The paper addresses the enormous qualitative transformation in the process of commodification that in the recent decades expanded to almost all areas of social life. Recently, this qualitative leap has been due to the overwhelming capitalist enclosure of the wider communicative field (information, knowledge, language and culture). Historically, the emergence of these processes accompanied the expansion of historical capitalism several centuries ago. However, they gathered pace in the nineteenth century with the increasing influence of advertising and industrial production, which finally led to the development of the full-blown (industrialised) mass media and (mostly US) media-cultural conglomerates in the early twentieth century. Since the mid-twentieth century, there has been an ongoing explosion of commodification in the wider field of communication, which now goes far beyond culture and media. In the words of Herbert I. Schiller, this has been a ‘total absorption in commercial translations that permeates the tightest echelons of the social order filters down to all levels’.
The paper proceeds from the epistemological perspective of historical materialism, understood in Werner Bonefeld’s sense as ‘the critique of things understood as dogmatic. It melts and dissolves all that appears solid’. Its subject matter forms a constitutive part of the field of political economy of communication. The analysis follows the Braudelian ‘longue durée’ approach of analysing long-term changes in social structures.
Jernej A. Prodnik is Junior Researcher in Media and Communication Studies at the Faculty of Social Sciences in Ljubljana. His research focus is the political economy of communication.