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<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Joanna,</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>To answer your question more directly.
Advertising does not really get going until well into the early half of
the 20th century. Hence it just was not a prevalent cultural
phenomena or institution. So yes Marx's key concepts (fetishism,
alienation, etc.,) would have to be applied to adverstising. A
more general angle would be to start from Marx's observations about the relative
and cultural historical determination of needs/wants and the role that
advertising has come to play in helping to determine the content of working
class desires and expectations with respect to their living
standards. </FONT></DIV>
<DIV>____________________________________<BR>Travis W Fast<BR></DIV>
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<DIV><BR></DIV>G'day Joanna,<BR><BR>I think the British Culturalists of the
late fifties and sixties would consider the following observations inspired by
a Marxist world-view:<BR><BR><BR>There was<B> Richard Hoggart</B> insisted
that advertisers should not be used as 'scapegoats for bigger social problems'
but argued also that neither should critics 'make easy accommodations' with
them. Where literature sought to produce self-understanding via a tweak of the
emotions, advertising does not. Anyone who believed that it was better for
people to understand themselves and their weaknesses, he argued, 'must regard
most modern advertising as, at the best, a waste of good human resources and,
at the worst, a misuse of people.<BR><BR>He wrote in 1965 (I think it was in
his <B>Uses of Literacy</B>)<BR><BR>"If critics spend a lot of time attacking
advertising this is not because advertising is a peculiar kind of vice, but
because it is a symptom, because it exhibits more plainly and persistently
than anything else the issues raised by mass persuasion. At bottom the
case against advertising is the same as that against political propaganda,
much religious proselytizing, and any other form of emotional
blackmail.<BR><BR>The case is this: that advertising tries to achieve its ends
by emotionally abusing its audiences. Recognizing that we all have
fears, hopes, anxieties, aspirations, insecurities, advertisers seek not to
increase our understanding of these feelings and so perhaps our command of
them, but to use their existence to increase the sales of whatever product
they happen to have been paid to sell at ant particular time. They
exploit human inadequacy."... .(Hoggart, Vol.1, 206)<BR><BR><BR>And then there
was<B> Raymond Williams</B>: In the last chapter in the 1976 edition of
<I>Communications</I>, Williams reaffirmed his sixteen-year-old conviction
that a crisis in communications was afoot:<BR><BR>"This book was conceived in
1960, in what seems, in retrospect, a very different Britain. Yet the
first thing that struck me, working through it again, was the essential
continuity of the crisis in communications. It is no kind of
satisfaction to see that the analysis of the the condition of the press, of
tendencies in broadcasting and publishing, and the subordination of a general
communications process to an increasingly powerful system of advertising and
public relations, has been strikingly confirmed. Since the analysis was
first made, seven more national newspapers have closed down, and as I write
the future of several others is in serious doubt. Commercial interests,
having made their way into television, have gained a foothold ... in sound
broadcasting, and are keeping up their pressure to exploit such new
developments as cable ... the crisis is not external to the system; it is a
part of it ... It is clear, looking back, that the period from the late
fifties to the early seventies in Britain was a time of evasion of all the
structural problems of the society. But this was not, as it is now ...
represented, the result of general inattention. The evasion was
systematic, and the communications institutions were one of its central
agencies (Williams 1976: 180-81)."<BR><BR>Cheers,<BR>Rob.<BR><BR><BR>
<BLOCKQUOTE>My son has put me on high alert that he is showing up on Tuesday
night with a paper to write in which he is to do a Marxist critique of an
advertisement.....and I am to "help."<BR><BR>Has Marx written about
advertisement anywhere specifically -- or does one just use his
alienation/commodification stuff to get into
it?<BR><BR>Joanna<BR><BR>___________________________________<BR>http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk<BR><BR></BLOCKQUOTE><?/fontfamily>
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