Fighting for communication control

By Herbert I. Schiller, Le Monde diplomatique, September 1997

Liberalism is for others. Although it insists on unlimited access for American products from the rest of the world, Washington has not hesitated since the end of the second world war to intervene financially, politically and diplomatically in sectors it considers strategic for maintaining US dominance. Communication is one of these sectors, and the most critical one, from both the industrial and the symbolic point of view, for mastering the information society of the next century.

Contrary to many reports, in the United States the state is alive and, if not well, at least still in charge. This is not necessarily the situation in other countries which form part of the global economy. In particular, in the sphere of communication, the American state is no paper tiger. Representing the core interests of capital, it has demonstrated unusual vision. It has frequently acted with determination to assure the promotion of an ever-expanding sector to what has now become a central pillar of the economy.

This present time is also characterised by numerous efforts to persuade the public that a new era has dawned, one which has no connection to times gone by. Many existing structural or institutional relations, like the contradictory relation of labour to capital, are now dismissed as obsolete. The game is a new one, they say, with no roots in the past. History, by this criterion, is not only useless for understanding the present. It is totally irrelevant. This is an especially destructive theory since it undermines any understanding of the social process and how to change it.

A third conclusion is the legitimacy and necessity of political economy as a means of grasping ongoing developments. The ever popular proposition that the communication sector can be regarded as autonomous and free-standing does not stand up to inspection.

In the late 1990s governing and academic circles still insist that the market is the solution to all problems, that private enterprise is the preferred means to achieve solid economic results and that the state is, as one economic analyst recently put it, the enemy. (1) This credo hardly squares with the last half-century's record of initiatives and policies by successive governments to ensure the US's world mastery over the now powerful sector engaged in cultural production, transmission and dissemination. We are up against a deliberate policy followed by every Administration from the second world war up to and including the Clinton White House.

The principle of the free flow of information (vital to the worldwide export of the American cultural product) is a construction which has made a universal virtue out of the cultural industry's marketing requirements. We should not forget that John Foster Dulles, possible the most aggressive secretary of state in the post-war years, regarded the free flow as the single most important issue in foreign policy. Even before the end of world war two, the Pentagon made military aircraft available to US publishers and senior editors to go and hector leaders in eleven allied and neutral countries on the virtues of a free press—that is to say, in private hands—and the free exchange of information (2).

In 1946 Assistant Secretary of State William Benton, put it like this: The State Department plans to do everything within its power along political or diplomatic lines to help break down the artificial barriers to the expansion of private American news agencies, magazines, motion pictures and other media of communications throughout the world. . . Freedom of the press—and freedom of exchange of information generally—is an integral part of our foreign policy (3).

At the United Nations and Unesco, and at international conferences, US representatives pressed relentlessly for the free flow. To be sure, there was another benefit from this advocacy. Beside the material advantages if offered to US companies, it facilitated an ongoing propaganda windfall at the expense of the non-market sector of the world (the USSR etc.).

State support for the cultural industries, however, was not limited to ideological initiatives. A wide-ranging programme of US material assistance to many countries came into operation after the war with, as its model, the Marshall Plan (1948-51). Among the many features of the plan was one tying dollar grants to a recipient's acquiescence to opening its market to US cultural exports, and film in particular (4).

Fifty years later, Harvard University Professor Jeffrey D. Sachs, free market missionary to several former socialist countries, recalled an aspect of the Marshall Plan that has generally been obscured. He noted that The Marshall Plan had two key features: it was conditional on policy changes in the countries that received assistance, and it was temporary (5). Seemingly unaware that this has been, and remains, US policy in all its overseas dealings, Professor Sachs was recommending this as a new idea.

More indirect but of enormous significance are the huge subsidies for state-funded research and development, in the first place from the Pentagon. These are estimated at over $1,000 billion since 1945 and have allowed, among other things, the rapid development of computers and the fields of computer science and artificial intelligence. These industries and fields of study have contributed incalculably to US ascendancy in information technology, computer networks, date base creation, the special effects industry and worldwide surveillance systems—the underlying infrastructure of what is now benignly termed the information age.

Still another planned and direct state action to further US communication primacy in the post-war years was the communication satellite undertaking. In this instance, the objective of this costly enterprise was explicit. It aimed to wrest global information control from Great Britain, which to that time exercised worldwide domination of underseas cable. Testifying before Congress in 1966, McGeorge Bundy, former chief aide to President Kennedy and afterwards president of the Ford Foundation, recollected: I was myself a part of the executive branch during the period which led up to the establishment of Comsat [Communication Satellite Corporation]. . . I do clearly remember what the record fully confirms—that Comsat was established for the purpose of taking and holding a position of leadership for the United States in the field of international global commercial satellite services (6).

