The Capitalist Advertising and Marketing Complex and the US Social Order: A Political-Materialist Analysis

Abstract

In this article, we explore the complex interconnections between monopoly power and commercial promotion and explain their role in maintaining the United States (US) social order in the twenty-first century. Our focus is the Capitalist Advertising and Marketing Complex (CAMC), or the range of corporate and state institutions that support and empower advertising and marketing in politics, culture, and the economy. Synthesizing and advancing early Frankfurt School Critical Theory and the Monopoly Capital School of political economy, we examine how the CAMC has degraded the Internet communications, the news media, and the pharmaceutical industry, in the process emerging as a formidable support mechanism for neoliberal capitalism. Our political-materialist approach illustrates how critical perspectives on political economy and cultural production at the intellectual forefront when the Caucus for a New Political Science (CNPS) was founded can motivate contemporary work that supports the “struggle for a better world” central to the Caucus’ mission.

Notes

¹ Michelle Hackman, “Industry Group PhRMA Tries to Counter Drug-Pricing Outcry,” The Wall Street Journal (January 23, 2017). For the lead ad, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VA--ZEJLoH8&feature = youtu.be. Set against a reading of Welsh poet Dylan Thomas’s “Do not go gentle into that good night,” the ad splices images of assiduous biomedical researchers and hopeful disease sufferers with high-tech graphics of drug molecules attacking viruses. It concludes by reminding us that: “When an indomitable will to cure pushes researchers to find the unfindable and cure the incurable, today’s breakthroughs become tomorrow’s medicines.”

² Victor Pickard, “Media and Politics in the Age of Trump,” Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective 10:2 (November, 2016), available online at: https://origins.osu.edu/article/media-and-politics-age-trump.

³ C.B. MacPherson, “The Maximization of Democracy” in Democratic Theory: Essays in Retrieval (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1973), pp. 3–23.

⁴ Inger Stole, Advertising on Trial: Consumer Activism and Corporate Public Relations in the 1930s (Urbana and Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2006); Gary Cross, “Origins of Modern Consumption: Advertising, New Goods, and a New Generation, 1890–1930,” in Matthew P. McAllister and Emily West (eds), The Routledge Companion to Advertising and Promotional Culture (London, UK: Routledge, 2013), pp. 11–23.

⁵ The Advertisers Protection Society formed in England in 1900. Raymond Williams, “Advertising: The Magic System,” in Jim McGuigan (ed), Raymond Williams on Culture and Society: Essential Writings (London, UK: Sage, 2014), p. 67. In the United States, the Association of National Advertisers was founded in 1910. “About the ANA,” available online at: https://www.ana.net/about. The American Association of Advertising Agencies was formed in 1917. “American Association of Advertising Agencies,” Advertising Age (15 September 2003), available online: https://adage.com/article/adage-encyclopedia/american-association-advertising-agencies/98313/. Stole, Advertising on Trial.

⁶ Stuart Ewen, Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture (New York, NY: McGraw Hill, 1976); Stuart Ewen, PR! A Social History of Spin (New York, NY: Basic Books, 1996).

⁷ William Leiss, “Technological Rationality: Marcuse and His Critics,” Philosophy of the Social Sciences 2:1 (1972), p. 32.

⁸ Herbert Marcuse, “Some Social Implications of Modern Technology,” in Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt (eds), The Essential Frankfurt School Reader (New York, NY: Continuum, 1982), p. 141.

⁹ Ibid.

¹⁰ In developing his concept, Marcuse drew on the critical philosophical distinction between subjective and objective reason. Subjective reason (“the abstract functioning of the thinking mechanism”) concerns “the adequacy of procedures for purposes more or less taken for granted and supposedly self-explanatory. It attaches little importance to the question whether the purposes as such are reasonable.” Objective reason, on the other hand, “focus[es] … on the problem of human destiny, and on the way of realization of ultimate goals” [Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason (New York, NY: Seabury Press, 1974 [1947]), pp. 3, 5].

