The problem of social order cannot be left as one of simple class differentiation. There is a reasonably direct and important relation between the relative powers of amplification and duration and the amounts of capital involved in their installation and use. It is much easier, obviously, to establish a capitalist or state-capitalist monopoly in radio-transmission than in megaphones. Such monopolies are still of crucial social and political importance. Yet within the amplificatory and durative means there are many historical contradictions. The very directness of access, at each end of the process, allows substantial flexibility. The short-wave radio receiver, and now especially the transistor radio, enable many of us to listen to voices beyond our own social system. The crucial phase of monopoly-capitalist development, including capitalist control of the advanced technologies of centralized amplification and recording, came also to include the intensive development of such machines as transistor radios and tape-recorders, which were intended for the ordinary channels of capitalist consumption, but as machines involving only primary communicative skills gave limited facilities also for alternative speaking, listening and recording, and for some direct autonomous production. This is still only a marginal area, by comparison with the huge centralized systems of amplification and recording, based on varying but always substantial degrees of control and selection in the interests of the central social order. Yet though marginal it is not insignificant, in contemporary political life.
Moreover there are many technical developments which, within the always contradictory social productive process, are extending this range: cheaper radio transmitters, for example. Within a socialist perspective these means of autonomous communication can be seen not only, as under capitalism or in the difficult early stages of socialism, as alternatives to the central dominant amplificatory and durative systems, but in a perspective of democratic communal use in which, for the first time in human history, there could be a full potential correspondence between the primary physical communicative resources and the labour-created forms of amplification and duration. Moreover this profound act of social liberation would itself be a qualitative development of the existing direct physical resources. It is in this perspective that we can reasonably and practically achieve Marx’s sense of communism as ‘the production of the very form of communication’, in which, with the ending of the division of labour within the mode of production of communication itself, individuals would speak ‘as individuals’, as integral human beings.
There are greater but not insuperable difficulties in those communicative processes which are technically alternative to the use of direct physical communicative resources. The most remarkable fact of electronic communications technology is that, coming very much later in human history than the technologies of writing and printing, it has nevertheless, in some of its main uses (with certain critical exceptions which we shall have to discuss), a much closer modal correspondence to direct physical communicative forms: speaking, listening, gesturing, observing. This means that there are in fact fewer obstacles, within this general mode, to abolition of the technical division of labour. The problems of the general social and economic—revolutionary—abolition of the division of labour are of course common to all modes, but there are here, as in other areas of production, significant technical differentiae which, even within a revolutionary society, will affect at least the timing of the practical ending of such divisions.
The first fact about the alternative communicative modes is that they require, for their very performance, skills beyond those which are developed in the most basic forms of social intercourse. Writing and reading are obvious examples, and the extent of illiteracy or imperfect literacy, even in advanced industrial societies, to say nothing of pre-industrial or industrializing societies, is evidently a major obstacle to abolition of the division of labour within this vital area of communication. Literacy programmes are thus basic within any socialist perspective. But their success, essential as it is, reaches only to the point already achieved within more direct physical communicative processes, in that there is then potential access at each end of the process. The problems encountered in the direct modes remain for solution: problems of effective access, of alternatives to class and state control and selection, and of the economics of general distribution. Theoretically these are of the same order as those encountered in democratization of the direct modes, but the costs of the transformation processes which are inherent in all alternative forms may significantly affect at least the timing of their solution.
Here also, however, technical developments are making some kinds of common access simpler. Mechanical and electronic forms of printing and reproduction are now available at relatively low capital costs. Beyond these there is a dynamic area of technical development which is socially and economically more ambiguous. From computer typesetting to the electronically direct composition of type—and beyond these, perhaps, though it is still some years away, direct electronic interchange, each way, between voice and print—there are now changes in the means of communicative production which at once affect class relations within the processes, and lead also to changes—indeed a rapid rise, at least in the first phase —in the necessary level of capitalization. Thus the relationship between writing and printing, developed in traditional technology, has been an outstanding instance of what is at once a technical and a social division of labour, in which writers do not print, but that is seen as only a technicality, and, crucially, printers do not write but are seen as merely instrumental in the transmission of the writing of others. The class relations within newspapers, for example—between editors and journalists who have things to say and who write them, and a range of craftsmen who then technically produce and reproduce the words of these others—are obvious and now acute. There is an ideological crisis within the capitalist press whenever, on important occasions, print craftsmen assert their presence as more than instrumentality, refusing to print what others have written, or, more rarely, offering themselves to write as well as print. This is denounced, within bourgeois ideology, as a threat to the ‘freedom of the press’, but the terms allow us to see how this bourgeois definition of freedom is founded, deeply, in a supposedly permanent division not only of labour but of human status (those who have something to say and those who do not).
Yet now, in the new technology, journalists, who ‘write’, may also, in a direct process, compose type. Traditional crafts are threatened, and there is a familiar kind of industrial dispute. Its terms are limited, but in any pre-revolutionary society the limits are an inevitable consequence of the basic social division of labour. Theoretically the solution is evident. Any gain in immediate access to print is a social gain comparable with the gains of direct transmission and reception of voices. But the capital costs are high, and the realities of access will be in direct relation to the forms of control over capital and the related general social order. Even where these forms have become democratic, there is still a range of questions about the real costs of universal-access communication, and obviously about the comparative costs of such access in different media. Much of the advanced technology, is being developed within firmly capitalist social relations, and investment, though variably, is directed within a perspective of capitalist reproduction, in immediate and in more general terms. At present it seems more probable that self-managing communication systems, with forms of universal access that have genuinely transcended the received cultural divisions of labour, will come earlier in voice systems than in print systems, and will continue to have important economic advantages.
‘Direct’ and ‘Indirect’ Communication
Thus far we have made only a first-level comparison between amplificatory and durative systems, on the one hand, and alternative systems, on the other. This comparison takes us a long way into the problem, but there is an important second-level comparison to which we must now turn.
The technical forms which are primarily amplificatory and durative include, as we have seen, within any class-divided society, certain social conditions which qualify their