Explore "White Collar" by C. Wright Mills on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
To believe that ‘the ideology wherein men become conscious of class conflict and fight it out' is determined solely by ‘material contradictions' is to overlook the positive role of the mass media of communications. If the consciousness of men does not determine their existence, neither does their material existence determine their consciousness. Between consciousness and existence stand communications, which influence such consciousness as men have of their existence. Men do ‘enter into definite, necessary relations which are independent of their will,' but communications enter to slant the meanings of these relations for those variously involved in them. The forms of political consciousness may, ‘in the end, be relative to the means of production, but, in the beginning, they are relative to the contents of the communication media.
In Marx's day there was no radio, no movies, no television; there was only printed matter, which, as he demonstrated several times, was in such shape that it was possible for an enterprising individual to start up a newspaper or magazine. It was easier to overlook the role of mass media or to underplay it, when they were not so persuasive in effect and yet were more widely accessible and, despite political censorship, more widely competitive.