WHAT IS POLITICAL ECONOMY?

A general, but ambitious definition of political economy is the study of control and sur­vival in social life. Control refers specifically to the internal organization of social group members and the process of adapting to change.

Understanding the interactions between control and survival yields a more specific definition of political economy as the study of the social relations, particularly the power relations that mutually constitute the production, distribution and consumption

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of resources, including communication resources from the press to the Internet (Mosco, 2009). This distinguishes political economy from studies where the focus is primarily on the means of communication (e.g., radio, television and other information and commu­nication technologies [ICTs]) or on various communication modes (e.g., interpersonal, organizational, or networked), to consider communication as inseparable from social relations of power. This means that a political economy of communication is necessar­ily critical in its consideration of historical and current articulations of power, whether experienced as social inequality, as manifest in struggles for knowledge legitimacy or in efforts to realize democracy more generally.

Political economy is distinguished from traditional economic theory in its insistence on the inseparability of the economic from the social (the combination of human thoughts and [inter]actions with each other and the natural environment), whether in theory or in practice. It also recognizes that what is social is never static, but is constituted through power dynamics (including harmony, negotiation, struggle, and conflict).

Political economy has consistently placed in the foreground the goal of understand­ing social change and historical transformation. For classical political economists of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries such as Adam Smith ([1776] 1937), David Ricardo (1819) and John Stuart Mill (1848), this meant comprehending the great capi­talist revolution, the vast social upheaval that transformed societies based primarily on agricultural labor into commercial, manufacturing and, eventually, industrial societies. For Karl Marx ([1867] 1976), it meant examining the conflicting and dynamic forces within capitalism and the relationship between capitalism and other forms of political economic organization, in order to understand the processes of social change that would, he contended, ultimately undermine the capitalist system. Orthodox economics, which began to coalesce against political economy in the late nineteenth century, tended to set aside this concern for the dynamics of history and social change, in order to transform political economy into the science of economics, which, like the science of physics, would provide general, if static, explanations.

Political economists of the Internet start by situating it in history through an examina­tion of the interactions between social forces and technological instruments that have shaped the Internet over time. How has the Internet been influenced by and helped to change power relations and the systems of social class, gender and race relations in society? Beginning with histories of electrical power (Nye, 1990), the telegraph (Winseck and Pike, 2007), telephone (Martin, 1991), radio (Douglas, 1987), and television (Fisher and Fisher, 1996), political economists have identified several historical continuities between the use and development of these communication resources and the Internet.

Foremost among the research findings is the general trend towards monopolies and oligopolies of corporate ownership and control affecting the full range of Internet use and development. Although not complete, this includes: ‘entry’ (hardware and soft­ware required for access and use); ‘service provision’ and ‘infrastructure’ (data carriage, processing and storage); content (extension of commercial media conglomerates and intellectual property regimes); ‘content management’ (search engines and databases); as well as ‘content exchange’ (through the so-called ‘social media’ used for data collection); the sum total of which is underpinned and promoted by advertising, marketing, and public relations (Fuchs, 2010, 2011; Sussman, 2011). In each case, with some national variations, only a handful of large corporations dominate globally. These include Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, and major media companies like News Corp., Disney, NBC, and CBS (Winseck and Jin, 2011). While the names may change periodi­cally, the existing structures of corporate power remain largely the same (Schiller, 1999).

Another historical constant in Internet use and development is the significant role of Western nation-states and their militaries in supporting and directing specific trajecto­ries. While it is common knowledge that the Internet was forged out of this nexus (with some debate as to whether government, corporations or peer networks were the lead innovators), the connections remain significant, as many of the world’s largest commu­nication corporations were established to fulfill, and continue to depend on, government procurement and military specifications and contracts (Schiller, 2011; Mazepa, 2015). This relationship is only intensifying as converging networks bring the state and military into intimate relationships with business in a mutual concern over network security.

