Advertising.doc
Advertising trends
1. The overall situation
“The dollar’s abandonment of gold in 1971 could have led to the end of America’s central role in international finance, a rift in the transatlantic alliance and a return to greater domestic policy fragmentation and autonomy. By the end of the decade, however, the US had opted for the anti-inflationary crusade that would restore the dollar’s global prominence and bring western Europeans into line. The 1976 sterling crisis and IMF intervention were a turning point; Maggie Thatcher followed, and eventually so did even François Mitterand and the French Socialists.
What emerged was simultaneously an assault on the power of organized labour in the developed north-an assault from which it has never recovered-and something else whose consequences were foreseen by virtually no one; an extreme deregulation of banks and financial institutions which unleashed their ability to make profits across the world. As manufacturing languished, brute capital became more profitable and salaries in the financial sector took off.
This process of financialization originated in the US but it was driven through by international agencies. In fact, it cannot be understood except as a campaign that helped powerful coalitions to emerge between the leading banks, the US treasury and the IMF and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).Representing a compact between the free-marketeering ideology of Wall Street and the western Europeans’ desire for rules and codes, they spread the new norms-of capital liberalization, deregulation of banks and the credit sector, and internal privatization of state-owned businesses- from one continent to another. A series of debt crises, also symptoms of this new, financialized world, offered the serendipitous means for the IMF to spread the neoliberal gospel.
Under the European Commission president Jacques Delors, a French socialist, Europe signed up. Opting to promote integration through the monetary system was a natural response to the exchange-rate volatility of the 1970’s and 1980’s. But there were two problems. One was that the needlessly rigid rules that were introduced along with the euro removed much of what discretionary power was left to EU member governments once the currency was adopted. The other was that the tiny size of the European Union budget made it impossible to achieve the other plank of Delor’s modernizing vision-a real mechanism for funding social solidarity across the EU. All that was left was money.
Today the consequences of financialization, within and outside Europe, are clear enough. Look at average growth rates during the Trente Glorieuses ( the Glorious Thirties ) and during the past thirty years : the comparison makes sobering reading. Banks and hedge funds may have increased their profitability, but national and continental economic performance have lagged sharply behind. One reason for this is that globalization has made the world more crisis-prone, not less so; nostalgia for the dictator Antonio Salazar in Portugal or communism in Russia reflects how the greater self-sufficiency of the years before 1980 brought greater predictability and stability. And this has also made the world much less equal or fair. The trend towards equalization of wealth and incomes that occurred within European societies between 1945 and 1975 has been stopped, and the curve, without exception in Europe, now points the other way, towards an ever-widening income gap, which is forcing large sections of the population to recalibrate their social expectations for themselves and their children.
In so far as the EU stands for the defence of the single currency, it thus finds itself aligned against those very priorities-stability, solidarity, equality-that helped restore the legitimacy of democracy to the western half of the continent after 1945. The recent divide between creditor north and debtor south makes these problems far more acute, but in fact they existed before the crisis hit. Even then, they lay at the heart of the fundamental political challenge that financialization has produced, the challenge posed by the decoupling of political from economic power. The euro-crisis has made this challenge evident, and more morally troubling.
In these alternatives, what demands explanation is not the emergence of organized protest , but the lack of it Why ,we need to ask, do people find it so hard to imagine alternatives? Taxpayers are bailing out the financial sector. So why haven’t they demanded more regulation, more control of pay, and ultimately a rebalancing of relationships between finance and manufacturing, between global liquidity and nationally rooted communities?
The main reason is the absence of widely believed alternatives. The revolutionary left, whether communist or anarchist, has failed the ballot box, which may not matter to its adherents but signals its lack of political weight. In the few cases where it has succeeded, as in austerity-driven Greece (with Syriza) , its recipes for the crisis are scarcely revolutionary. People may have soured on the globalization dream but politicians continue to regard the financial markets as indispensable in more or less their present form. Domestically, what is striking is the degree to which recovery programmes today rely simply on expanding liquidity through the banking system rather than by means of the kinds of ambitious public works projects that characterized recovery across Europe after 1945. Thus, while the left hand of Whitehall chastens the banks, its right hand begs them to kick-start a new boom.
