Mediation (Marxist Theory and Media Studies) - Mediation in Marxism

Mediation in Marxism

The problem of mediation in Marxism is also referred to as the problem of determination, or namely how social actors navigate the social structures that bind them. For Marx, the primary form of mediation is labor, which forms a dialectical relationship between a worker’s body and nature. Labor thus mediates between humans and the natural world. Once labor becomes reified, or made into an abstraction that becomes a commodity, however, it becomes alienated from the worker who owns it and becomes exchangeable just like any other commodity. Once this occurs, capital becomes the mediating or determining factor, with the capitalist setting the wage rate or exchange-value of labor. The only thing the worker owns in this case, his or her labor power or ability to work, becomes the worker’s sole means of subsistence. The worker must get as much value from his or her labor as is possible on the open market in order to survive.

A major theme in Marxism is the problem of mediation or determination: what amount of agency does labor have in light of the determining forces of a given culture. Implicit in this is the underlying fact that labor is itself worth something, and thus the mediator is actually money, be it access to money or its possession. All arenas of conflict are mediated by how money acts as a primary determining agent in the outcome of that struggle. As James Arnt Aune has reflected, questions that arise concerning this problem include: “How do institutions, practices, and messages shape class formation? What alternative institutions, practices, and messages are available to those who wish to reshape class formations within the framework of structural possibilities?” (46). The question of mediation, then, is a question, as Aune puts it, of how Marxist theory mediates “structural possibilities and popular struggle” (46).