Spectacle and Diversity

Transnational Media and Global Culture

Lee Burton Artz, Lee Artz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9780367754174
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000515237
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book shows how transnational media operate in the contemporary world and what their impact is on film, television, and the larger global culture. Where a company is based geographically no longer determines its outreach or output. As media consolidate and partner across national and cultural boundaries, global culture evolves. The new transnational media industry is universal in its operation, function, and social impact. It reflects a shared transnational culture of consumerism, authoritarianism, cultural diversity, and spectacle. From Wolf Warriors and Sanju to Valerian: City of 1000 Planets and Pokémon, new media combinations challenge old assumptions about cultural imperialism and reflect cross-boundary collaboration as well as boundary-breaking cultural interpretation. Intended for students of global studies and international communication at all levels, the book will appeal to a wide range of readers interested in the way transnational media work and how that shapes our culture.

1GLOBAL ENTERTAINMENTNot Yet the Democratic Age

DOI: 10.4324/9781003162452-02

We live in a capitalist world. Media are a primary part of that world with commercial media and culture produced by national and multinational capitalist industries. Thus, at least some rudimentary explanation of capitalism is necessary to understand media. Capitalism is an historical form of social relations in which wage labor produces commodities—goods and services sold for a profit. Profits are taken by capitalist owners by withholding a portion of the value produced by wage labor. Profits are realized when the commodities are sold. Although manufacturing jobs have disappeared from the US and Europe due to technology and the globalization of production, globally the number of workers has increased to three billion. Hundreds of millions of those workers create value with their labor, applying skills and technology to produce valuable commodities and services. Thousands of corporate owners, financial investors, and shareholders in media corporations and other industries capture part of that created value in the form of profits. This is the market system. We work. They profit. Those few who own the factories, machines, technology, land, and resources determine working conditions, wages, grabbing their wealth from the labor of millions.

Working for 40 years at Amazon in the US might net you a total of $500,000 over your entire lifetime. If you lived in Seattle, you'd spend most of that on rent, the rest on food. If you spend your lifetime working for Jeff Bezos, you'd live broke and die broke. Meanwhile, Bezos collects $150,000 every minute from the labor of 500,000 workers just like you. Add that to the cut he takes from thousands of small businesses, he has captured $200 billion so far. This is not just American capitalism. Carlos Slim, owner of Telmex telecom in Mexico, has accumulated $60 billion from the work of his 50,000 employees. Jack Ma, the owner of Alibaba—the Chinese version of Amazon—has accumulated over $50 billion from his 100,000 Chinese workers. Pony Ma, owner of Tencent and WeChat, also has taken $50 billion from the labor of 70,000 employees. Altogether there are 389 billionaires in China taking their wealth from almost 800 million workers, while millions more are impoverished. Anil Ambani, owner of Reliance Media (partnered with DreamWorks and Amblin Entertainment) has reaped almost $40 billion from his many enterprises in India. Similar relations of work and wealth exist in France, Germany, Brazil, Turkey, everywhere—some are more dramatic and startling, some less obscene—but globally all are part of transnational capitalism (Forbes, 2020).

This book recognizes that we have entered a new stage of capitalism: transnational capitalism. Capitalists from nations large and small coordinate their partnerships, notably in media ventures, which share production, distribution, costs, and profits from wage labor in many nations. Capitalism did not get here by accident. Capitalism developed over several centuries; it was not birthed full grown. Banking, renting, merchant trade, and even production for profit—often called mercantile capitalism—developed as the dominant socio-economic system in the late 18th century. In the 19th century, industrial capitalism privately owned the primary means of mass production and employed wage labor to produce commodities for profit through sales in the market. Industrial capitalism developed largely, but not only, within nations.

