Blog 5: Visiting Artist Jesse Drew

The commonalities between Karl Marx and Noam Chomsky's descriptions of society are pretty clear. Marx claims that social structure is broken up into two groups, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, the latter functioning as the masses that are at the mercy of the few elite (the former). Chomsky's media model functions in the same way. The media acts as the bourgeoisie in modern society. It is owned by a select few elite companies that have a monopoly on advertisements and the like, and is essentially able to tell the masses what to think through this control. Just like the five man companies that currently control the media, what the bourgeoisie says is the only reality that is told to the public and therefore is accepted. Similarly, a majority of the people in modern society play the role of the proletariat, at the mercy of the media and subject to their control. Further, the media, just like Marx's bourgeoisie, sees the masses merely as potential money. They are solely a market that can be sold to. As Marx says, this is "merely the organized power of one class for oppressing another." Chomsky's explanation definitely seems to fall into this categorization as well.