Seth Siegelaub (2022): Prefaces to Communication and Class Struggle Volume 1 and 2

At the root of labor lies communication—the act and process by which it is facilitated and organized after its initial inception. In Siegelaub’s words, communication is “the articulation of the social relations between people.” Analog to the mode of production, Siegelaub historicizes the mode of communication, the way communication takes place, derived from the circumstances that led to its establishment. While in today’s perception information and data appear as separate from their material base and bodies—thanks to ‘AI’ and ‘Cloud Computing’–historically, to transmit information has meant to physically move people as carriers and conveyors of information. The essential quality of communication is movement—of people, goods, information, and capital. How and by which means this movement can take place, depends on each society’s technological development in relation to its superstructure: the scroll, the book, the telegraph, the radio all allow for, and necessitate specific forms of information. In contrast to other media theories, Siegelaub places a much more pronounced emphasis on the production of the medium itself and its corresponding message, opposed to only examining the way in which information is disseminated.

Language

This concept of communication being connected to labor reaches back to the development of language. With the advent of labor people “had something to say to each other”, as he quotes Engels. Written at the end of the 1970s, Siegelaub already notices how speech has become both “extended in space via the telephone,” but also “reduced to a one-way monologue” by radio and television, and how imperialism aims at the destruction of “subaltern speech and languages.”

Writing

With the invention of language, communication becomes structured by class—knowledge of the written script is the domain for the few who oversee and administer power and property. Accounting thus precedes written history. Herein lie the foundation of both the division of manual and intellectual labor, and intellectual property. The scribe who was responsible in keeping record of the state apparatus finds their contemporary equivalent in the bourgeois journalist.

Localizing the Work: Books to Bookshops

In a self-reflective notion, Siegelaub looks at the gap between the conditions under which academic Marxist communication theories are produced, and those under which activists, union and party groups produce their bodies of work, and notes the lack of conversation between these groups. A crucial place for the eventual distribution of left thought is the progressive or community bookshop, that will immediately stock important works and writers, disregarding trends and popularity. In this context, Siegelaub stresses the adverse effect of advertising on virtually all other forms of communication. Today’s rise of the Content Creator and its pressure journalists and other media professionals alike only further emphasizes this point. In one of the most illuminating sections of the preface, Siegelaub breaks down the economic makeup of the production of the book and the market dynamics of a progressive publication in a mainstream dominion.

Dissecting Culture and Politics

In the preface of the second volume, Siegelaub takes on the concept of the popular, and looks more deeply at culture, communication, the social and the political. If the word were true to its etymology, “popular culture” would simply be another way to express working class culture, i.e. the way of life of the majority of the population, the people’s culture. But today’s popular culture does not stem from the people, nor does it really depend on their views or experiences for its constitution. Rather it is the product of a cultural industry in which different media reference each other and lopsidedly shape the contours of what is regarded and respected as popular by way of being first simply known, and then known to be agreed upon as a point of reference.
Siegelaub employs the metaphor of the supermarket to visualize the false notion of freedom when it comes to leisure and entertainment: people can decide between different packaging and promotion, yet the sphere of production or even the working conditions inside the market remain out of reach. But the working class is nonetheless the only class that significantly produces what is called material culture, which is then in turn appropriated and used by the ruling class. The task at hand for the workers is to overcome the separation of manual and intellectual labor and create a new form of self-conscious culture beyond alienation. His conception of cultural anthropology as “the history of the generalized development” of the worker’s personality under different forms of exploitation could bear the possibility to undermine the abuse of culture for the construction of grand narratives en route to the establishment of empires.

Likewise, communication, for Siegelaub, is exchange, be it of goods, or ideas and information. Eventually, we can appreciate not only politic’s dependence on communication as a means to convey messages, but as a process of communication within or between different groups and classes.

What’s Left of Media Theory?

The importance of this perspective is highlighted again by Jack Henrie Fisher’s postscript. Within these pages lies an important foundation for a critical theory of media and communication—one that is on par with far more recent ones, like Armond R. Towns’ On Black Media Philosophy, but doesn’t shy away from its Marxist origins.