, “Preface,” in Baran and Sweezy, Monopoly Capital, ix. From the first Sweezy had been concerned that the “cultural mess,” given that it was left to the end of the manuscript, should not be given short shrift as a result (Paul M. Sweezy to Paul A. Baran, July 23, 1957, Baran Papers, Monthly Review Foundation). Baran had indicated that “if anything” he would “tend to accentuate its importance” (Paul A. Baran to Paul M. Sweezy, July 29, 1957, Baran Papers, Monthly Review Foundation).
- ↩ C. Wright Mills, “Psychology and Social 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, Lezlo Kolokowski, William A. Williams, Paul Sweezy, and Erich Fromm.” C. Wright Mills, The Marxists (New York: Dell, 1962), 98.
- ↩ On Miliband’s relation to Mills see Michael Newman, Ralph Miliband and the Politics of the New Left (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2002), 65–68.
- ↩ E.P. Thompson, “Last Dispatches from the Border Country: Raymond Williams, 1921–1988,” The Nation, March 5, 1988, 310.
- ↩ Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), x; Ralph Miliband, Parliamentary Socialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1964; original UK edition 1961). Raymond Williams’ famous essay “Culture is Ordinary” appeared in Norman MacKenzie, ed., Conviction (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1958), 74–92.
- ↩ E.P. Thompson, “The Segregation of Dissent,” in Thompson, Writing by Candlelight (London: Merlin Press, 1980), 8.
- ↩ On Baran as the political economist of the Frankfurt School, see M. C. Howard and J. E. King, A History of Marxian 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 work was to far eclipse him. Sweezy was less directly influenced by the Frankfurt School, but he had early on taken on many of the propositions on history and dialectics of Georg Lukács and Karl Korsch.
- ↩ Peter Marcuse recalls: “I had only met Baran once, during the war, when my father was with the OSS [Office of Strategic Services]…. I was maybe 12 at the time. Baran had come over to our house to talk to my father, and they stayed up a long time. I asked my father later why Baran had come, and he told me Baran wanted to talk about whether capitalism was ultimately bad for the capitalists as well as the workers, and I gather they agreed it was. My father was working on Eros and Civilization at the time (on the side, not at OSS!), and I assume that was the context. They really respected each other.” Peter Marcuse to John Bellamy Foster, July 4, 2012. Baran referred to Adorno’s work not only in the missing chapter on culture that he drafted for Monthly Review, but also in The Political Economy of Growth. His close attention to Adorno and Horkheimer’s work was shown in his correspondence with Marcuse, e.g., Paul A. Baran to Herbert Marcuse, July 10, 1962 (Baran Papers, Monthly Review Foundation). Fromm is also discussed in Baran’s letters.
- ↩ 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.
- ↩ Paul A. Baran (writing under the pseudonym Historicus), “Better Smaller But Better,” Monthly Review 2, no. 3 (July 1950): 85–86.
- ↩ Early outline of “Monopoly Capital,” circa l957 (Baran Papers, Monthly Review Foundation).
- ↩ 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.
- ↩ Rowitha Mueller, Bertolt Brecht and the Theory of the Media (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 15–16; Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre (New York: 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 broad 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.” Mueller, Bertolt Brecht, 15.
- ↩ Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, 34–35.
- ↩ Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, 23, 48.
- ↩ Paul A. Baran, The Longer View (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1969), 32; Mueller, Bertolt Brecht and the Theory of the Media, 24; Astrid Oesmann, Staging History: Brecht’s Social Concepts of Ideology (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005), 107.
- ↩ Walter Benjamin, Understanding Brecht (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 work and the Frankfurt School discussions of the early 1930s.
- ↩ Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, 47–52.
- ↩ Erich Fromm, The Crisis of Psychoanalysis (Greenwich, CT: Fawcett Publications, 1970), 158–60; Axel Honneth, The Critique of Power (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 23–26; 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. See Erich Fromm, The Sane Society (New York: Rinehart and Co., 1955), 163. It is noteworthy that Baran and Sweezy thought Fromm’s early work (no doubt including his 1932 essay) was so important that they considered translating it for Monthly Review Press (“Notes on Planned Translations from the German,” Monthly Review Press, no date, circa 1957, Baran Papers, Monthly Review Foundation).
- ↩ Max Horkheimer, “Authority and the Family,” in Horkheimer, Critical Theory: Selected Essays (New York: Continuum, 2002), 59–60, 67–68.
- ↩ 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 Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization (New York: Vintage Books, 1955). Earlier in his 1941 article on “Some Social Implications of Modern Technology,” Marcuse had presented what he called “the technical apparatus of industry, transportation, and communication” as the crucial, if partial, mediating factor, of modern 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. Herbert Marcuse, “Some Social Implications of Modern Technology,” in Arato and Gebhardt, eds., The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, 138, 143, 180.
- ↩ Honneth, The Critique of Power, 23–26.
- ↩ Honneth, The Critique of Power, 18.
- ↩ Erich Fromm, The Revision of Psychoanalysis (Boulder: Westview Press, 1992), 56.
- ↩ Fromm, The Sane Society, 163; Paul A. Baran to Paul M. Sweezy, November 28, 1956 (Baran Papers, Monthly Review Foundation).
http://monthlyreview.org/2013/07/01/the-cultural-apparatus-of-monopoly-capital