Historic materialism: from Grundrisse to Gutenberg’s galaxy.

Marx’s materialistic reading of history was based on class struggle. He perceived the function of technology in the production process and realised that industry needed free labour to hire and fire, and he understood that gold was not money but it had allowed the concept to take form. However, he did not see society as the mirror of its material environment. The conflict opposing the propertied class and the property-less was to be the end-game opening to a classless future. Technology was just a player in the larger game of a terminal confrontation between labour and capital. However unnecessary and unjust the extreme inequality that is a feature of the present distribution of wealth may seem, it will not be reduced by a proletarian overthrow of the bourgeoisie. There will be no final showdown to save humankind, though there may be a slow realisation that a particular gift or proficiency can earn its possessor a large income, whereas capital gains are the earnings of money. It may become apparent that money does not produce any value, and that its remuneration is the consequence of the private monopoly of an imminently social instrument. Some skills are better paid than others, usually because they are difficult to acquire, and ultimate mastery can result in extravagant life styles, which is the effect of rarity, or of topping the sales charts. The rarity of money is a completely contrived situation, and so is its capacity to appropriate income in the form of usury (rent, interest and profit). 

War, misery and injustice form an endless tale of horrors throughout history. Their intensity and atrocity vary, but these variations are more the result of evolving technologies than of a changing moral outlook. Many great cities have been razed, but Joshua, Titus, Hulagu and Cortez would have found the use of an atomic bomb barbaric. They and their armies were intent on looting, taking slaves and just plain blood spilling. In Nagasaki, the 9^th of August 1945, there was not much to loot, slaves were of no use and guns had replaced knives. Famines and epidemics have often ravaged societies in the past, some to extinction. This no longer happens, or very rarely, because world opinion is informed and because air freight is commonplace. The images provoke empathy and the money collected pays the cargo and the planes. Might has always been right. Nevertheless, law backed by might (and/or consensus) has occasionally had the upper hand. The oral transmission of rules and regulations existed, but a practical judicial process could not be without writing. Written laws are the best protection against arbitrary acts of power because they are there for everyone to see. 

Human evolution is neither psychological nor ethical, it is material and technological. Social relations and ideas are changed by tools, processes, machines, by media as McLuhan defined them, as extensions of the body, the senses and the mind, as intermediaries with the surrounding universe. From the digging-stick of our simian ancestors to the smart-phone, media have determined human transformation. For the past million years or so, random inventions have replaced random genetic mutations, and the rate of change has been able to accelerate at a dizzying speed. Some media increase the power of muscles, some regulate body temperature, some enhance the range of the senses and some store and circulate images and sounds. Along with weaponry and the art of war, this last category was McLuhan’s main interest. He considered writing to be the first major step after drawing, and alphabetical writing in particular as it is far easier to master than are ideograms and hieroglyphics. Before writing, information could only be transmitted orally and was stored in human minds. Legends, incantations, genealogies, everything had to be memorised before it could be passed on. Apprenticeship was long and difficult, and death destroyed it all, whereas written information outlives the writer and need not be committed to memory. With writing the quantity of information began to expand like a rolling snowball. Its availability freed minds from the constraints of rote, and its diversity encouraged minds to search farther. And the more there was, the more it was sought after. 

McLuhan did not only describe the functional effects of media, he was also convinced that they contained a subliminal element, that their very nature and usage had far reaching consequences, hence his phrase “the medium is the message”. Writing converts sounds into signs. Reading converts the signs back into sound. Reading handwritten texts was (is) difficult and needed training. It was usually done out loud for and audience. Printing changed everything. It made reading matter much more available, and easier to decipher with standard letters and spelling, which lead to reading in private and in silence. The ear no longer heard the words, they became an inner voice. It also developed the notion of serial production. Coins came from the same mould, as did some figurines, but everything else was produced one by one. Identical books and handbills in their hundreds and thousands were circulated, constructing a community of thought, a shared internal narrative. This had never happened before and it set off an unprecedented chain of events from the reformation to the industrial revolution and the rise of liberal capitalism. 

Another aspect of writing analysed by McLuhan was its visual impact. He imagined how different letters joining to form words, and words to make a sentence that had meaning and intent, could have produced the Greek phalanx of literate hoplites. And he wondered if the printed page with its idiomatic text and its precisely defined borders may have generated the image of a nation. More importantly, he studied what happened when a new means of transmitting ideas was introduced. He saw a stunning effect and wrote of societies sleep-walking. He also categorised media into hot and cold, according to the degree of participation needed to get the message. Radio was much warmer than the press and TV was cooler than the movies (the heat of a rock festival and the chill of a web page). And the successive appearances of different mass media give a coherent explanation of social evolution since the steam press and the first newspaper magnates. The silent scream of headlines and the rant and rave of editorials can go to the extremes because print is cold. When the hot media of radio and sound systems began defusing the same language and ideas, everything got quickly out of hand. Later, the Cold War was kept at a low temperature by television. 

In the 1960s McLuhan hung out with some interesting, imaginative and weird people who damaged his academic prestige, and he came to be considered a bit over the top and… psychedelic. But he had many premonitory inspirations that have become a part of basic courses on advertising and opinion making. He died in 1980, before Reagan’s successful bid for the White House, and before internet was weaned from its military-collegial progenitors. That a Hollywood actor should be elected president was the logical conclusion of the political salesmanship he had theorised and warned against. As for the World Wide Web, he had invented the concept of a global village long before its connected existence. Evolution is a material process, and human evolution is essentially technological. Internet is a syncretic medium absorbing press and publishing, radio and TV, politics and religion, work and recreation, etc. It is having a profound effect and will do so even more with time. Will the transformations be good or bad? Global communications with a cool media seems a promising premise but, like global warming, the interactions are so complex that forecasting is an impossible task. Humans have been fighting for so long over the heritage of their common ancestry that it has become a second nature. However, on the brink as never before, there can still be an informed and rational step back.