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THE POST PROPAGANDA SOCIETY
Herschel Hardin Leadership Campaign
Policy Circular 10 • May 25, 1995 |
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Pepsi, Coke, McDonald's, those shiny, speeding cars, Nike, Coor's Light television commercials come at us 12 minutes every hour, day in and day out, on the most powerful medium in history. Since Canadians watch on average three and a half hours of television per day, that's 40 minutes of unvarnished propaganda daily with one cumulative message that what counts in life is buying consumer goods.
The consequences are enormous. Self indulgence and instant gratification are glorified. Everything else is downgraded by default self discipline, co operation, productive investment, liveable neighbour-hoods, enterprise, environment, community. Social democracy, which is an expression of ourselves as social beings, is subtly undermined. Also, because most of those goods are produced in the private sector, the private sector is indirectly glorified. The public sector, which we politically support, is culturally pushed into the shadows. Then we wonder why, in election campaigns, we get so badly beaten.
We haven't yet adjusted to the television age. Commercialism, amplified dramatically by the intrusiveness of television, is one of the most pervasive and powerful forces of our time. It is on a par, culturally and hence politically, with the computer chip in technology. In the last 15 years, it has gotten much worse, more bold and invasive, not least because it has gone unchallenged. Through what is euphemistically called "sponsorship," it has also now taken over much of sports and culture. The capture of the Olympics and of rock concerts are typical examples. The list goes on to competitive sports and the performing arts at large.
Imagine, now, liberating our media, especially television, from brand name and other commercial propaganda, with its waste and its profound negative consequences. Replace this commercialism with a vibrant, humanist, popular culture of our own and with independent consumer and environmental information. Phase out or tax away the overlay of commercial propaganda on sports and culture.
We will have created the first Post Propaganda Society of the electronic age.
I cannot think of any task more important for ourselves as a political party. Politics is ultimately framed by culture. The Post Propaganda Society is also true modernism. It will leave the propaganda ridden American society behind, like an outdated relic that somehow, for some strange, atavistic reason, lingers on in backward places. Articulating the Post Propaganda Society will mark NDP politics powerfully as the politics of the future.
There is also, here, a rare strategic opportunity. Our main political opponent is really the American model that's what we're fighting against in the end. Commercialism is its weak spot. Television commercials are a closed propaganda system in the classic sense. They are pervasive, maddeningly intrusive, repetitive, and without right of reply (for free and equal speech, like counter commercials, would destroy it). Such a propaganda system simply cannot be justified.
An American sociologist compared it to "socialist realism" propaganda in Stalin's Russia, except it is more professionally manipulative and insidious. He called it "capitalist realism." The name is not quite apt, for capitalism invests capital, devises technology, and produces things. Advertising propaganda portrays only the consumption of things. I prefer to call it "bureaucratic realism," after the marketing bureaucracy which sustains it and lives off it. One could also call it "materialist realism."
Whatever name we give it, it is vulnerable to challenge in the same way that free speech broke up communist bureaucratic sway in Eastern Europe once free speech was allowed.
Behind this propaganda system is a wasteful marketing bureaucracy and its bureaucratically-driven expansion. The advertising cadres themselves are cynical and overfed. They hide behind free enterprise ideology in much the same that their counterparts in the old Soviet Union hid behind the ideology of democratic centralism.
Their activity is also extraordinarily wasteful, like the waste of all entrenched bureaucracies that are protected by ideology. The overheads for raising money commercially for television in Canada, for example, are upwards of $750 million annually, or three quarters of a billion dollars. This is money eaten up by agency commissions, sales commissions, producing commercials, etc., and which never gets into television proper. It amounts to an estimated 57 cents for each net dollar made available an astonishing bureaucratic slice. This money comes out of our pockets as consumers. The administrative cost of financing television through public appropriation or cable fees, by comparison, is nominal in percentage terms.
Brand name propaganda also undermines competitive markets is in fact anti free enterprise. The purpose of brand name advertising is to raise the price that can be charged, over and above the market. Building "brand-name equity," it's called, in the jargon. Together these elements add from 5 to 10 per cent to the average price of consumer goods in affected sectors in effect a punitive "tax" privately imposed.
The commercialism is most objectionable, however, for what it is in itself an indefensible propaganda system which distorts values and, through that, causes the misallocation of resources. It is profoundly dehumanizing. Early CCFers recognized this. They knew that commercialism diminished us as human beings and was antithetical to the socially oriented society they were trying to create. In the early radio debates, they fought against the American model and the idea of radio as a "billboard of the air."
We, in this generation, forgot too soon. I propose to free all of Canadian television from commercial propaganda and to move on from there, reducing the cultural space that commercialism takes up elsewhere. I propose, in short, nothing less than the creation of the first Post Propaganda Society of the electronic age. The argument is waiting to be made. And once the debate is engaged, Canadian politics, and Canada, will never be the same.
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