¹¹ Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, trans. Edmund Jephcott, Dialectic of Enlightenment (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002).

¹² Ibid., 131.

¹³ Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man. Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1964), pp. 4–5.

¹⁴ Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man.

¹⁵ Christian Fuchs, Digital Labor and Karl Marx (New York, NY: Routledge, 2014), p. 77; Ronald V. Bettig, “The Frankfurt School and the Political Economy of Communications,” in Jeffrey T. Nealon and Caren Irr (eds), Rethinking the Frankfurt School: Alternative Legacies of Cultural Critique (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2002), pp. 81–94.

¹⁶ Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy, Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order (New York, NY: Monthly Review Press, 1966).

¹⁷ Ibid., 128.

¹⁸ John Bellamy Foster, Robert W. McChesney, and R. Jamil Jonna, “Monopoly and Competition in Twenty-First Century Capitalism,” Monthly Review 62:11 (2011), available online at: https://monthlyreview.org/2011/04/01/monopoly-and-competition-in-twenty-first-century-capitalism/.

¹⁹ Robert W. McChesney, Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism is Turning the Internet Against Democracy (New York, NY: New Press, 2013), p. 121.

²⁰ Jerry Mander, “Privatization of Consciousness,” Monthly Review 64:5 (2012), available online at: https://monthlyreview.org/2012/10/01/privatization-of-consciousness/.

²¹ Robert W. McChesney, The Problem of the Media: US Communication Politics in the 21st Century (New York, NY: Monthly Review Press, 2004).

²² Our central concept has some affinities in function and effects with the Althusserian idea of “ideological state apparatuses” (ISAs). Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation)” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (New York, NY: Monthly Review Press, 1971), pp. 127–86. Like ISAs (such as the education system, the family, and religious institutions) the CAMC is a material institutionalization of ideologies that support the reproduction of the social order. Also like ISAs, the CAMC is—potentially, at least—a site of political struggle (including class struggle). However, the Capitalist Advertising and Marketing Complex is clearly distinct from ISAs in at least two major ways. First, while Althusser defines ISAs as transhistorical institutions that predate capitalism, the CAMC is a historically particular outgrowth of the monopoly stage of capitalist development. While Althusser acknowledges the “very subtle explicit or tacit combinations” that exist between the ISAs and the repressive state apparatus, the CAMC framework understands the spheres of cultural production and the state to be dialectically entwined with specific monopoly capitalist accumulation strategies (such as the sales effort). Second, by dictating material quality standards influenced by the imperatives of the sales effort, the CAMC has a direct role in commodity production. It is through these material imperatives that advertising and marketing promote cultural values which shape a public mindset predisposed to engage in an irrational and alienating regime of consumption. While Althusser rightly characterizes ISAs as material (rather than merely ideational), they are not defined by a central economic role analogous to that played by the CAMC.

²³ Joseph Turow, The Daily You: How the New Advertising Industry is Defining Your Identity and Your Worth (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011).

²⁴ Joseph Turow, “Media Buying: The New Power of Advertising,” in Matthew P. McAllister and Emily West (eds), The Routledge Companion to Advertising and Promotional Culture (London, UK: Routledge, 2013), p. 100.

²⁵ John Bellamy Foster and Robert W. McChesney, “Monopoly-Finance Capital, the Military-Industrial Complex & the Digital Age,” Monthly Review 66:3 (2014), available online at: https://monthlyreview.org/2014/07/01/surveillance-capitalism/.

²⁶ Even the founders of Google were hesitant to integrate advertising in the late 1990s. McChesney, Digital Disconnect, p. 102.

²⁷ Ibid., 104.

²⁸ Turow, Daily You, p. 174.

