Fascism And Capitalism: A Critical Analysis

Habermas notes that newspapers were initially commercial sheets that dissemin- ated “news” (i.e. what was novel and contemporary), but then were transformed into instruments of political debate under the pressures of the American and French Revolutions and the organization of political groups to revolutionize society. Yet newspapers also fell prey to commercial imperatives and often put profit and busi- ness interests above political opinion, selling advertising and papers via tabloid sensationalism and entertainment rather than disseminating political information and

ideas. Moreover, as the society became more dominated by mass media, powerful corporations came to control major institutions …show more content…
While Habermas’s theory of the public sphere describes the earlier phase of liberal bourgeois society, Marx and Engels analyze the consolidation of the class rule of the bourgeoisie and hegemony of capitalism during the mid-nineteenth century. Gramsci in turn presents the transition from liberal capitalism to fascism in Italy in the 1930s, while the work of Horkheimer and Adorno can be read as an articulation of a theory of the state and monopoly capitalism which became domin- ant throughout the world during the 1930s. This era constituted a form of “organized capitalism,” in which the state and mammoth corporations managed the economy and in which individuals submitted to state and corporate …show more content…
Theories of structure (linguistic, anthropological, social) emerged from an age of burgeoning technology and influenced the Marxist revisionism of French philosopher Louis Althusser. Begin- ning with Marx’s thesis that the mode of production determines the character of social, intellectual, and cultural life, Althusser sees ideology as an effect of the struc- ture of society, a force in which economic, political-legal, cultural, and ideological practices are interrelated to shape social consciousness. In Althusser’s version of “structural Marxism,” “ideological state apparatuses” (schooling, media, the judiciary, etc.) “interpellated” individuals into preconceived forms of subjectivity that left no space for opposition or resistance. On this account, subjects were constructed as pre- constituted individuals, men or women, members of a specific class, and were induced to identify with the roles, behavior, values, and practices of the existing state- capitalist society. In fact, it is Althusser who advanced the idea that ideology operates via everyday practices, rather than through some form of externally imposed doctrine. Combining psychoanalysis, Marxism, and structuralism, Althusser thus analyzed how individuals were incorporated into specific social systems and functioned