By Matt Kilsby, Socialist Alternative Greater Manchester
Over recent weeks and months, as the UK general election campaign has been in full swing, many working-class people will have rightly questioned the role of the capitalist media in preserving and maintaining the status quo. Many will have been enraged by the televised leadership debates and the countless media interviews with establishment politicians, where no hint of an alternative to declining living standards or endless war are even countenanced. None of this is by accident.
Hegemony and interests of the ruling class
According to the Media Reform Coalition (MRC), just three companies – DMG Media (publishers of the Daily Mail, Metro and i), News UK (The Sun and The Times) and Reach (Daily Mirror, Daily Express, Daily Star) – dominate 90% of national newspaper circulation. These same three companies also account for more than 40% of the online news audience, meaning that they have an unrivalled monopoly in setting the news agenda across print, broadcast and online formats. It is a similar picture at a local level across the UK, as 71% of all local newspapers are owned by just six companies. The two largest companies, Newsquest and Reach, control 40% of the local media market between them.
The domination of media outlets and the news agenda by a handful of capitalists is part and parcel of the class society in which we live. As a class society, the ruling class – the 1% – does not represent the interests of everyone, but instead is only interested in maintaining its power and privilege, all the while viciously exploiting the working-class majority. As the minority in society, the ruling class has to conceal the true nature of the state and class society, and also persuade the majority to accept it. It does this through its control of the mass media, education and science, where the capitalist system is always portrayed as the best and most natural way of running society. As Karl Marx wrote in The German Ideology:
“The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.”
The Italian Marxist and revolutionary, Antonio Gramsci, described this phenomenon as ‘civil hegemony’, whereby capitalist society maintains control over the working class, not just by coercive means – the police, law courts, army, etc. – but also through the use of culture and media. Gramsci argued that by presenting capitalist cultural values as neutral, the ruling class presents its interests as being the same as the wider public, and their values as basic ‘common sense’. In addition, he argued that modern states have cultivated hegemony across civil society such that force and coercion, or its threat, was no longer the primary form of rule, except, as he put it, in “moments of crisis of command and direction when spontaneous consent has failed”.
Corbynism and the media
Soon after Jeremy Corbyn was elected leader of the Labour Party in September 2015, the capitalist press and media moved into overdrive to discredit him. This was not out of fear of Corbyn as an individual but, instead, the ideas that he was putting forward that had gained such a huge echo from hundreds of thousands of working class people, many of whom joined Labour just so that they could vote for him in the leadership contest. Indeed, just a few days after being elected, the Daily Telegraph printed an article that included an army general speaking openly about the potential for a military coup in the event that Corbyn subsequently won a general election:
“The Army just wouldn’t stand for it. The general staff would not allow a prime minister to jeopardise the security of this country and I think people would use whatever means possible, fair or foul to prevent that. You can’t put a maverick in charge of a country’s security. There would be mass resignations at all levels and you would face the very real prospect of an event which would effectively be a mutiny.”
The ruling class, fearful of the increasing popularity of socialist ideas and the mass movement that had erupted around Corbyn, needed to discredit him and portray the ideas as alien and a threat to society. All underpinned by the threat of a potential military coup.
While he was Labour leader, Corbyn also faced frenzied attacks from the BBC, which like many capitalist state broadcasters is presented as impartial and balanced. In reality, the BBC is no more neutral than the police or the law courts and its ultimate purpose is to defend the system and the interests of the ruling class. This is why the BBC published articles and broadcasts accusing Corbyn of being a Russian spy, a misogynist, a terrorist, anti-Semitic, a traitor, etc. This is the same BBC, lest we forget, that helped to cover-up the crimes committed by Jimmy Saville, who sexually abused hundreds of people during his career. It has come to light since his death that from as early as 1973, BBC executives had some knowledge of what Saville was up to but ignored it because of his popularity and his connections with establishment figures.
Social media and the internet
Today, more and more people access news via social media and the internet. It is fair to say that many activists hoped that this new technology could wrestle back control from the ruling class as to how ideas and information are disseminated.
Just as with traditional print and broadcast media, however, a small number of capitalists dominate social media and the internet: MRC has calculated that 10 of the top 15 online platforms used to access news in the UK are owned by Meta, Alphabet and X Corp (the owners of X/Twitter). Meta and Google harvest approximately 80% of all spending on online advertising, which means that they have an essentially limitless power over how ordinary people find news online.