Capitalism did not grow the same everywhere. It did not follow some theoretical template for development. Instead, material conditions and social relations for each nation presented different options and possibilities. Where working classes were organized and politically active, capitalism adopted more social reforms like public health care, accessible public education, and public regulations on growth—as in Sweden, Denmark, and other European nations. US capitalism had a different trajectory given its geographic expansion, indigenous genocide, race slavery, immigration, a restrictive two-party electoral system, and the political and cultural impact of those conditions on social class relations. Saudi capitalism morphed from an archaic feudal system into a family and clan-dominated global investor based on private profits from oil production. More recently, the Chinese state has become capitalist, albeit with some special characteristics given its socialist history, including very strong government control and significant government enterprises, including in media. Still, the government promotes capitalism, consumerism, and the market. A new class of Chinese capitalists has emerged, including thousands of millionaire corporate owners and investors. Notably, other capitalist formations grew from their specific material conditions and social and political battles. Until recently most European countries had a robust public media system; in the US and Latin American media began and remain largely a private, commercial industry; China has a mix of large state-owned media and vibrant private media corporations like Dalian Wanda and Alibaba.

As institutions of political power, national governments promote and defend dominant social classes and the social relations of power, while mediating the dominance over other social classes (Davidson, 2016, p. 191). Thus, as capitalist economies reached the material limits of production and consumption within European nations, leading industries consolidated and capitalism became monopolized by fewer large enterprises. Each national governments backed colonial expansion to secure more resources and new markets for their own corporations. In the 20th century colonial era—the time of monopoly capitalism and imperialism—national competition increased between states representing their national capitalist interests. Rivalries within Europe and over colonial conquests led to international conflicts that took more than 100 million lives. The victors continued to impose sanctions and military interventions against their former colonies. A crucial point here is that imperialism as a form of capitalism is more than empire, colonialism, or even military conquest. Imperialism is the monopoly stage of capitalism, the point at which consolidated national corporations shoved aside smaller enterprises to dominate production, trade, and the subsequent accumulation of wealth from their colonies. We will come back to imperialism when we further consider whether cultural imperialism sufficiently informs our understanding of media developments around the world. For now, imperialism can be understood as a significant stage in the growth of what has become a global socio-economic system. Capitalism grew from mercantilism (17th and 18th century), to industrialism (19th century), to imperialism and monopoly (20th century), to its latest iteration as 21st century transnationalism.

Capitalism

To understand how monopoly capitalism and imperialism have morphed into what will be explained as transnational capitalism, a few brief points about capitalist social relations are needed.

Capitalism organizes social relations so that resources and the means of production are privately owned for individual profit. Labor has always been needed to obtain natural resources by using tools to produce goods to be sold. Human labor itself has become a commodity, privately purchased and controlled. However, the capitalist employer is not “buying” the worker—although the restrictions on our civil liberties while at work might suggest as much. The capitalist is actually buying our labor time. Capitalism needs trained and educated workers. It needs to produce and reproduce workers, including providing them with time to sleep, eat, have some leisure time, and learn the norms of capitalist social relations. Under most conditions as a wage laborer, there is no choice but to submit to an employer in order to survive.

Capitalism turns human relations into market transactions. Capitalism reduces human abilities into factors of production for profit. Capitalism positions citizens as consumers. Notably, while corporations dictate the terms of employment, the capitalist class does not rule society directly. Decisions and actions defending capitalism are left to its political hirelings. Capitalism develops in tandem with national governments (Anderson, 2016, p. 140). Capitalism resides within state power—in economics, politics, culture, and civil society—while state power responds to capitalist influences, activities, and interests, such that a Princeton Study determined the US is no longer a democracy (James, 2014). Capitalists throughout history have relied on vigilantes, private security, organized violence, and other means to control labor. State enforcement of private property rights offers some semblance of political legitimacy to the defense of social relations of power, appearing as unbiased enforcement of laws incumbent on all. Just as corporations have dropped their programs for labor social welfare, including pensions, health insurance, and supplement wages, so too corporations have deferred enforcement and violence to the government. In most cases, state managers, politicians, bureaucrats will act in what they perceive to be the best interests of capital (which they understand as equivalent to the best interests of society).