²⁹ Lauren Johnson, “Google’s Ad Revenue Hits $19 Billion, Even as Mobile Continues to Pose Challenges,” Adweek (July 28, 2016), available online at: https://www.adweek.com/digital/googles-ad-revenue-hits-19-billion-even-mobile-continues-pose-challenges-172722/; Turow, Daily You, pp. 65–68. Nicole S. Cohen, “Commodifying Free Labor Online: Social Media, Audiences, and Advertising,” in Matthew P. McAllister and Emily West (eds), The Routledge Companion to Advertising and Promotional Culture (London, UK: Routledge, 2013), p. 178.

³⁰ Turow, “Media Buying,” p. 102.

³¹ Turow, Daily You, p. 69.

³² Ibid., 184–90.

³³ Julia Angwin, Charlie Savage, Jeff Larson, Henrik Moltke, Laura Poitras, and James Risen, “AT&T Helped US Spy on Internet on a Vast Scale,” The New York Times (August 15, 2015), available online at: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/us/politics/att-helped-nsa-spy-on-an-array-of-internet-traffic.html?mcubz=1.

³⁴ Foster and McChesney, “Monopoly-Finance Capital, the Military-Industrial Complex & the Digital Age.” For example, browser “cookies” (software designed to surreptitiously track online behavior) were initially designed to provide a precise mechanism for distinguishing “click” activity on different computers in order to more efficiently price and place advertising. Turow, “Media Buying,” pp. 100–01.

³⁵ Elizabeth Stoycheff, “Under Surveillance: Examining Facebook’s Spiral of Silence Effects in the Wake of NSA Internet Monitoring,” Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 93:2 (2016), pp. 296–311; Keith Hampton, Lee Rainie, Weixu Lu, Maria Dwyer, Inyoung Shin, and Kristen Purcell, ‘Social Media and the “Spiral of Silence,”’ Pew Research Center (August 26, 2014), available online at: https://www.pewinternet.org/2014/08/26/social-media-and-the-spiral-of-silence/.

³⁶ Pew Research Center, The State of the News Media 2016: An Annual Report on American Journalism, available online at: https://stateofthemedia.org.

³⁷ Lee Fang, “CBS CEO: ‘For Us, Economically, Donald’s Place in This Election Is a Good Thing’,” The Intercept (February 29, 2016), available online at: https://theintercept.com/2016/02/29/cbs-donald-trump/.

³⁸ John Nichols and Robert W. McChesney, Dollarocracy: How the Money and Media Election Complex is Destroying America (New York, NY: Nation Books, 2013); Cynthia Littleton, “Local TV Stations Ready to PAC in Cash as Election Season Gears Up,” Variety (October 28, 2015), available online at: https://variety.com/2015/tv/features/political-ads-local-tv-pac-1201628302/.

³⁹ Robert B. Horwitz, “Communications Regulation in Protecting the Public Interest,” in Geneva Overholser and Kathleen Hall Jamieson (eds), The Institutions of American Democracy: The Press (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 284–302. Victor Pickard, America’s Battle for Media Democracy: The Triumph of Corporate Libertarianism and the Future of Media Reform (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

⁴⁰ McChesney, Problem of the Media. Nichols and McChesney, Dollarocracy.

⁴¹ McChesney, Digital Disconnect, p. 183.

⁴² Dallas W. Smythe, “Communications: Blindspot of Western Marxism,” Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory 1:3 (1977), pp. 1–27.

⁴³ Sut Jhally, The Codes of Advertising: Fetishism and the Political Economy of Meaning in the Consumer Society (New York, NY: Routledge, 1987).

⁴⁴ McChesney, Digital Disconnect. Jonathan Hardy, Critical Political Economy of the Media: An Introduction (New York, NY: Routledge, 2014), pp. 149–50.

⁴⁵ Emily, Guskin, Mark Jurkowitz, and Amy Mitchell, “Network: By the Numbers.” Pew Research Center Project for Excellence in Journalism (2013), available online at: https://www.stateofthemedia.org/2013/network-news-a-year-of-change-and-challenge-at-nbc/network-by-the-numbers/.

⁴⁶ Nichols and McChesney, Dollarocracy.