In his book, Theories of the Information Society, Frank Webster makes a crucial distinction between those writers who see today's world as a rupture with the past and those who find historical antecedents and continuities (7). Webster comes down firmly on the side of historical continuity, though his is by no means a majority view. In the postwar decades, at least three variants of the rupture of history theory have had a powerful influence in fortifying the ideology of capitalism.

The first came from Daniel Bell, who set the stage for what was to follow with his study of what he called post-industrial society (8), a theory about which Dan Schiller noted: Post-industrial theory utilised its exceptionalist premise [the uniqueness of information and its production] to invoke a comprehensive but undemonstrable historical rupture, and therefore to draw back decisively from the predominating social relations of development. 'Information' itself was given an aura of objectivity (9).

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, signalling the global triumph of United States capitalism, Francis Fukuyama was able to declare the end of history (10), to the delight of those tired of confrontation and polarities. According to the author, serious social conflict now belonged to the past and people's conditions should henceforth reflect an ongoing process of social betterment driven by well-disposed, pluralistic forces. Inconveniently for this theory, the facts show that these forces are working in the opposite direction and triumphant capitalism has unleashed a powerful drive toward inequality.

Today, the latest theory of historical rupture is represented by the claims of the electronic crowd, who now comprise a strident chorus. In this group come the communication hardware and software people, who speak mostly with market expectations in mind. But there is also the academic contingent, centred in the high tech universities, and, above all, political figures in the highest reaches of government. A prophet has emerged in Alvin Toffler, whose numerous books won mass circulation and nationwide attention. Toffler described the computer-using society as the third wave (11), displacing the preceding industrial one which in turn came after the agricultural era.

Winning in the 21st century

More recently, Wired, a monthly with a sizeable readership, has been serving up feverishly enthusiastic accounts of the networked age, according to which we are on the threshold of a wonderful new world. Here is the magazine's outlook, as described by an outside observer: Computers lead to a kind of Utopia: a better future through symbiosis between man and machine. . . a religion that sees cyberspace as a transcendental medium which will usher in a Golden Age, an age where being digital frees the mind, allowing us to transcend the body and ascend to a higher plane of consciousness (12). When such a transcendental fantasy is accepted, the more earth-bound problems that have been with us since the beginning of industrialisation—insecurity, poverty, unemployment, exploitation—fade from thought. The class struggle, for instance, is transformed into an opposition between those who support and those who are unreceptive to the Internet (13).

Yet Wired and the many other equally fervent media and academic voices claiming transformative power for electronic networks are, at most, only cheerleaders for processes already underway, helped along by powerful political and economic forces. Far more influential in affecting actual developments in the restructuring of the economy is government. Communication has been elevated to a top government priority since the beginning of the Clinton Administration in 1993. The president and the vice-president, Al Gore, rhapsodise as much as Wired over the capability of the new information technologies to transform everyday life and to overcome the pervasive economic and social disabilities that scar modern existence. They say that the Internet is set to transform itself into a cybermarket.

In 1941 Henry Luce proclaimed the advent of the American century. In the late 1990s it seems that government officials are contemplating a second one, this time founded on electronic mastery. At all events, this is the core of the argument offered by two formerly high-placed officials in the first Clinton Administration, Joseph S. Nye Junior and Admiral William A. Owens, respectively former assistant secretary of defence for international affairs and now dean of the Kennedy School at Harvard, and the former vice-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

According to them, the 21st century, not the 20th, will turn out to be the period of America's greatest pre-eminence. Information is the new coin of the international realm and the United States is better positioned than any other country to multiply the potency of its hard and soft power resources through information. Furthermore, the one country that can best lead the information revolution will be more powerful than any other. For the foreseeable future, that country is the United States. . . its subtle, comparative advantage is its ability to collect, process, act upon and disseminate information, an edge that will almost certainly grow over the next decade (14).

Another voice, one from the computer software industry, is no less enthusiastic about prospects for American information global primacy in the times ahead. Daniel F. Burton Junior, vice-president of government relations at Novell and the former president of the private-sector Council on Competitiveness, has this to say: As the pioneer of the [networked] economy, the United States will play a defining role in how it develops. No other country combines the diverse set of assets necessary to drive its evolution—a towering software presence, a world-class hardware business, a dynamic content industry, a telecommunications sector that is rapidly being deregulated, a strong venture capitalist base, flexible labour markets, and an unparalleled university system. From this, Burton concludes that it will be a networked world comprised of electronic communities of commerce and culture—a world that ironically will strengthen the position of the United States as a nation among nations, even as it disrupts the system of nation-states (15).