The 2018 Facebook-Cambridge Analytica (CA) data scandal laid bare the interests of the capitalist’s involvement with the biggest social media firms. CA is a data company that was, and still is, owned by Donald Trump-supporting billionaires and had bought user information harvested from as many as 87 million Facebook user profiles. They then used that data in an attempt to influence voting in the 2016 US election. Facebook knew that the data had been harvested but did nothing about it and failed to report it.
There have been some attempts to portray the owner of Meta, Mark Zuckerberg, as some liberal force for good. In the aftermath of the Trump-inspired events at the US Capitol in January 2021, Zuckerberg announced that Trump had been banned from Facebook. He said that Trump had used his social media platforms “to incite violent insurrection against a democratically elected government”. At the time, while some on the left cheered, the same tactics – and worse – could and would be deployed against a mass working class movement, especially one that was fighting for socialist and revolutionary change. In addition, Zuckerberg is the fourth richest person on the planet and his class interests are entirely opposed to the billions of working-class people and oppressed across the world.
It is true that social media and the internet can play an important role in enabling socialists and workers to organise and put forward our demands and ideas, but we must be mindful that it can simply be blocked by the ruling class. This is what happened during the revolutionary movement in Egypt in 2011, when social media sites, including Facebook, were blocked. Many online platforms are permanently blocked by authoritarian regimes, such as Iran, where Facebook and X/Twitter have been banned since 2009.
How do we respond?
In the face of such domination of our media by the capitalist ruling class, despair and despondency amongst workers and activists is understandable. But it is important that socialists do not overstate the ability of the media to control events because people’s real lived experience under capitalism does limit what ideas take root. This can be seen in recent attempts by Rishi Sunak and the Tory press to try to convince us that the economy is surging, inflation is over and things are better. But that simply will not convince the millions of working-class people that have suffered at the sharp end of austerity, job losses and declining living standards over the last decade and a half.
In September 1917, just a few weeks before the Russian Revolution, Lenin estimated that the three main nominally socialist parties “command from threequarters to four-fifths of the votes.” However, “the circulation of the newspapers they publish is certainly less than a quarter, or even less than one-fifth, that of the whole capitalist press.” This shows, to an extent, the limits of capitalist media influence particularly at times of heightened class struggle. Similarly, during the recent strike wave that swept across the UK in 2022, in spite of a huge propaganda campaign put out by the Tories, capitalists and their media, public support for the strikes remained high throughout.
In his short 1938 article, Freedom of the Press and the Working Class, Leon Trotsky argued that the most efficient way to fight the capitalist media is for the workers to develop their own. This has never been as true as it is today and that is why Socialist Alternative publishes a monthly newspaper, has a website, and is active on social media and internet platforms. Our media output is a key point of contact with the mass of working-class people, and we want it to reflect our politics, and provide an analysis and understanding which the working-class needs. Unlike the capitalist media, Socialist Alternative is rooted in working-class struggle and reflects the real-life experiences of the majority in society. And just like the capitalist media is an unashamed defender of the ruling class, we are unashamed defenders of our class and persistent agitators for socialism.
Clearly, it is a huge task for socialists in trying to build a workers’ media and we do not underestimate the challenge, but as Gramsci argued, one way for the working class to counter hegemony is through the promotion of its own, counter-hegemonic culture and values. He believed that challenging and fighting against the ‘normalisation’ of capitalist ideas and values (i.e. the hegemony of the capitalists) was an important part of class struggle. Therefore, the eradication of capitalist hegemony must begin with the mass struggle of the workers against capitalist society, and can be completed only with the revolutionary overthrow of that society.
What would a socialist media look like?
Alternative and working-class media outlets are important, in that they are expressions of our class interests and clearly state how those interests are diametrically opposed to the capitalists and their media. However, an alternative, workers’ media is just that and our ultimate task as socialists is not simply to supplant the mass media. It’s also not simply a task of challenging the capitalist media on all those platforms that are available to us; instead we aim to take the media into democratic, public ownership, run by the working class and in defence of our interests.
All media in a socialist society would be run democratically, under the control of media workers (including journalists, printers, IT programmers and developers) and the trade unions. The media would also be open to everyone, with its parameters and role discussed widely, and decided democratically, involving the widest possible number of people. As Trotsky pointed out, socialist society would not be about “…policing public opinion, but in freeing it from the yoke of capital. This can only be done by placing the means of production – which includes the production of information [the mass media, today] – in the hands of society in its entirety.”