The (re)creation of myths associated with technological change is also an historical accessory to the Internet. As each new form of technology is introduced, the death of the ‘old’ media is pronounced, and the ‘new’ media are heralded as providing the ultimate solution - promising an end to enduring political economic and social problems (Mosco, 2004). Glossy predictions offer the possibility of heretofore unrealized economic gains, and limitless freedom and democracy for all. While such myths are arguably possible and are undeniably attractive, they tend to gloss over the ‘complexities and contradictions’ of new technology, and in the case of digital media like the Internet, shield the ideal of cyberspace from ‘the messiness of down-to-earth politics’ (ibid., pp. 30-31).

Political economy is also characterized by an interest in examining the social whole, or the ‘totality of social relations’ that make up the economic, political, social, and cultural areas of life. From Adam Smith, whose interest in understanding social life was not constrained by the disciplinary boundaries that mark academic life today, to Karl Marx, and contemporary institutional, conservative and neo-Marxian theorists, political econo­mists have consistently aimed to build on the unity of the political and the economic by accounting for their mutual influence and for their relationship to wider social and sym­bolic spheres of activity. Accordingly, the political economist asks: how are power and wealth related? How do these influence our systems of communication, information, and entertainment?

Attending to the social totality means that the ‘wealth of networks’ (Benkler, 2006) can also be seen as ‘networks of wealth’, as digital divisions complement divisions of social class, gender, race, and other social inequalities following a long history of inclusions and exclusions. Political economists thus identify and question the extent of power conferred by profit priorities that significantly skew public access and participation away from those who can least afford it, or otherwise direct and contain Internet use and develop­ment under private ownership of the means and modes of communication.

This focus on social relationships means that the Internet is not driven by the ‘invis­ible hand’ of the market, or solely by either corporate decision-making or individual consumers. Instead, it is made up of the collective and changing networks of institutions, organizations, social movements, and other social aggregates that use and develop it. These networks are not considered random, objective or agentless connections, but instances and places where power coalesces and is exercised. A political economy approach thus pays close attention to the contested grounds of business decisions, gov­ernment policy-making, legal challenges, and labor negotiations over the range of com­munication resources as primary sites where the relationship and extent of private and public ownership are negotiated, opposed and decided (Mosco and McKercher, 2008). These are important indications that the Internet is the result of continual and conten­tious political processes, while appreciating that research is itself a political process, and thus remains open to scrutiny and change (Fuchs, 2010).

Political economy is also noted for its commitment to ‘moral philosophy’, understood as both an interest in the values that help to create social behavior and in those moral principles that ought to guide efforts to change it. For Adam Smith, this meant under­standing values like self-interest, materialism, and individual freedom, which he argued were contributing to the rise of commercial capitalism, whereas for Karl Marx moral phi­losophy meant reconciling the ongoing struggle over human agency between the innate drive to realize individual and social value in human labor and the push (in capitalism) to reduce labor to a marketable commodity.

Contemporary political economy tends to favor moral philosophical standpoints that promote the extension of democracy to all aspects of social life. This goes beyond the political realm, which guarantees rights to participate in government, to the economic, social and cultural domains where supporters of democracy call for income equality, access to education, full public participation in cultural production, and a guarantee of the right to communicate freely.

Following from this view, ‘social praxis’, or the fundamental unity of thinking and acting, also occupies a central place in political economy. Specifically, in contrast to traditional academic positions which separate the sphere of research from that of social intervention, political economy traces its roots back to ancient Greek and Roman politi­cal philosophy (of Aristotle, Plato and Socrates) with its practice of providing advice and counsel to leaders. Accordingly, intellectual life is taken as a form of social transforma­tion, and social intervention as a form of knowledge.

Taking collective responsibility and accountability seriously then, the political economy approach expressed through praxis is necessarily critical. As previously underscored, this last characteristic means questioning and challenging social relations of power; not as just an exercise of criticism or philosophy, but as a method of normative and practical evaluation with the objective of suggesting and advancing public alternatives in the use and development of the Internet, among other shared resources (Artz et al., 2006).

