Socialist parties and the trade unions confront all capitalist corporations, whether they exist in a state of pure competition or as monopolies. The notion that we "cheer" for monopolization is based on a misreading of Lenin or the ISR of 1900. Marxists simply pay attention to such trends as they do any movement within the capitalist system.
The question of Microsoft however does raise a series of questions that are somewhat different than ones involving whether we have a choice between Ma Bell, or different local phone companies. Anybody can figure out that what Gates has in mind is an Internet based on the cable TV model, while we are interested in one based on the public library. Marxists should make common cause with Ralph Nader, who has been spearheading the anti-MS drive. It doesn't matter that Sun, Netscape et al are on Nader's side. A victory for Gates would mean that free information would be compromised.
A better analogy for what Gates is up to is the commercialization of radio, which took place in the 1920s. This is the subject of Robert McChesney's "Telecommunications, Mass Media and Democracy: The Battle for Control of U.S. Broadcasting, 1928-1935."
----- Radio Days: A Struggle From the Past With a Message for Today
By Laurien Alexandre
EXTRA! July/August 1994
Telecommunications, Mass Media and Democracy: The Battle for Control of U.S. Broadcasting, 1928-1935 By Robert McChesney (Oxford University Press, 393 pp.)
Revisionist historians tell us stories that debunk dominant myths, discover new kinds of heroes and illuminate oppositional movements hidden beneath hegemonic tales of the status quo. In Telecommunications, Mass Media and Democracy, journalism professor Robert McChesney uncovers a coherent media reform movement that decried the corporate-controlled, advertising-sponsored broadcasting system whose programming and purposes debased democratic thought and citizen action.
The book recaptures the unequal struggle between the powerful commercial interests and the public interest in the early days of radio broadcasting. Democratic forces which are again gathering to reclaim the right of public participation in media policy-making can find historical guidance and challenging implications in this new book.
In the mid-1920s, broadcasting benefitted from a rich mix of stations operated by nonprofit and civic organizations, religious groups, labor unions and, in particular, colleges and universities. But in mid-1928, the Federal Radio Commission, predecessor to today's FCC, announced its landmark frequency reallocation plan, General Order 40, which reassigned 94 percent of all broadcasters to new frequencies.
The FRC determined that allocation in "the public interest, convenience, or necessity" should favor "well-rounded" broadcasters, not special interests--unless, of course, those were advertisers' self-interests. Numerous nonprofits fell victim to this logic and saw their hours reduced and their time turned over to commercial broadcasters. By the end of the decade, the contours of the modern U.S. network-dominated, advertising-supported broadcasting system were in place.
It was at the time that an organized, although not always unified, opposition to commercial broadcasting emerged. Groups like the ACLU, through its influential Radio Committee, saw the emergence of commercial broadcasting as undermining core ideals of liberal democratic political theory. Said one reformer of the day, "With its radio broadcasting in the hands of money-changers, no nation can be free."
According to McChesney, the single greatest obstacle facing the broadcast reformers was the commercial broadcasting industry itself, especially the radio lobby, which emerged full force by the early 1930s. The industry devoted its considerable resources to publicizing the market as quintessentially democratic.
To the broadcast reform movement, with far less resources but far more democratic imagination, the commercial status quo was inimical to the communication requirements of a democratic society. Private control, they felt, rendered genuine freedom of thought impossible. Political censorship was commonplace. Advertising's trivializing effect upon program content was also a concern. In 1931 Upton Sinclair wrote, "The conditions of our radio constitute a national scandal and disgrace. If allowed to continue for another 10 years, we shall have the most debased and vulgarized people in the world."
In rich detail, McChesney shows how the broadcasting industry achieved legislative victory with the enactment of the Communications Act of 1934, still the primary regulatory broadcast statute in the United States, which consolidated the commercial status quo.
McChesney's well-researched study discredits the notion that criticism of a corporate media system is a recent phenomenon. Why that movement failed, and the legacy it left for the future, has much to offer those who strive to develop a vision of a democratic media system as well as a more democratic society.
(Laurien Alexandre is the dean of academic affairs at Antioch University in Los Angeles.)
Louis Proyect
(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)