Manufacturing Inequality
The process is not novel. Before the nineteenth century was two decades old, it was clearthat the established vocabulary of "ranks" and "estates" had been over-taken by events. Itwas altogether too rigid to catch capitalism's creative destruction of the old social order. Anew, more flexible, term was needed to describe the emerging pattern of economic divisions.That term was "class." But as John Stuart Mill noted in 1834, the classification of society into” landlords, capitalists and laborers" rapidly became as ossified and a historical as the feudal vision it had displaced. Too many commentators, he complained:
... seem, to think of the distinction of society into those three classes as if it were one of God's ordinances not man's, and ... scarcely any one of them seems to have proposed to himself as a subject of inquiry, what changes the relations of those classes to one another are likely to undergo in the progress of society,(Quoted in Briggs, 1985: 3).
Of the various writers who took up the challenge of mapping shifts in class relations, Marx has been by far and away the most enduringly influential. Unfortunately, he diedconceptually intestate. Although he saw class as the axial principle of social division, and class struggle as the principle engine of historical change, he never provided a concise definition of what exactly he meant by a class. As he notes on the final page of the last, and unfinished, volume of his magnum opus, Capital, "What constitutes a class" is the obvious "first question to be answered" in any class analysis (Marx, 1863-7) but, tantalizingly, the manuscript breaks off a few lines later before he offers an answer. Looking across the range of his work, however, we can identify five basic dimensions to his analysis of class:
· class structure
· class formation
· class culture
· class consciousness, and
· class action.
Even his fiercest critics have tended to accept this list as a
…… 每一种学术思想的发端都不是孤立于社会情境的,传播政治经济学也不例外,其学术发展与资本主义体系在全球范围内的建立、急剧扩张以及与之相抗争的社会运动的发展密切相关。同时,任何一个学科身份与地位的确立,除了其内在学理与研究路径的充实与丰富之外,更重要的推进源泉还在于社会行动与实践力量的相互建构,以及学术流派之间的对话与交锋。莫斯可(Vincent Mosco)以商品化(commodification)、空间化(spatialization)和结构化(structuration)切入传播政治经济学分析(Mosco,1996);赵月枝把传播政治经济学对传播与社会权力关系的分析模式解构为四个相互关联的主要组成部分,即提供语境(contextualizing)、图绘(mapping)、衡量(measuring/evaluating)与干预(intervening)(赵月枝,2007a;赵月枝、邢国欣,2007)。这个读本,因篇幅局限,难以囊括传播政治经济学范畴全部的认识论、方法论与全球各地本土实践的经验成果,仅以传播政治经济学所主要关切的研究议题为核心,分别从该学派的历史起源与理论基础,方法思索与跨学科对话,广告的权力与受众商品的塑造,产权与盎格鲁一美国语境下的控制,资本主义整合的全球、民族与本土动力,转型的场域、能动性与进程等六个方面建构这个学派批判性的阐释路径。读本的论文组织以英美为主,兼顾其他**与地区,主流批判中涵盖另类建设,突出对话,在传播与政治经济相互关联、作用的过程中关注多样化的论题,并贯穿**、社会性别、种族、**与区域的研究视野。
一、传播政治经济学的马克思主义学术指向
自从资本主义产生的那**起,资本主义在带来社会生产力的飞速发展和社会财富的高度积聚的同时,也带来了剥削、压迫、不平等和血腥,包括殖民暴力、法西斯主义、20世纪的两次世界大战和对人类赖以生存的文化和生态系统的侵蚀。因此,意识形态和资本主义制度的再生产、不平等的社会关系在社会文化领域的构建和合法化、马克思和恩格斯在《德意志意识形态》中所言的统治**的思想是如何成为占统治地位的思想的问题,包括丹·席勒(Dan Schiller)在《罗伯特·A·布莱第的遗产:传播政治经济学的反法西斯起源》一文中所提到的社会文化传播系统是如何把工人**的革命直觉(revolutionary instincts)平复和淡化的问题,就成了一个半世纪以来后马克思学者们上下求索的问题。这些学者不断从各自社会情境的“当代性”出发,讨论马克思理论的内容指向和实践品格。马克思理论文本历经着不同国籍的学者解读、诠释与实践,已在世界范围内形成了一个复杂的马克思主义传统。