Marx and Chomsky

When reading Marx’s “Communist Manifesto,” it seems like Noam Chomsky pulled a page right out of that work and adapted those ideas to fit the economy at the time he created his “Propaganda Model.” Marx’s interpretation of the structure of the economy in this section bases the structure on the division between two major classes of people: the bourgeoisie (upper class) and the proletariat (working class). Chomsky’s belief follows a similar structure except he structure’s it by saying that there are about twenty percent of people who are “relatively educated” that are the managers and teachers and then the other eighty percent are “meant to follow orders.” Chomsky’s distinction is of those people of what Marx would call the proletariat; the bourgeoisie are those who own the media.

Marx talks about how the bourgeoisie have “concentrated property in a few hands” and this is certainly true in today’s world, especially in the media, which today is owned by the media conglomerates, the biggest ones being Disney, News Corp., Viacom, and Time Warner, the concentrated bourgeoisie of the modern age. These conglomerates, according to Chomsky, are also the ones who put individuals into high positions of political power in order to have their influence reach all corners of the infrastructure. Marx believes that this occurs as well, for the bourgeoisie to go into positions of power, but Chomsky takes it one step further by explicating how the modern news, one of the main properties owned by the media conglomerates, is selected from a number of stories that come into the editors’ office of, say, The New York Times and the stories are selected based upon what the editor believes should be in the paper, sometimes excluding important stories because of what the higher-ups may tell them; this is the same for ABC World News where the stories broadcast on the air are decided by an editor who answers to his boss, someone in Disney who has control over what news gets broadcast. Also, the advent of campaign commercials for political candidates shows only the things about that candidate that they want you to see.

Marx also talks about how there is an “epidemic of overproduction” of goods and this is true of the media in the way that they have so many ads in various magazines and newspapers. In Manufacturing Consent people cut up an edition of The New York Times and laid the paper out in two different sections: ads and news. In that edition, which would have been in the early-Nineties, ads took up roughly sixty percent of the paper while news was only forty percent. Chomsky believes that all of this, ads and news, is propaganda to support the media through purchase of their goods and submitting to their ideals. In the realm of television, the amount of time in a one-hour television drama, such as Law & Order, has increased over the years to where the amount of time that there is of show now is something like forty-two minutes, which is less than it was ten years ago, and this has happened across all television programs, further pushing the media's propaganda.