⁴⁷ C. Edwin Baker, Advertising and a Democratic Press (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994); Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (New York, NY: Pantheon, 1988), pp. 14–18.

⁴⁸ Turow, “Media Buying,” pp. 108–09.

⁴⁹ Thomas E. Patterson, Out of Order (New York, NY: Vintage, 1994); Joseph N. Cappella and Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Spiral of Cynicism: The Press and the Public Good (New York, NY: Oxford University Press. 1997); Regina G. Lawrence, “Game-Framing the Issues: Tracking the Strategy Frame in Public Policy News.” Political Communication 17:2 (2000), pp. 93–114.

⁵⁰ “MM&M’s 2016 Top Agencies,” Medical Marketing & Media (July 5, 2016), available online at: https://www.mmm-online.com/agencies/mmms-2016-top-100-agencies/article/501208/.

⁵¹ Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, “Producer Price Index: Pharmaceutical Preparation.” (2016), available online at: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PCU325412325412.

⁵² Public Citizen, “Rx R&D Myths: The Case Against the Drug Industry’s R&D ‘Scare Card’.” (2001), available online at: https://www.citizen.org/publications/publicationredirect.cfm?ID=7065; Richard Anderson, “Pharmaceutical Industry Gets High on Fat Profits,” BBC News (November 6, 2014), available online at: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-28212223.

⁵³ Peter S. Kim and David Baltimore, “US Medical, Drug Research Has Three Legs,” The Wall Street Journal (January 16, 2017), available online at: https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-medical-drug-research-has-three-legs-1484591163.

⁵⁴ C. Lee Ventola, “Direct-to-Consumer Pharmaceutical Advertising,” Pharmacy and Therapeutics 36:10 (2011), pp. 669–74, 681–84.

⁵⁵ Joanna Belbey, “Pharma, the FDA, and Social Media,” Forbes (May 16, 2016), available online at: https://www.forbes.com/sites/joannabelbey/2016/05/15/pharma-the-fda-and-social-media/#2093320e5a73.

⁵⁶ Ray Moynihan and David Henry, “The Fight against Disease Mongering: Generating Knowledge for Action,” PLoS Med 3:4 (2006), pp. 425–28.

⁵⁷ Mike DeBonis, “Congress Passes 21st Century Cures Act, Boosting Research and Easing Drug Approvals,” The Washington Post (December 7, 2016), available online at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2016/12/07/congress-passes-21st-century-cures-act-boosting-research-and-easing-drug-approvals/.

⁵⁸ Virginia Heffernan, “A Prescription for Fear,” The New York Times (February 4, 2011), available online at: https://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/06/magazine/06FOB-Medium-t.html.

⁵⁹ Colette DeJong, Thomans Aguilar, Chien-Wen Tseng, Grace A. Lin, W. John Boscardin, and R. Adams Dudley, “Pharmaceutical Industry-Sponsored Meals and Physician Prescribing Patterns for Medicare Beneficiaries,” Journal of the American Medical Association 176:8 (2016), pp. 1114–21.

⁶⁰ The Pew Charitable Trusts, “Persuading the Prescribers: Pharmaceutical Industry Marketing and its Influence on Physicians and Patients” (November 11, 2013), available online at: https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/fact-sheets/2013/11/11/persuading-the-prescribers-pharmaceutical-industry-marketing-and-its-influence-on-physicians-and-patients.

⁶¹ Institute of Medicine of the National Academies of Science, Bernard Lo and Marilyn J. Field (eds), Conflict of Interest in Medical Research, Education, and Practice (National Academies Press: Washington, DC, 2009).

⁶² Institute of Medicine, Conflict of Interest, p. 129.

⁶³ Ibid.

⁶⁴ Ibid., 126.

⁶⁵ Ibid., 127.

⁶⁶ John B. McKinlay, Felicia Trachtenberg, Lisa D. Macreau, Jeffrey N. Katz, and Michael A. Fischer, “Effects of Patient Medication Requests on Physician Prescribing Behavior,” Medical Care 52:4 (2014), pp. 294–99.