Internationally, too, the idea that the removal of capital controls which took place in the past 30 years might need to be rolled back-that a sharper distinction might legitimately be drawn (the old distinction, in fact) between productive, long-term investment and short-term, speculative flows-has scarcely begun to be voiced, though there have been faint murmurs of it in recent IMF discussions.
Even if there were persuasive alternatives, would they be heard? Back in the 1820’s, public opinion was a “Divinity”, a novel democratizing and rationalizing impetus that would force the old elite to modernize. In the age of the internet and the blogosphere, who still believes this? Here, as in other senses, Europe is living through the collapse of older certainties. Democracy has been won-but what has that meant? On its own, it guarantees the hegemony of a set of institutions and practices, not any particular policies. After all, the forces that made for social justice emerged not out of democratic institutions per se, but out of deep ideological anxieties and rivalries, rivalries that served to fetter the power of the markets and won wide political support for so doing.
Absent those ideological rivalries, or any new forms of effective collective mobilization, and nothing checks the European social model from continuing to disintegrate. Europe=euro: in the shadow of this equation, all the other older, nobler and more ambitious versions of what Europe might stand for have faded away. An interesting possibility thus follows-might the dissolution of the euro be necessary in order to save something of the European idea? Or would we merely find ourselves with neither? We may yet find out”.
From the article by Mark Mazower “ The Great Reckoning: Why the European ideal is under threat-The certainties that sustained notions of European unity and social solidarity are collapsing. The financial structures that formed the foundations of old Europe have warped and are destroying it.So, where next?” in http://www.newstatesman.com/print/2013/04/great-reckoning...
(1)-Basic reading and viewing:
- John Gray “Why Europe is floundering-Its architects envisioned the EU as a model for the world, but current dogma will achieve the opposite, in http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/oct/17/europe-sinis..., retrieved 12 November 2012.
- Watch Susan George “On neoliberalism”, on You Tube.
-The films Debtocracy ( http://www.debtocracy.gr/index.html) and Catastroica ( http://www.catastroica.com/index.php).
-The gold standard functioned in a similar manner to the euro (read en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_Standard). The gold standard is a guarantee of a fixed exchange rate to the currency of another country using the gold standard.
2.Various problems of the media field.
(2)-Basic reading
-Smythe,Dallas W. “Communications :Blindspot of Western Marxism”, pages 1-21, in the magazine Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory, Gall 1977, Volume1, No 3.
-http://rally.stopwatching.us. Snowden
-Special topics in advertising :Lecture notes written especially for the students of the School of Communication at the USO, Sao Paulo,Brazil, in http://www2.media.uoa.gr/lectures/ad/
- The Greek post-deregulation mass media: A possible foretaste for other countries (pdf) ,in http://www2.media.uoa.gr/lectures/ad/
-Sut Jhally and Bill Livant “”Watching as Working: The Valorization of Audience Consciousness pages 124-143.
-Vincent Mosco “Strange Topography: Globalization at Ground Zero” in compos.org.br/seer/index.php/e-compos/article/view/111/110.
-Ien Ang “Desperately guarding borders : media globalization, “cultural imperialism” and the rise of “Asia”, in compos.org.br/seer/index/php/e-compos/article/view/140/141.
-Concerning the foreign media companies/media conglomerates, see : ketupa.com, mediadb.eu.
3. The commodity , the law of value and the brands.
Marx on the commodity:
“A commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood. Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties” Capital, Volume I , Chapter One. In the 1976 Penguin edition, see page 163.
On the fetishism of commodities:
“..the existence of the things qua commodities, and the value-relation between the products of labour which stamps them as commodities, have absolutely no connection with their physical properties and with the material relations arising therefrom. There it is a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things…This I call the fetishism …of commodities”. Capital, Volume I , Chapter One. In the 1976 Penguin edition, see page 165.
On the law of value : en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_value.
On the law of value and the rate of profit : www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/supp.htm.
