The sustainability experiment in American democracy is still running due to stare decisis et al. in the property crisis between federalism and unenumerated constitutional states rights that simultaneously transcend borders and reinforce their landed values. Add 19th Century political economy with analysis of exploitation and class inequality; sprinkle with 20th Century institutional analysis of monopoly and globalization and we have, along with political unconsciousness, the "very model of a (post)modern major" political economy, where postmodern is but one way to describe its communication climate. But its textual roots are Marxological, in that we can examine original texts and find useful comments that not only ring true today but might point us into useful analysis for further study. This is not the kind of interpretive analysis which one finds with Biblical scholars that might have implications for worshiping an inerrant ideological fiction, but this is analysis that may direct us to properly contextualized and networked political action. In this example, I introduce the problem of how to consider Marx as a useful tool for the studying the contemporary political economy of communication.
“I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.”
― Groucho Marx
...The railways sprang up first as the couronnement de l'oeuvre in those countries where modern industry was most developed, England, United States, Belgium, France, etc. I call them the "couronnement de l'oeuvre" not only in the sense that they were at last (together with steamships for oceanic intercourse and the telegraphs) the means of communication(emphasis mine) adequate to the modern means of production, but also in so far as they were the basis of immense joint stock companies, forming at the same time a new starting point for all other sorts of joint stock companies, to commence by banking companies. They gave in one word, an impetus never before suspected to the concentration of capital, and also to the accelerated and immensely enlarged cosmopolitan activity of loanable capital, thus embracing the whole world in a network of financial swindling and mutual indebtedness, the capitalist form of "international" brotherhood.
On the other hand, the appearance of the railway system in the leading countries of capitalism allowed, and even forced, states where capitalism was confined to a few summits of society, to suddenly create and enlarge their capitalistic superstructure in dimensions altogether disproportionate to the bulk of the social body, carrying on the great work of production in the traditional modes. There is, therefore, not the least doubt that in those states the railway creation has accelerated the social and political disintegration, as in the more advanced states it hastened the final development and therefore the final change, of capitalistic production. In all states except England, the governments enriched and fostered the railway companies at the expense of the Public Exchequer. In the United States, to their profit, great part of the public land they received as a present, not only the land necessary for the construction of the lines but many miles of land along both sides the lines, covered with forests, etc. They become so the greatest landlords, the small immigrating farmers preferring of course land so situated as to ensure their produce ready means of transport....
Letter from Marx to Nikolai Danielson In St. Petersburg Written: April 10, 1879; Source: Marx and Engels Correspondence; Publisher: International Publishers (1968); First Published: Gestamtausgabe;
So the analysis of such a passage makes the issue of infrastructure as a means of communication in the
nineteenth century sense useful in the present since all infrastructure for energy and transportation is structured not so much by our interstate travel freedom but by all the elements that bind us to capitalized networks. Our movement is constrained by the price of gasoline and soon we will rely on corporate quasi-public electricity to determine our range of movement as well as travel highway right-of-ways that are coordinated by a telecommunication infrastructure and defined by cellular phone range and tower siting. The web may only be the representational product distributed in a
space of flows rather than the labor process created by the interaction of networks and the networked. The circuit is completed by consumption in the transformation of that interaction into a social ontology consisting of cognitive and bodily labor processes exchanged as reflexive critical practices.
Correspondingly, the satellite GPS network also "has accelerated the social and political disintegration, as in the more advanced states it hastened the final development and therefore the final change, of capitalistic production". Location and position in space acquires new value whether in military or civilian activity. For Marx that crisis of disintegration was perhaps delayed by a number of developments none the least of which was the lack of an analysis of monopoly capital. Baran and Sweezy are but one version of that advancement of the Marxian research program.The key message of Marx's analysis for us even with the delay of world wars was that the means of communication was defined by a network which in the present circumstances is the capstone or "be all and end all" of modern capitalism, a couronnement de l'oeuvre. The "reinforcement of territories in a world of supposed freedom of movement" was created by the contradiction of physical borders and transnational network infrastructure. Research by scholars such as David Harvey, David Gregory and Allen Scott point to the spatio-temporal nature of a more postmodern analysis. These relations are made more concrete by the networking of the surveillance state and its projection into battle spaces that bind the terrestrial and the celestial.
This development compels us to look beyond modern capitalist relations as manifest in the increased mediation of human communication by networked technology in wireline or wireless form since both are "situated" on a global empire of landed capital regardless of footprint. The "accelerated and immensely enlarged cosmopolitan activity of loanable capital" defines the relation to the financial debtor networks represented by our credit/debit cards. For the individual bank consumer, our access to banking via our phones represents that networked, "mutual indebtedness" of both the 1% and the 99%. This is the material reality that connects a "social ontology" with finance capital and makes the swipe terminal and the ATM co-conspirators in alienation.
The Twittered revolutions in West Asia and the immediate rebroadcast of cellphone image captures have brought us to an internationalized political position that Marx would have appreciated as an indy journalist of his time. He would blog if he lived today. With his help we may combine the means of communication and the formation for a postmodern major political economy, if only everyone would read the canon of political economic thought.
Tony Lawson might be an exemplar of that new methodological direction:
Heterodox economists like Tony Lawson, Frederic Lee* or Geoffrey Hodgson* are trying to work the ideas of critical realism into economics, especially the dynamic idea of macro-micro interaction.
According to critical realist economists, the central aim of economic theory is to provide explanations in terms of hidden generative structures. This position combines transcendental realism with a critique of mainstream economics. It argues that mainstream economics (i) relies excessively on deductivist methodology, (ii) embraces an uncritical enthusiasm for formalism, and (iii) believes in strong conditional predictions in economics despite repeated failures.
The world that mainstream economists study is the empirical world. But this world is "out of phase" (Lawson) with the underlying ontology of economic regularities. The mainstream view is thus a limited reality because empirical realists presume that the objects of inquiry are solely "empirical regularities"—that is, objects and events at the level of the experienced.
The critical realist views the domain of real causal mechanisms as the appropriate object of economic science, whereas the positivist view is that the reality is exhausted in empirical, i.e. experienced reality. Tony Lawson argues that economics ought to embrace a "social ontology" to include the underlying causes of economic phenomena. (* = epb has pointed out that these might not be self-described critical realists (trust [or not] in Wikipedia))
More model building and ontic glue-sniffing in part II.