Ibn Khaldûn and the Political Economy of Communication: A Reply to Graham Murdock

Introduction

I appreciate Graham Murdock’s thoughtful reflections on my paper ‘Ibn Khaldûn and the Political Economy of Communication in the Age of Digital Capitalism’. They very well complement and enhance situating Ibn Khaldûn in the context of the Political Economy of Communication. Graham Murdock especially points out biographical and contextual aspects of Khaldûn’s works, the role of the state in society and the economy, the de-Westernisation of Media and Communication Studies, ideology, and aspects of neoliberalism.

There is much Graham Murdock and I agree on in general as well as in respect to Ibn Khaldûn. We both see Khaldûn as an important contributor to Political Economy who thought holistically, historically, dialectically and morally and who advanced ideology critique, the analysis of merchant’s capital, and the analysis of the value created by labour. Both of us see the importance of engaging with the ideas of non-Western thinkers. Naturally, there are also some points where we disagree.

Khaldûn’s work is eclectic and non-systematic. In my article, I focused on some aspects that I find interesting sources of reflection for a contemporary Critique of the Political Economy of Communication. My interpretation focused deliberately on selected topics, namely the labour theory of value, merchant’s capital, ideology, communication in society and communication in class society, which is a rich range of topics.

Different ways of reading and interpreting theories

Graham Murdock helpfully points out that there are different ways of reading and interpreting thinkers. On the one side, there are historically, socially and geographically relativist and contextualist interpretations that say that thinkers and theories are radically contextual and can never be generalised. According to this position, generalisation attempts necessarily result in false inferences. On the other side, there are radical universalist approaches that argue that ideas and theories always have some form of universal aspect that can be generalised and transferred to other contexts. There are myriads of positions that lie between these two approaches of radical contextualism and radical universalism.

My position is that theories and analyses, to certain degrees contain contextual and universal elements. There may also be elements where the contextual and the universal are dialectically interwoven. There are different types and genres of theories and analyses. They have differing degrees of contextual, universal, universal-contextual and contextual-universal elements. In the 1857 Introduction to the Grundrisse, Marx (1857/1858: 81–111) outlined his dialectical approach as a dialectic of the abstract and the concrete and the dialectical method of ascending from the abstract to the concrete.

Reflecting on the role of durable and transient features of society, Braudel (1980, 34) distinguishes between ‘long-lasting movements and short bursts, the latter detected from the moment they originate, the former over the course of a distant time’ (Braudel, 1980: 34). ‘The history of society is [. . . ] a collaboration between general models of social structure and change and the specific set of phenomena which actually occurred’ (Hobsbawm, 1997: 80). Braudel and Hobsbawm point out that there are more general and more particular features of society that social analysis needs to take into account.

In my paper on Ibn Khaldûn, I am particularly interested in identifying elements that are not purely contextual but can inform and serve as a starting point for the analysis of 21st-century digital capitalism. Of course, neither Khaldûn nor Marx analysed Amazon, Facebook, Google, TikTok and so on. But there are categories in their works, such as ideology, merchant’s capital, economic value, labour and so on, that are more general in nature and that we can take as an occasion to reflect on how these categories need to be adapted and developed in order to understand 21st-century capitalism and digital capitalism. A transfer of categories is, therefore, not a simple 1:1 mapping of the original concept and the new concept but involves the dialectical theory labour of Aufhebung (sublation): Certain theoretical aspects are preserved while others are eliminated. New aspects are added so that the category in question is lifted to a new level of analysis. The labour of transferring concepts to other contexts is one of dialectical Aufhebung.

Concerning Ibn Khaldûn’s works, there has been a debate on whether or not elements from it have a transcontextual character. Al-Azmeh (1982) gives a radical contextualist interpretation of Khaldûn and says that The Muqaddimah ‘is infirmed within its historical specificity, and shares only the limitations of history with the trans-historical texts’ (Al-Azmeh, 1982: 145). In contrast, Lacoste (1984) argues that The Muqaddimah provides an understanding of underdevelopment that has ‘contemporary and universal significance’ and ‘helps to clarify the role of colonialism and neo-colonialism’ (Lacoste, 1984: 200–201). Yalvaç (2016: 79) argues: ‘Although the focus of his analysis was medieval Islam, Khaldûn provides a more general analysis of historical development and social dynamics’. My view is that there are both general and highly contextual elements in Khaldûn’s works. Both Marx and Khaldûn lived in and analysed class societies. In both approaches, we find elements that are characteristic of class societies in general. It is not known if Marx was aware of and read Khaldûn or not. Although there are of course differences, we can find some interesting parallels in the two thinkers’ works that have to do with their interest in the analysis of class structures.

In thinking about the dialectic of categories that analyse society, I have found Hegel’s dialectical notions of universality, particularity, and individuality helpful (Hegel, 2010: §§ 163–165). Based on this distinction, Marx (1857/1858: 108) distinguishes between ‘the general, abstract determinants which obtain in more or less all forms of society’, particular characteristics of capitalist society in general, and features of 19th-century capitalism.

Merchant’s capital and the evolution of advertising

Trade is older than capitalism. It has existed in different types of class societies. In capitalism, trade, markets and money have been subsumed under capital, have taken on new forms, and have acquired new qualities. Modern advertising did not exist at the time of Khaldûn and only existed in rudimentary forms in the print media at the time of Marx. This is why neither Marx nor Khaldûn gave an analysis of advertising capital. However, their notions of ideology and merchant’s capital are relevant and can be further developed for the analysis of contemporary digital advertising.

