The Use-Effect: Marx's Theory of Advertising

• In Event: Marx's Forgotten Concepts

Abstract

“Advertising” is not a keyword of Marx’s critique of political economy. On one level, this should not be surprising; after all, practices of advertising were but a minor appendage to the functioning of industrial capitalism in the nineteenth century. Today, however, advertising has become structurally fundamental to the capitalism of mass society. It is thus striking that there has been rather little attention to this theme amid the recent efflorescence of new readings of Marx that seek to demonstrate his continued relevance to our own changed conditions. This paper assembles the elements of what we reconstruct as Marx’s—mostly implicit—account of advertising, demonstrating its relevance to the contemporary study of advertising as an economic and political phenomenon. We make an argument in three steps. First, we collect and analyze the role of the scattered references to particular advertisements and marketing practices that do appear intermittently, but consistently, across Marx‘s writings on capitalism (especially in his recurrent discussions of American newspaper advertisements for slave auctions). Second, we recover from the second volume of Marx’s Capital a forgotten concept whose full significance can only be understood when it is rethought in terms of the advertisement: the concept of the "use-effect." On our reading, this term turns out to be fundamental to Marx’s neglected theory of use-value. Use-value is not merely the qualitative side of the commodity that allows it to satisfy some extra-economic or pre-political needs; the use-value is instead an effect, the outcome of a complex process of social and political construction. Today the production of use-effects is organized systematically through the advertising industry and has become fundamental not only to the economic organization of capitalist markets but also to the political administration of capitalist democracies. In our third section, we show that this theory of advertising as the production of use-effects in fact anticipates and goes beyond the key insights of critical studies of advertising from both post-Marxists and liberals, ranging from Jean Baudrillard to Shoshana Zuboff. When made explicit, Marx’s implicit theory of advertising turns out to be even more relevant to our time than it could hope to have been in his own.

Authors

• Matthew Shafer, Florida International University

• Alicia Steinmetz, Florida International University