Influence of Popular Culture

The theory of culture industry, developed by the Frankfurt School (Horkheimer & Adorno, 1944), explains that popular culture is the result of a culture industry in the West that seeks to maintain control over the minds and hearts of the working class in order to prevent social uprising against the ruling elite. In effect, the culture industry is the tool of the ruling classes in that what is produced has an effect like that of an opiate: it removes the desire of the working class to strive for control of the means of production, which is what Marx and Engels (1848) called for in their Communist Manifesto. The Frankfurt School consisted of neo-Marxists who were disappointed to see that the workers’ revolution failed to transpire and that the class warfare that Marx had predicted never came to fruition. The Frankfurt School went on to explain that the failure of the uprising was due to the culture of the West, which suppressed the desire that Marx had saw being inflamed. The culture industry, which confects pop culture, was the reason for this failure—and it was deliberate on the part of the ruling elite: the elite wanted pop culture to spread weak, insubstantial ideas and create basically a zombie class of citizens that never questioned and never looked for anything more than endless amusements and saccharine entertainments.
Thus, according to the theory of culture industry, the determinants of popular culture are the ruling classes. Popular culture comes from their tools, which would be the popular presses, the popular media (TV, Hollywood, music), and the Internet (Facebook, Twitter, etc.). All major distributors of media and platforms are controlled by people from the ruling class, which can be seen by examining who sits on their boards of directors, which often overlap from one company to another. Popular culture, according to this theory, does not emerge from the people themselves as an autonomous expression of their interests and modes of experience but rather is imposed from above by those in positions of power as a type of social control. However, in responding to the culture, those in the audience add to the culture by creating their own modes of expression that align with the culture being placed on them—which is just fine with those in positions of power, as that is what they want: the people to be consumed with the pop culture modes and expressions given them and unconcerned with power and control, which is the sphere the ruling class cares about.
Commercialization and industrialization influence popular culture by making it for a mass audience. Pop art, music, film, and so on all can be disseminated far and wide thanks to both commercialization and industrialization. The Internet has thoroughly turned everyone into a consumer of pop culture, though it also represents a risk, what with so many alternative news sites—which is why the main big tech companies such as Google and Facebook are purging these sites (Durden, 2019). Reducing culture to commodity means that the criteria of profitability and marketability take precedence over quality, artistry, integrity and intellectual challenge—which can be seen in just about every mass-marketed, mass-produced piece of entertainment. However, after so many years of the culture industry being in operation, the result has actually been a universal market where what is popular actually corresponds to what people want and think is valuable. The culture industry has succeeded in making people think that what it has to offer is actually good, according to Horkheimer and Adorno (1944). Still, there are those who would say that just because a work of art is marketable and profitable does not mean it is not quality art.
According to the theory, pop culture is used to control and indoctrinate people and is used to get them to accept and adhere to ideas and values which will ensure the continued dominance the ruling elite and allow them to exercise power over them. Even though popular culture also celebrates rebellion and opposition, the rebellion and opposition are controlled in such a way as to allow the ruling class to manage them and make them ultimately fruitless and ineffective. This is what happened with the “Hippie” Movement, when serious minded people were beginning to be anti-War: the pop culture movement began to embrace drugs, sex and music like The Doors, all of which was used to co-opt the anti-War movement and turn it into something ridiculous. At the same time, some within the pop culture movement were genuine in their opposition to the establishment and their works have quality—but they are not helpful in achieving the ends that the neo-Marxists anticipated; thus, they too serve unwittingly as controlled opposition.
The strengths of this theory are that it explains the phenomenon of popular culture in a meaningful way and shows why so much low quality entertainment is popular: it is because the ruling class wants to promote to ensure that everyone in the audience is made an unthinking slave by it. This is what Weaver (1948) explains in Ideas Have Consequences. The theory shows that people embrace pop culture because they prefer not to think about reality.
The weakness of the argument is that it is ultimately grounded in the assumption that the working class ever wanted to rise up in the first place. It is quite possible that this premise was always wrong and that workers never had any intention of taking over the means of production. Pop culture therefore could be rather easily embraced by them, because all they want is to be entertained anyway. Thus, the major objection to the theory would be that Marxism was always unrealistic. Still, this does not undercut the main idea, which is that pop culture is still a means of political control.



References
Durden, T. (2019). Facebook bans Zerohedge. Retrieved from
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-03-11/facebook-bans-zero-hedge
Horkheimer, M. & Adorno, T. (1944). The Culture Industry. UK: Routledge.
Marx, K. & Engels, F. (1848). Communist Manifesto. Retrieved from
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Manifesto.pdf
Weaver, R. (1948). Ideas Have Consequences. IL: University of Chicago.