For long centuries manuscript books were the repository of man’s knowledge, and the chief means by which it was passed on from one generation to the next. The pride of place among cultural media has traditionally belonged to books. Instead of the “training and refinement of mind, tastes, and manners,” we witness the diminution of mind, the debasement of tastes, and the brutalization of manners. The result is a cultural output which has turned into its opposite. As the cultural industries have moved from handicraft to mass production, they have fallen under the sway of corporate business, which has learned that one way to make maximum profits is to cultivate and cater to all the frailties and weaknesses in human nature. But this vast increase in quantity has been accompanied by an equally impressive change in quality-a change in general for the worse. Rising incomes and shortening work days have indeed been accompanied by a commensurate increase in the production and consumption of printed matter, drama, music, cinema. The actual course of events has taken a different turn. But as he acquired more income and more leisure, the fruits of rising labor productivity, the worker surely would be able to claim his rightful share in “the intellectual side of civilization”: such was the promise of developing capitalism.
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Only when the worker had some free time of his own could he hope to improve his mind and fit himself for full participation in the life of society. Reformers, understanding this, focused much of their energies on the struggle for a shorter worker day. Under these circumstances the market for culture was necessarily infinitesimal, and popular education, to the extent that it existed, was confined to imparting knowledge needed for the efficient performance of work. The fourteen-hour day was commonplace, and the sixteen-hour day was not rare. Hundreds of thousands of miners and factory- and mill-hands crept to their employment before dawn and emerged after sunset. For skilled and unskilled laborers, the working day was so long during the first half of the century as to be a national scandal. Retail tradespeople, a million and a quarter of them by the 1880’s, were in their shops from seven or eight in the morning until ten at night, and on Saturdays until midnight. In the lower levels of that class, most spent long hours at their work, small employers and overseers keeping as long hours as their workmen.
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Only the relatively well-to-do minority of the middle class, the merchants, bankers, professional men, manufacturers, and so on, could spend full evenings with their families and their books. In England, as late as the nineteenth century, In earlier times culture was the monopoly of a tiny minority, while the vast majority had to work most of their waking hours to keep body and soul together. The development of big business in the cultural field has of course been possible only because of the enormous increase in the productivity of labor under advanced capitalism. These are both now big businesses, and they therefore demonstrate the striking extent to which culture has become a commodity, its production subject to the same forces, interests, and motives as govern the production of all other commodities. The culture of a society includes the education of its young, its literature, its theater, music, the arts-in short whatever contributes to the “training and refinement of mind, tastes, and manners …the intellectual side of civilization.” i To inquire further into the culture of monopoly capitalism, we have here selected for attention two areas which offer a larger body of specialized research and which we judge to be decisive for the quality of culture as a whole: book publishing and broadcasting. For the larger intellectual context see the introduction to this issue. Part of the original draft chapter, dealing with mental health, was still incomplete at the time of Baran’s death in 1964, and consequently has not be included in this published version. The style conforms to that of their book. The text as published here has been edited and includes notes by John Bellamy Foster. Sweezy, Monopoly Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1966). This is a hitherto unpublished chapter of Paul A.
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