This thinking comes close to being a blueprint of current United States strategic communication policy. President Clinton put it like this: To keep the United States on the cutting edge, my job is to adjust America so we can win in the 21st century (16). Charlene Barshevsky, the US trade representative, struck an almost identical note after the recently concluded World Trade Organisation negotiations on worldwide telecommunications. The government, no less than industry and academics, confer on the new electronics a revolutionary role. Industry and university voices are more inclined to claim that the technology is producing a totally new world. The state and it s administrators, more aware of power relations, nationally and globally, announce their intention to incorporate the new technologies into historically familiar structures of control and domination.

This hardly escapes the attention of those most vulnerable to this power. Sheila Copps, former Canadian deputy prime minister and now minister of heritage, has openly challenged what she termed American cultural imperialism and stated the If the Americans insist in pursuing their domination of the world culture community by using all the instruments at their disposal, they will expect the same in return (17). Which is easier said than done. . .

There can be no doubt about the centrality of the communication sector in the United States economy. In 1996, for instance, two giant firms, one in software and the other in hardware, Microsoft and Intel, reported net profits that totalled $11 billion. This colossal return catapulted Intel into second place in the national corporate profitability scale, behind General Electric and ahead of Exxon. And these are far from isolated examples.

The 1990s have seen an incredible system-wide concentration of capital, with the communication-media sector in the forefront. Growth through merger, consolidation and capital expansion in the symbol-producing industries has been especially active. TimeWarner and Disney-ABC Capital Cities, two $20 billion plus communication-cultural conglomerates, each manufacture films, TV programmes, books and magazines, recordings. And their holdings extend to the circuits that disseminate these products, such as cable systems, TV networks, theme parks etc.

To understand the stakes involved, the returns to the Star Wars film trilogy offer some perspective. Beyond its $1.3 billion in cinema tickets sold, there were $500m in video sales, $300m in CD-ROM and video games, $1.2 billion in toys and playing cards, $300m in clothes and accessories and $300m in books and comics (18). Four billion dollars is hardly small change! In the same way, a few dozen mega hardware and software corporations increasingly submerge the US and global market with their manufactured symbolic product.

Just as cultural production becomes increasingly indistinguishable from production in general, a political economy of culture—its production and its consumption—is becoming an obligatory and vital site for research and analysis. The question is how to begin to challenge the material and symbolic authority of triumphant capitalism.

Notes

(1) Paul Craig Roberts, Business Week, 13 January 1997.

(2) The New York Times, 29 November 1944.

(3) Department of State Bulletin, 1946, 14 (344), 160.

(4) Thomas Guback, The International Film Industry Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1969. See also Geneviève Sellier, Le précédent des accords Blum-Byrnes,Le Monde diplomatique, November 1993.

(5) Jeffrey Sachs, When Foreign Aid Makes a Difference, The New York Times, 3 February 1997.

(6) Progress Report on Space Communications, Hearings before the Senate Subcommittee on Communications, 89th Congress, 2nd session, 10, 17, 18 and 23 August 1966, serial 89-78, Washington, 1966.

(7) Frank Webster, Theories of the Information Society, Routledge, London/New York, 1995.

(8) Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, Basic Books, New York, 1973.

(9) Dan Schiller, Theorizing Communication: a History, Oxford University Press, New York, 1996.

(10) Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, Free Press, New York, 1992.

(11) Alvin Toffler, The Third Wave, William Morrow, New York, 1980.

(12) David S. Bennahum, The Myth of Digital Nirvana, Educom Review, September/October 1996, vol. 31, no. 5.

(13) John Perry Barlow, The Powers That Were, Wired, September 1996.

(14) Joseph S. Nye Jr. and William A. Owens, America's Information Edge, Foreign Affairs, March/April 1996.

(15) Daniel F. Burton Jr., The Brave New Wired World, Foreign Policy, no. 106, Spring 1997.

(16) John Markoff, Clinton Proposes Changes in Policy to Aid Technology, The New York Times, 23 February 1993.

(17) Craig Turner, Canadian Official Hints at Trade War on Hollywood, Los Angeles Times, 11 February 1997.

(18) James Sterngold, The Return of the Merchandizer, The New York Times, 30 January 1997.