Alternancia irregular de lutitas rojas y ocres y areniscas con intercalaciones de calizas

Another crucial aspect taken into account is the role of audiences in relation to corporate media’s commodification of culture. As Smythe (1978: 126) observes, “the way to a Marxist theory of how ideology is produced by monopoly capitalism is to use a historical, materialist,

dialectical method always seeking the reality of class struggle”. Furthermore, Harper (2012) posits that over the last century, the media has been the key platform through which the ideology of the ruling class is disseminated. Thus, to fully comprehend the political economy of the corporate media, attention must be paid to Smythe’s assertions that the product of the media, proficiently supported by advertising, is not the content communicated through a specific medium but rather the audience for the content. In this regard, the form of the commodity produced by the corporate media is “audience labour-power” (Smythe, 1977, 1978, 1981 cited in Nixon, 2012). In the same vein, the audiences are commodified and sold by the media to advertisers. Hence, they “do not choose to sell their labour-power, but they work for advertisers nonetheless” (Nixon, 2012: 450). Essentially, the media industry as part of the

“consciousness industry” is a capitalist industry that derives its profits through the process of people producing their own consciousness (Nixon, 2012; also see Smythe, 1977).

Fundamentally, in this process capital owns both labour-power (audiences) and the means of production (advertisements). It is this hegemony by capitalism over the production of the news content that reproduces dominant capitalist views on ideological charged discourse.

Critical political economy unravels the manner in which capitalist-oriented corporate media commodify the culture produced while controlling the means of production. What is also crucial, as noted by Fuchs and Mosco (2012), is the fact that within the media sphere, capitalist accumulation takes place in both content and infrastructure, thereby forming media capital.

This reflects the pervasive nature of capitalism within the media system, and thus the “use value” of media and its technologies lie “on their capacity to provide information, enable communication, and advance the creation of culture” (Fuchs and Mosco, 2012: 132). Over and above this commodity hypothesis, the ideological hypothesis exposes the dominance of the use value of media by exchange value and its role in legitimisation and reproduction of domination (Fuchs and Mosco, 2012). Essentially, audiences as consumers of media are mainly interested in the use values of media and the associated technologies, while capitalists are largely interested in the exchange value aspects geared towards capital accumulation (Fuchs and Mosco, 2012). Subsequently, the media and its associated technologies take a commodity form and thus possess ideological characteristics by the time they reach consumers. Beyond the commodification aspect, audiences do not have control of the media and are therefore subjected to the capitalist media’s construction of reality (Harper, 2012). Therefore, the media content is designed and shaped to attract those audiences with buying power. The nature of the content is important for advertising and marketing commodities in the circulation process of

commodities, a process where surplus value is transformed into profit (Fuchs and Mosco, 2012). Indeed, the corporate media caters to the needs of advertisers and delivers the correct products for the audience (Curran et al., 1982; Chandler, 2000). Commodification of culture can also be understood in the context of the “Web. 2.0”, where the focus on commodification and selling of “produsers” to advertisers is rife (Ekman, 2012). Therefore, “mainstream news media facilitates and reproduces the exploitation of capital, how the use of new information/communication technology become colonised by capital, and how commodification processes tend to dominate the flow of information in global media and communication systems” (Ekman, 2012: 169).

In order to rescue the audience from being perpetually subjected to the capitalist media’s construction of reality while being sold to advertisers, this research study argues for an alternative to the commodified and privatised corporate media. As a starting point it is important to acknowledge that “the critical political economy of culture and consciousness produced by the Marxist dialectical method makes clear that the fundamental policy issue is control over the means of producing culture and consciousness” (Nixon, 2012: 453). To this end, it is imperative to appreciate how ordinary human activities are turned into activities that generate profit for capitalists. Through this approach, the research study is enabled to fully comprehend that, for example, advertising already exists on top of heavily commodified culture. Within the realm of this approach, the fundamental question is what needs to be done, and a practical response therefore lies on the concept of “decommodification” (Esping-Andersen, 1990; Vail, 2010; Nixon, 2012). For example, Nixon (2012: 453) postulates that

“Policies of decommodification include expanding the availability of public media and simply decreasing the amount of advertising in culture”. Vail argues that

Decommodification would insulate non-market spheres from market encroachments; increase the provision of public goods and expand social protection; promote democratic control over the market by creating economic circuits grounded in a logic predicated on social needs rather than profit; and undermine market hegemony by revealing the market’s true social costs and consequences (Vail, 2010: 310).

In the final analysis, “decommodification constitutes a central feature of an egalitarian agenda”

and thus represents a significant shift from market-driven commodified media to public media (Vail, 2010: 310).

4.4 Towards a conceptual framework – decolonial Marxism and the