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A theoretical emphasis on the means of communication as means of production, within a complex of general social-productive forces, should allow and encourage new approaches to the history of the means of communication themselves. This history is, as yet, relatively little developed, although in some areas there is notable empirical work. Within the ideological positions outlined above, the most familiar kinds of history have been specialized technical studies of what are seen as new ‘media’—from writing to alphabets through printing to motion pictures, radio and television. Much indispensable detail has been gathered in these specialist histories, but it is ordinarily relatively isolated from the history of the development of general productive forces and social orders and relationships. Another familiar kind of history is the social history of ‘audiences’ or ‘publics’: again containing indispensable detail but ordinarily undertaken within a perspective of ‘consumption’ which is unable to develop the always significant and sometimes decisive relations between these modes of consumption, which are commonly also forms of more general social organization, and the specific modes of production, which are at once technological and social.

The main result of a restated theoretical position should be sustained historical inquiry into the general history of the development of means of communication, including that especially active historical phase which includes current developments in our own societies. These remarkable developments have of course already directed attention to the crises and problems of modern communications systems. But in general, within the terms of one or other of the initial ideological positions, these tend to be treated statically or to be discussed as mere effects of other systems and other, as it were completed (or in general completely understood) historical developments. In few fields of contemporary social reality is there such a lack of solid historical understanding. The popularity of shallowly-rooted and ideological applications of other histories and other analytic methods and terms is a direct and damaging consequence of this lack. The necessary work, so immense in scope and variety, will be collaborative and relatively long-term. All that is possible now, in a theoretical intervention, is an indication of some of its possible lines.

Thus it is possible, in considering means of communication as means of production, to indicate, theoretically, those boundaries between different technical means which, as they are drawn, indicate basic differences in modes of communication itself. It should also then be possible to indicate the main questions about the relations of these modes to more general productive modes, to different kinds of social order, and (which in our own period is crucial) to the basic questions of skills, capitalization and controls.

It is useful, first, to distinguish between modes of communication which depend on immediate human physical resources and those other modes which depend on the transformation, by labour, of non-human material. The former, of course, can not be abstracted as ‘natural’. Spoken languages and the rich area of physical communicative acts now commonly generalized as ‘non-verbal communication’ are themselves, inevitably, forms of social production: fundamental qualitative and dynamic developments of evolutionary human resources; developments moreover which are not only post-evolutionary but which were crucial processes in human evolution itself. All such forms are early in human history, but their centrality does not diminish during the remarkable subsequent stages in which, by conscious social labour, men developed means of communication which depended on the use or transformation of non-human material. In all modern and in all foreseeable societies, physical speech and physical non-verbal communication (‘body language’) remain as the central and decisive communicative means.

It is then possible to distinguish types of use or transformation of non-human material, for communicative purposes, in relation to this persistent direct centrality. This yields a different typology from that indicated by simple chronological succession. There are three main types of such use or transformation: (i) amplificatory; (ii) durative (storing); (iii) alternative. Some examples will make this preliminary classification clearer. Thus, in relation to the continuing centrality of direct physical communicative means, the amplificatory ranges from such simple devices as the megaphone to the advanced technologies of directly transmitted radio and television. The durative, in relation to direct physical resources, is, in general, a comparatively late development; some kinds of non-verbal communication are made durable in painting and sculpture, but speech, apart from the important special case of repetitive (conventional) oral transmission, has been made durable only since the invention of sound recording. The type of the alternative, on the other hand, is comparatively early in human history: the conventional use or transformation of physical objects as signs; the rich and historically crucial development of writing, of graphics, and of means of their reproduction.

This typology, while still abstract, bears centrally on questions of social relationships and social order within the communicative process. Thus, at a first level of generality, both the amplificatory and the durative can be differentiated, socially, from the alternative. At least at each end of the amplificatory and most durative processes the skills involved—and thus the general potential for social access—are of a kind already developed in primary social communication: to speak, to hear, to gesture, to observe and to interpret. Many blocks supervene, even at a primary level, as in the different languages and gesture-systems of different societies, but within the communicative process itself there is no a priori social differentiation. Problems of social order and relationship in these processes centre in issues of control of and access to the developed means of amplification or duration. Characteristically these are of direct interest to a ruling class; all kinds of control and restriction of access have been repeatedly practised. But it is still a shorter route, for any excluded class, from such control and restriction to at least partial use of such means, than in the case of alternative means, in which not only access but a crucial primary skill—for example, writing or reading—has also to be mastered.

The problem of social order cannot be left as one of simple class differentiation. There is a reasonably direct and important relation between the relative powers of amplification and duration and the amounts of capital involved in their installation and use. It is much easier, obviously, to establish a capitalist or state-capitalist monopoly in radio-transmission than in megaphones. Such monopolies are still of crucial social and political importance. Yet within the amplificatory and durative means there are many historical contradictions. The very directness of access, at each end of the process, allows substantial flexibility. The short-wave radio receiver, and now especially the transistor radio, enable many of us to listen to voices beyond our own social system. The crucial phase of monopoly-capitalist development, including capitalist control of the advanced technologies of centralized amplification and recording, came also to include the intensive development of such machines as transistor radios and tape-recorders, which were intended for the ordinary channels of capitalist consumption, but as machines involving only primary communicative skills gave limited facilities also for alternative speaking, listening and recording, and for some direct autonomous production. This is still only a marginal area, by comparison with the huge centralized systems of amplification and recording, based on varying but always substantial degrees of control and selection in the interests of the central social order. Yet though marginal it is not insignificant, in contemporary political life.