Starting at the individual level, this involves critical pedagogy that advances public education and research, not as justification and training to support the status quo, but as activism that facilitates public participation in decision-making, equitable resource dis­tribution, and social and environmental health. This is advanced by the public nature of the research itself through avenues such as: education and information venues (ranging from universities and public conferences to newspapers and social media); direct activ­ism and publicizing research via alternative media; publications in open-access journals (e.g., Global Media Journal, triple C, and Democratic Communique); online research­sharing sites (e.g., the Canadian Media Concentration Project); as well as policy involve­ment on local, regional, national and international levels (e.g., see Mansell and Raboy, 2011 and Padovani and Calabrese, 2014). These initiatives aim to take action on issues such as communication rights, public access, rural broadband development, net neutral­ity, privacy and lawful access, as links between local and global Internet use and develop­ment, and national and international policy (e.g., the University of Toronto Information Policy Research Program). Praxis-driven research includes identifying and working with the range of labor, feminist, environmental and other non-government organiza­tions that have been part of the use, development and decision-making processes of the Internet from the start (Lee, 2006; Mosco, 2009, pp. 58-61; Mansell and Raboy, 2011, Chapters 8-14).

Political economists view democratizing the means and modes of communication as inseparable from movements to democratize politics and economics more generally (Hackett and Carroll, 2006). They question, for example, researchers and other stake­holders who foreground the Internet as an unlimited space for individual expression or democratic politics, while downplaying or ignoring other initiatives that could contribute to a democratic economy and facilitate meaningful public participation in national and international decision-making (Fuchs, 2011).

The many schools of thought that comprise the political economy approach guar­antee the inclusion of a significant variety of viewpoints and vigorous internal debate. Arguably the most important divide in political economy emerged in response to the classical political economy of Adam Smith and his followers. One set of scholars, which eventually established the contemporary discipline of economics, focused on the indi­vidual as the primary unit of analysis and the market as the principle structure, both coming together through individuals’ decisions to register wants or demands in the mar­ketplace. Over time, this approach has dominated mainstream thought on the Internet and progressively eliminated classical political economy’s concerns for history, the social totality, moral philosophy and praxis. It thus transformed classical political economy into the purportedly value-free ‘science’ of economics founded on the empirical investigation of marketplace behavior conceptualized in the language of mathematics. A second set of scholars opposed this as a limited and restricted methodology and refused to abandon the classical concerns, such that subsequent formulations continued to engage in a holis­tic method. The complexity of engaging in such a comprehensive approach to political economy leaves us with a dynamic and contentious range of contemporary formulations.

Beginning at one end of the political-economic spectrum, a ‘neo-conservative political economy’ thrives on the work of people like Stigler, Buchanan and Coase, all recipients of the Nobel Prize in Economics, who apply the categories of neoclassical economics to all social behavior with the aim of expanding individual freedom. In contrast, ‘insti­tutional political economy’, primarily identified with the work of Galbraith (who drew principally on Veblen), argues that institutional and technological constraints help shape markets to the advantage of those corporations and governments large and powerful enough to control them.

With its attention to power differentials, institutionalists created a framework for media studies, documenting, for example, how large media companies can control the production and distribution of mass media products to restrict diversity of content, specifically by filtering out work that challenges pro-business views (Herman and Chomsky, 2002). Also attending to the concentration and networks of power rela­tions underpinning capitalism, ‘neo-Marxian’ approaches, including those of the French Regulation School, world systems theory, and others engaged in the debate over globalization, continue to place social class at the center of analysis. These are principally responsible for debates on the relationship between monopoly capitalism, the automation and deskilling of work, and the growth of an international division of labor.

A number of social movements have also generated and invigorated schools of political economy. These include ‘feminist political economy’, which addresses the persistence of patriarchy and the dearth of attention to gender in political economy, distinguishing how gender is articulated in household labor, as well as media and technology production and consumption (Meehan and Riordan, 2002). Expanding the holistic approach in political economy to the ecosystem, ‘environmental political economy’ concentrates on the links between social behavior and the wider organic environment (see Mosco, 2009, pp. 60-61). Last, a political economy that melds the analysis of social movements and labor to iden­tify alternative forms of organization and social change is advanced in the ‘autonomous Marxist theoretical tradition’ (Dyer-Witheford, 1999).

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