Media: Left media criticism: Beyond the lying press

Perhaps there are still T-shirts with the slogan “Taz is lying” in the back corner of some clothes racks in left-wing house projects. 30 years ago, activists on the extra-parliamentary left wanted to distance themselves from the Greens and the media associated with them. Their slogan was also a response to the “Bild lies” campaign, which was supported by leftists and left-liberals for decades. By also making the under-complex accusation of lying to the Taz, it was intended to make it clear that cheap criticism of the Springer Group and its newspapers is not enough. What was needed, this much seemed to be clear to the left, was a fundamental criticism of the media in capitalist society.

It is not surprising that many leftists no longer want to be reminded of this slogan. After all, it is similar to the accusation of lying press loudly chanted at right-wing demonstrations. Of course, this does not end the issue of left-wing media criticism. The consequence cannot be to simply defend the media attacked by the right. It is therefore welcome that the sociologist Lukas Meisner published his book “Media Criticism is Left” at Das Neue Berlin. The fact that the admittedly striking title with “Why we need a media-critical left” is doubled in the subtitle should not deter you from reading it, as if the message had to be drummed into readers’ heads on the cover.

Wagenknecht’s identity politics

Meisner only gets to the actual subject, left-wing media criticism, in the second half of the book. Consequently, in the first two chapters he has to define the concept of the left from which he expects this criticism. To do this, he first wants to prove that he has dealt with criticism of the state and capitalism with quotes from Karl Marx, George Orwell, Herbert Marcuse, Jodi Dean and Raul Zelik.

Meisner also comments on the long-standing controversy between the Wagenknecht wing and its opponents in the Left Party and has something stimulating to contribute here. He shares with Wagenknecht’s criticism of the left-liberal variant of identity politics, but then diagnoses Wagenknecht as “trivializing racism and sexism, whose victims are dismissed as bizarre and quirky.”

His criticism of Wagenknecht’s bestseller “The Self-Righteous” is fundamental: “In her book, Wagenknecht unironically promotes not only German national capital, i.e. Germany as an innovative location and its industry, but also for CDU values, for tradition, community, Hard work and effort.”

A few weeks before the final separation between Wagenknecht and the party, Meisner addressed a central point in her project: Wagenknecht was not responding to the identity politics she criticized by reformulating the program of a universalist left that would support the fight against racism and patriarchy the resistance against capitalist exploitation. Rather, it developed a middle-class ideology with praise for German virtues. For Meisner, Wagenknecht is developing his own variant of identity politics and “is merely opening a pseudo-left, conservative branch next to the pseudo-left headquarters of liberal identity politics.”

Left General Store

Meisner names a central point in Wagenknecht’s concept: the lack of anti-capitalism. The author can feel confirmed by the texts of the founding declaration of the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance. Some Wagenknecht supporters, who still see the image of the leading figure of the Communist Platform from the late 90s, rubbed their eyes. In the text of the new Wagenknecht formation, the concerns of the German middle class are lamented in detail and German virtues are praised, but there is nothing there about class or trade union struggle.

In contrast, Meisner formulates a briefly summarized counter-concept: “The newest left reminds us that feminism, anti-capitalism and ecology can only exist as anti-capitalist and universalist emancipation efforts.” There is no indication here that there was already an earlier preoccupation with racism and racism in the communist movement also with the patriarchy, as Brigitte Studer described in her informed history of the Communist International under the title “Travellers of the World Revolution”. Even though Stalinism put an end to these efforts, they should not be forgotten. Especially because new left-wing movements can learn from it.

The chapter “Pleas for a New Left” reads like a left-wing general store in which various key words from the left-wing debate are summarized. There is talk of the “universalism of the 99 percent” without pointing out that the slogan used in the Occupy movement about the oppressed 99 percent has little to do with Marxist analysis.

Meisner touches on the concepts of intersectionality and emancipatory reason and then presents Marx as a pioneer of postcolonialism and ecology in a short chapter. “The fact that Marx is the pioneer of ecological thinking must be emphasized in particular in order to be able to preserve today’s ecological movement in its own sense,” says Meisner, describing his motivation. What remains too brief here can be found in the Japanese philosopher Kohei Saito, who recently tried in over 500 pages to make Marx a pioneer of the ecology movement.

Or is it conservative cultural criticism?

In the last 80 pages, Meisner devotes himself to the title topic, left-wing media criticism. There he writes a lot of right things about the crisis of the bourgeois public and criticizes its neoliberalization, for example using the many podcast and video formats in the current media landscape. In the artificially close relationship with the audience, the people appearing in it would become role models for a life that conforms to capital.

You have to put a big question mark behind some of Meisner’s polemically pointed ideas. When he generalizes podcasts as “Orwell’s wet nightmare,” he doesn’t do justice to the many audio contributions with emancipatory, left-wing content. Where Meisner then advocates a ban on fashion and advertising, one has the impression that he is using elements of conservative cultural criticism and not left-wing media criticism. The latter would have to place both phenomena in the context of capitalist socialization, which cannot be abolished by regulation. Regardless, it would have to be discussed whether fashion and advertising bans make sense from an emancipatory point of view.

Meisner can raise such questions with his book, but he does not provide the final word on them. The author is absolutely right in the urgency that we need left-wing media criticism again and should not limit ourselves to defending the more or less liberal media that is attacked by the right. But what this left-wing media criticism should look like requires further discussion.

Lukas Meisner: Media criticism is left-wing. Why we need a media-critical left. The New Berlin, 154 pages, br., 16 €.