In a capitalist world, you only get what you can buy. Food, housing, health, education, and recreation depend almost solely on your own resources. Under capitalism, everyone is formally recognized as free. We are not forced to work for someone else, but are “free” to sell our labor power to whomever we choose. Those who own a means of production can employ you for a wage and make a profit that in turn increases their capital. You are formally recognized as free, but if you do not own a means of production, you are effectively forced to labor for the sake of someone else's profit in order to live. Instead of religion, nobility, or nature, under capitalism it is the dominant social relations of production that justify the subordination of one person by another.

Social classes arise according to their relation to the production of wealth. Capitalists own land, factories, machines—but do not actually work. Workers own little other than their labor power, so they work the land and operate the machinery in factories they do not own. Small businesses own their means of production and often work in their own enterprises. Politicians and bureaucrats are part of a professional social class that neither owns the means of production of wealth, nor works as producers. Rather, this social class serves as managers for the capitalist class and its practices, maintaining control and leadership over the working class and small business capitalists. “Regardless of their class origins, state managers and capitalists are drawn together into a series of mutually supportive relationships” (Davidson, 2016, p. 213). The former need the resources provided by individual national capitals, from political contributions, taxation and loans, in order to tend to the needs of capitalism as a whole; the latter need policy initiatives to regulate demands of the working class and other social groups domestically and to advance the preferred goals of national capital in the global economy. Importantly, politicians must be able to negotiate the dominance of capital with the challenges posed by the working majority, maintain connections with those social classes and sectors, and on occasion offer reforms to appease public demands for more equity and social welfare. Media function to report, justify, and promote modest reforms intended to win consent from working and middle classes and bolster the social order.

Workers receive a wage for their labor, but not for the total value of their production. Goods and services produced are then sold in the market, but workers are paid less than the value produced. Capitalist profits come from keeping the surplus of the difference between the value of the commodity and the wages paid labor. In every stage of capitalism, profits have been made by selling commodities produced by underpaid labor to consumers. Of course, without sales, no product provides a profit.

How much time is needed to produce a commodity, a chair, a dress, a car? What is the socially necessary labor time to produce goods and services for an entire society? It depends largely on the available technology and means of production; as socially necessary labor time declines, the value of the commodities produced declines. Technology increases surplus value taken as profits, because technology-using labor produces more commodities in less time, keeping wage costs down. Thus, capitalists compete for technology, for work practices and processes that lower labor time, and constantly push for lower wages to lower the costs of production and raise profits. Herein, lies the inherent contradiction of capitalism.

The total wages allowed to workers are ultimately insufficient for purchasing all the goods produced for exchange. The problem of overproduction has always presented an insurmountable contradiction for capitalism. Workers create commodities for sale, but workers receive only part of the value of the goods produced—the surplus value is withheld as profit. In other words, in the aggregate, across society and now the globe, the total purchasing power of all consumers, based on wages received, is less than the value of the products produced. Overproduction is inevitable. This is not overproduction of what citizens need or even want, but overproduction of goods that can be profitably sold. Food is plentiful. Millions are hungry. Under capitalism, food is destroyed or wasted whenever and wherever people cannot afford the prices.

A cursory example may help to illustrate this social relation of production. If workers are paid $8 to build a chair sold for $10 (and the owner keeps $2) then workers collectively cannot afford to buy all the chairs they produce. If a worker is paid $40,000 year to produce 100s of cars sold for $50,000 that worker cannot afford to buy that car. Some might be able to buy a chair or car made more cheaply, but to make a chair or car more affordable means either other workers will be paid less (while the capitalist still profits), or the capitalist must find new means for lowering costs—through lowering wages, intensifying working conditions, or developing better technology. Because workers own little other than their labor, they must work for wages to survive. To continue to profit, capitalists must constantly find new methods of produc...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Endorsements Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Introduction: Transnational Media: The New Order
• 1 Global Entertainment: Not Yet the Democratic Age
• 2 Cultural Imperialism and Transnational Media
• 3 Media in India: From Public to Private to Transnational
• 4 Crouching Tigers: Transnational Media in and from China
• 5 Latin America: From Telenovelas to Transnational Media
• 6 The New Frontiers of Europe: Transnational Media Partnerships
• 7 The Hegemonic Appeal of Spectacle and Diversity
• Index