⁶⁷ Celine Gounder, “Who is Responsible for the Pain-Pill Epidemic?” The New Yorker (November 8, 2013), available online at: https://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/who-is-responsible-for-the-pain-pill-epidemic.

⁶⁸ Josh Katz, “Drug Deaths in America are Rising Faster than Ever,” The New York Times (June 5, 2017), available online at: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/06/05/upshot/opioid-epidemic-drug-overdose-deaths-are-rising-faster-than-ever.html.

⁶⁹ Alana Semuels, “Are Pharmaceutical Companies to Blame for the Opioid Epidemic?” The Atlantic (June 2, 2017), available online at: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/06/lawsuit-pharmaceutical-companies-opioids/529,020; Harriet Ryuan, Lisa Girion, and Scott Glover, ‘“You Want a Description of Hell?” Oxycontin’s 12-Hour Problem,’ The Los Angeles Times (May 5, 2016), available online at: https://www.latimes.com/projects/oxycontin-part1/.

⁷⁰ Douglas Kellner, “The Frankfurt School and British Cultural Studies: The Missed Articulation,” in Jeffrey T. Nealon and Caren Irr (eds), Rethinking the Frankfurt School: Alternative Legacies of Cultural Critique (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2002), pp. 31–58.

⁷¹ Robert W. McChesney, “Whatever Happened to Cultural Studies?” in Catherine A. Warren and Mary Douglas Vavrus (eds), American Cultural Studies (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2002), pp. 76–93; Mike Budd, Robert M. Entman, and Clay Steinman, “The Affirmative Character of US Cultural Studies,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 7 (June 1990), pp. 169–84.

⁷² Kellner, “Frankfurt School and British Cultural Studies.”

⁷³ John Bellamy Foster and Robert McChesney, “The Cultural Apparatus of Monopoly Capital: An Introduction,” Monthly Review 65:3 (2013), available online at: https://monthlyreview.org/2013/07/01/the-cultural-apparatus-of-monopoly-capital/.

⁷⁴ For a summary and rebuttal of these critiques, see John Bellamy Foster, The Theory of Monopoly Capitalism: An Elaboration of Marxian Political Economy (New York, NY: Monthly Review Press, 1986), pp. 24–50, 74–106.

⁷⁵ John Bellamy Foster, “Monopoly Capital at the Half-Century Mark,” Monthly Review 68:3 (2016), available online at: https://monthlyreview.org/2016/07/01/monopoly-capital-at-the-half-century-mark/.

⁷⁶ Matthew P. McAllister and Chenjerai Kumanyika, “‘Brut Slaps … And Twins’: Hypercommercialized Sports Media and the Intensification of Gender Ideology,” in Matthew P. McAllister and Emily West (eds), The Routledge Companion to Advertising and Promotional Culture (London, UK: Routledge, 2013), pp. 237–51.

⁷⁷ Juliet B. Schor, “The Paradox of Materiality: Fashion, Marketing, and the Planetary Ecology,” The Routledge Companion to Advertising and Promotional Culture, (London, UK: Routledge, 2013), pp. 435–49.

⁷⁸ Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (New York, NY: Penguin Books, 1973), pp. 100–08.

⁷⁹ Naomi Klein, No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies (Toronto, Canada: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000); Public Citizen, “Nader Starts Group to Oppose the Excesses of Marketing, Advertising, and Commercialism,” Commercial Alert (September 8, 1998), available online at: https://archive.commercialalert.org/issues/culture/ad-creep/nader-starts-group-to-oppose-the-excesses-of-marketing-advertising-and-commercialism.

⁸⁰ Nancy Fraser, “The End of Progressive Neoliberalism,” Dissent (January 2, 2017), available online at: https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/progressive-neoliberalism-reactionary-populism-nancy-fraser.

⁸¹ Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (New York, NY: International Publishers, 2005), p. 427.