On “knowledge capital”:
“Words are not innocent when they “naively” include in the social relations of capital things which, just a few years ago, seemed necessarily to lie outside them. I am thinking of the burgeoning of different “capitals” now present in dominant thinking: “cultural capital”, “intellectual capital”, “educational capital” , “experiential capital”, “social capital”, “natural capital”, ”symbolic capital”, “human capital” and, in particular, “knowledge capital” or “cognitive capital”, this latter forming the basis of “cognitive capitalism” or even of the –quite naturally, capitalist-“knowledge society”, since “(formal) knowledge can be regarded as the new form of capital , through which the creative capacity of modern societies finds expression”.
However, this “new form of capital”-there are others-differs fundamentally from capital in the economic sense. It is not originally acquired or produced in order to become or remain the private property of its possessors. On the contrary, it becomes augmented with additional knowledge by being used and shared. It is not originally accumulated to serve as a means of production, but to satisfy the need to know, the passion for knowledge-in other words, to get to the truth of what is beyond appearance and use. It is not the product of surplus-value taken from the exploitation of labour. It is wealth and a source of wealth even when it gives rise to nothing that can be sold. It cannot grow by circulating in the value-form; on the contrary, it is by disseminating itself as a good accessible to all that it engenders additional knowledge.
In a word, its properties are precisely the opposite of the properties of capital in the economic sense. “Knowledge capital” can function as capital only in the framework of-or, more precisely, within-capitalism when it is distorted by its association with traditional-financial and material –forms of capital. It is not capital in the usual sense and its primary intention is not to serve in the production of surplus-value or even value in the usual sense. It does not signify the coming of a hyper- or pan-capitalism, as its name might suggest but contains, rather, the seeds of a negation and transcendence of capitalism, commodity labour and commodity exchange.
To the confusion between the “new forms of capital” and capital in the sense of political economy is added the confusion between (exchange-)”value” in the economic sense and the ”value” that has its source in knowledge ( and experience, culture, social relations, etc).
“Value will be determined only by humanity’s own continuous innovation and creation”, writes Antonio Negri, and Bernard Paulré argues that “Value is mainly the product of change and innovation”. More fundamentally , Moulier-Boutang writes : “Free activity upstream and downstream from what is considered by political economy ( in all its various schools) as the only activity deserving of remuneration is the main source of value”.
What does this mean? What “value” is being referred to? Exchange-value, monetary and commercial, which is the only value political economy knows (in all its various schools)? The scarcity value of things that are now a source of rent for their inventors? Or the intrinsic value of what is intrinsically desirable and, consequently, not exchangeable as a commodity for other commodities. Isn’t value employed also in the sense of “wealth”, as Marx does, for example, when he speaks of the production of “use-values no longer measured by their exchange-value”, in other words , of values that are no longer those commodities primarily made for sale-and hence can no longer be exchanged as a function of the market but, rather, like art works at a predetermined price that bears no relation to the cost of production.
All these questions are concertinated in this remark by Rullani : “In post-Fordism, knowledge produces value also because it generates meaning. The intrinsic value of what one does […] becomes as important as the money value obtained on the market. For the musician who “sells” music, the result is not measured only in money, but in “the value of work that has a meaning in itself”. Now, there is no relation of proportionality (and even less, of equivalence) between these two “values”.
Money value in no sense reflects aesthetic value, which in no way reflects labour value. “Intrinsic value” lies, by its very essence, outside the economy. The intrinsic values-aesthetic or ethical vital values in Max Scheler’s sense (strength , agility, health, courage)-are neither comparable, exchangeable nor interchangeable. What Maurizio Lazzarato says of the “truth value” of a book in his essay on Gabriel Tarde applies also to them : “It is essentially intangible, inappropriable, unexchangeable, unconsumable and indivisible,” irrespective of the market value of the book as a material commodity. Aesthetic, cognitive or ideal creations are never really “traded” or sold, since “the person who hands them over does not lose them, does not deprive himself by socializing them”, and “trading” in them benefits all parties concerned, who are enriched by their gifts. “Consumption is not destructive, but creative of other knowledge. Consumption and production coincide in the consumption of knowledge or of aesthetic or ideal creations.