Moreover there are many technical developments which, within the always contradictory social productive process, are extending this range: cheaper radio transmitters, for example. Within a socialist perspective these means of autonomous communication can be seen not only, as under capitalism or in the difficult early stages of socialism, as alternatives to the central dominant amplificatory and durative systems, but in a perspective of democratic communal use in which, for the first time in human history, there could be a full potential correspondence between the primary physical communicative resources and the labour-created forms of amplification and duration. Moreover this profound act of social liberation would itself be a qualitative development of the existing direct physical resources. It is in this perspective that we can reasonably and practically achieve Marx’s sense of communism as ‘the production of the very form of communication’, in which, with the ending of the division of labour within the mode of production of communication itself, individuals would speak ‘as individuals’, as integral human beings.

There are greater but not insuperable difficulties in those communicative processes which are technically alternative to the use of direct physical communicative resources. The most remarkable fact of electronic communications technology is that, coming very much later in human history than the technologies of writing and printing, it has nevertheless, in some of its main uses (with certain critical exceptions which we shall have to discuss), a much closer modal correspondence to direct physical communicative forms: speaking, listening, gesturing, observing. This means that there are in fact fewer obstacles, within this general mode, to abolition of the technical division of labour. The problems of the general social and economic—revolutionary—abolition of the division of labour are of course common to all modes, but there are here, as in other areas of production, significant technical differentiae which, even within a revolutionary society, will affect at least the timing of the practical ending of such divisions.

The first fact about the alternative communicative modes is that they require, for their very performance, skills beyond those which are developed in the most basic forms of social intercourse. Writing and reading are obvious examples, and the extent of illiteracy or imperfect literacy, even in advanced industrial societies, to say nothing of pre-industrial or industrializing societies, is evidently a major obstacle to abolition of the division of labour within this vital area of communication. Literacy programmes are thus basic within any socialist perspective. But their success, essential as it is, reaches only to the point already achieved within more direct physical communicative processes, in that there is then potential access at each end of the process. The problems encountered in the direct modes remain for solution: problems of effective access, of alternatives to class and state control and selection, and of the economics of general distribution. Theoretically these are of the same order as those encountered in democratization of the direct modes, but the costs of the transformation processes which are inherent in all alternative forms may significantly affect at least the timing of their solution.

Here also, however, technical developments are making some kinds of common access simpler. Mechanical and electronic forms of printing and reproduction are now available at relatively low capital costs. Beyond these there is a dynamic area of technical development which is socially and economically more ambiguous. From computer typesetting to the electronically direct composition of type—and beyond these, perhaps, though it is still some years away, direct electronic interchange, each way, between voice and print—there are now changes in the means of communicative production which at once affect class relations within the processes, and lead also to changes—indeed a rapid rise, at least in the first phase —in the necessary level of capitalization. Thus the relationship between writing and printing, developed in traditional technology, has been an outstanding instance of what is at once a technical and a social division of labour, in which writers do not print, but that is seen as only a technicality, and, crucially, printers do not write but are seen as merely instrumental in the transmission of the writing of others. The class relations within newspapers, for example—between editors and journalists who have things to say and who write them, and a range of craftsmen who then technically produce and reproduce the words of these others—are obvious and now acute. There is an ideological crisis within the capitalist press whenever, on important occasions, print craftsmen assert their presence as more than instrumentality, refusing to print what others have written, or, more rarely, offering themselves to write as well as print. This is denounced, within bourgeois ideology, as a threat to the ‘freedom of the press’, but the terms allow us to see how this bourgeois definition of freedom is founded, deeply, in a supposedly permanent division not only of labour but of human status (those who have something to say and those who do not).

Yet now, in the new technology, journalists, who ‘write’, may also, in a direct process, compose type. Traditional crafts are threatened, and there is a familiar kind of industrial dispute. Its terms are limited, but in any pre-revolutionary society the limits are an inevitable consequence of the basic social division of labour. Theoretically the solution is evident. Any gain in immediate access to print is a social gain comparable with the gains of direct transmission and reception of voices. But the capital costs are high, and the realities of access will be in direct relation to the forms of control over capital and the related general social order. Even where these forms have become democratic, there is still a range of questions about the real costs of universal-access communication, and obviously about the comparative costs of such access in different media. Much of the advanced technology, is being developed within firmly capitalist social relations, and investment, though variably, is directed within a perspective of capitalist reproduction, in immediate and in more general terms. At present it seems more probable that self-managing communication systems, with forms of universal access that have genuinely transcended the received cultural divisions of labour, will come earlier in voice systems than in print systems, and will continue to have important economic advantages.