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SUMMARY REPORT Although we use the term "the state" freely in everyday discussion and assume that others know what we are talking about, a little consideration will show that such an explicit entity is, in fact, rather difficult to identify. Although many state institutions are easy to distinguish, it is difficult to generalize in visible terms what the state actually is. Miliband started by raising the essential question of why it was that the state, even if it had a democratic body of laws and the majority of the population were working class, acted in the interest of the capitalist class? Why was it that democratic states were capitalist states?
His answer was straightforward: The direction of the state is organized by the welfare concerns of the capitalist class. This is accomplished by a twofold mechanism, first the prominent positions within the state apparatus were held by members of the bourgeoisie, and second because the economic power behind capitalist lobbyists were unrivaled when compared to other interest groups. Therefore, although the state may have a pluralistic and open democracy, the economic power of capitalist interests in conjunction with bourgeois sympathies and perceptions of those running the state apparatus, ensure that the policies of the state are dominated by the minority interests of the bourgeoisie. In reality, Ralph Miliband goes so far as to claim that the state, as such, does not exist. Rather, we can view the state as an assemblage of a number of different institutions that constitute it: the government, bureaucracy, military, police, judiciary, and parliamentary assemblies. Some of these institutions exercise power in an administrative manner (the bureaucracy), some with the threat of financial pressure (banks) or physical punishment (police), others may practice more subtle ideological power (schools and state broadcasting systems).
The institutions of the state may not all act in concert and actually may be conflict on occasion. Therefore, to understand the state in proper context, one requires a divided approach to these institutions and their powers. Miliband refers to the concept of hegemony, defined as the apparatuses of the state managing to set the agenda and pre-shape the views of the population through, for example, control of the educational system and media. This indoctrination process ensures what is in fact, class rule, will appear to be rule in the interests of all.
Various hegemonic classifications exist. Material hegemony centers on bourgeoisie efforts to control production for self-interested capital accumulation (profits), while leaving the impression that material conditions are fittingly abundant for other classes to thrive and share in material benefits. The bourgeoisie also maintains hegemony of social processes, where groups and individuals interact in contradictory conditions of conflict and cooperation. Material and cultural struggles are enacted by social processes as conflicting values and their interpretations. Social processes include the government or political activity, with its multitude of administrative, legislative, judicial, and political party functions. Culture includes the interrelationship of beliefs and language, which hinge on interpretations of social reality.
Cultural hegemony centers on bourgeois efforts to control opinions, knowledge, and the language used to interpret them. Predominant values are crucial to setting up overall values. Values help bolster hegemony over material and social processes, while shaping the socio-cultural consciousness and unconsciousness of interacting individuals and groups. Hegemonic processes are manipulative and often invisible efforts; the bourgeoisie casts the best light on its actions, hiding the exploitation of others in its predominant interpretation of values, such as social welfare, innovation, security, democracy, freedom, individualism, and development.
Such values usually are proffered up in the language of economics, which justifies the usefulness of actions under the proposition that parallels efficiency and social well-being. Schools are central to hegemony. They are intended to indoctrinate in children bourgeois knowledge and values, understanding of social class position, and work habits and skills. In schools, cultural hegemony is intended to limit individuals: to have them think, perceive, and act in certain ways. Culture, then, becomes a way of seeing. Miliband's analysis maintains that hegemonic processes are central to class struggle as the bourgeoisie seek to "banish all sense of radical alternatives from the mind of the subordinated classes" (Miliband 1991).
Miliband accepts that hegemony can never be taken for granted, but cites the U. S. A. as an example, where any organized, radical powerful opposition to dominant class values and ideas is noticeably lacking.
He sees this situation as a clear illustration of successful hegemony, and significantly claims that the same trend is now visible in British politics. For Miliband the underclass are those most economically damaged by the power struggle operating throughout all levels of present-day capitalist society. They constitute the most deprived members of the working class: the permanently unemployed or disabled. The class analysis undertaken by Miliband, however, is essentially an analysis of power and domination, the power elite and the underclass representing the respective winners and losers of class struggle and hegemonic manipulation. An important machines available to capitalists for indoctrination (hegemonic manipulation) of the underclass and proletariat is the mass media. The media acts in capitalist interests.
Information is distilled by a set of rules that act to screen the news and other material disseminated by the media. These are: ? the size, concentrated ownership, owner wealth, and profit orientation of the dominant mass-media firms? advertising as the primary income source of the mass media?
the reliance of the media on information provided by government business, and "experts" funded and approved by these primary sources and agents of power? stricture as a means of disciplining the media? anticommunist dogma (or "pro-capitalist fodder") as a nationalistic control mechanism. (invoke "nationalism") However, even in spite of the process of hegemony, from time to time, reform gains popularity. However, when socialist governments are elected to power on a particular platform, they are regularly able to detach from commitments made earlier in the face of widespread social unrest.
Miliband explains that it is not sufficient for socialists to capture office rather, it is necessary for any socialist Government to be backed up by a mass extra-parliamentary movement. This movement could counter the political and economic pressures that would be brought to bear against socialist policies, both internal and external to the state apparatus. These points indicate why existing power structures cannot effectively be challenged through democratic elections (as discussed later in this review). The government strategy for countering and controlling socialist policies is based on an implicit restriction of the policy.
A policy can turn to protest and it must be protest, "to the state", for "the state" to take action. When protesters take direct action, which in itself furthers their aims, (rather than relying on the government to do...
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Research essay sample on Social Processes Mass Media