Already, Marx pointed out the historical character of merchant’s capital and that this type of capital is older than capitalism: ‘Commercial capital appears as the historic form of capital long before capital has subjected production itself to its sway. Its existence [. . . ] is itself a historical precondition for the development of the capitalist mode of production’ (Marx, 1894: 444). In capitalism, merchant capital promotes the circulation, sale and consumption of commodities and, thereby, the accumulation of all types of capital.

Graham Murdock (2013) has convincingly shown how advertising has developed in capitalism and how advertising capital has featured different media, retail environments, and principles. According to Murdock, advertising subsequently developed through the principles of utility, display, flow, immersion, and integration. I added to this analysis that these advertising principles are characteristic of particular stages of capitalist development: competitive capitalism (utility), imperialist capitalism (display), Fordist, Keynesian capitalism (flow), global, flexible, neoliberal, financial capitalism (immersion), and digital capitalism (integration) (see Fuchs, 2024: chapter 7). Merchant’s capital has certain roles in class society and capitalism. It is a universal feature of capitalism. As Murdock has shown, it changes its qualities in different phases of capitalism where it has particular features. There are individual manifestations of merchant’s capital. For example, individual companies such as Amazon or Facebook/Meta accumulate capital based on a specific organisation of advertising and merchant’s capital.

Ideology

Graham Murdock and I agree that Khaldûn has made an important contribution to the critical understanding of ideology. Wherever there are social classes, there are modes of justification and legitimation that are used for the discursive defence of class structures. Just like other features of class societies, ideology develops in a dialectical manner so that, historically, it has taken on new features.

While some other versions of Critical Theory and the Political Economy of Communication have either primarily focused on ideology critique or class analysis, Graham Murdock has, in his works and in publications together with Peter Golding, pointed out that ideology critique and class analysis belong together as dimensions of the Political Economy of Communication. For example, in his discussion with Dallas W. Smythe that came to be known as the ‘Blindspot Debate’, Murdock (1978) basically agrees with Smythe that commercial media are ‘selling audiences to advertisers’ (Murdock, 1978: 113) but adds that one needs to see the ideological aspects of capitalist media. They ‘are in the business of selling explanations of social order and structured inequality and packaging hope and aspiration into legitimate bundles. In short, they work with and through ideology’ (Murdock, 1978: 113).

For Marx, ideology and class were two complementary and interacting aspects of capitalism and class societies that he gave attention to. That is why, in chapter 1 of Capital Volume 1, there is an analysis of both labour and fetishism in the context of the commodity. Labour analysis and ideology critique have often been separated. For example, Labour Process Theory has given little attention to ideology, and Critical Discourse Analysis has not much focused on labour. There is, however, the labour of producing and reproducing ideology as well as labour as ideology. Labour and ideology are two dialectical poles that critical theories should treat together (Fuchs, 2015, 2020). In the age of digital capitalism, both have taken on new forms, which is evident in the case of, for example, the labour of prosumption (productive consumption) on the Internet and user-generated ideology (see Fuchs, 2021).

The state and neoliberalism

Graham Murdock writes that Ibn Khaldûn would have readily agreed with many positions held by Adam Smith and says that Khaldûn was ‘a precursor of neoliberalism’ who argued for a night-watchman state that is limited to the protection of capital. The state in Khaldûn’s context was feudal in nature and it is here that I do not see a meaningful way of drawing parallels to capitalism in general or contemporary capitalism. Khaldûn (2015: 230–238) describes the state’s relation to the economy in chapters 36–40 of The Muqaddimah. He writes that the feudal state is controlled by a dynasty that obtains its wealth and luxuries by taxing land and trade (Khaldûn, 2015: 231–233, 235). The class relation he describes is one between the dynasty that is not just the economically ruling class but also the state on the one side and farmers, artisans, and merchants on the other side. In Khaldûn’s context, there were no wage workers and no capitalist companies. What Khaldûn calls taxes includes feudal rents. It is in this context that he writes that those undertaking ‘cultural enterprises’ (Khaldûn, 2015: 231), by which he means artisans, agricultural workers, and merchants, have an interest that there are low taxes.

The feudal state Khaldûn analyses is a class state. In capitalism, the state has a different character. It is also, but not only, a class state. To a certain degree, it subsidises capital. But it also has the power to redistribute wealth from the rich to the working class, to organise public services that benefit all and so on. The state can transcend capitalist interests. It is a political arena where class conflicts are transposed and played out in complex manners. The rise of capitalism has resulted in a differentiation of the state from the economy. The modern state emerged as an institution that is not controlled by a single class. The ruling class is not simply controlling the state, but just like the working class stands in a complex relation to it.

The state in capitalism does not directly map or mirror the interests of the capitalist class but rather crystallises the complexities of the class structure in contradictory ways. By the articulation of capitalist class factions, labour’s class factions, government, parliamentary opposition, social movements, lobby groups and so on, on the terrain of the state, economic interests are transposed from economic power into state power and, in a dialectical reversal, back from state power to economic power. The ‘state crystallizes the relations of production and class relations. The modern political state does not translate the “interests” of the dominant classes at the political level, but the relationship between those interests and the interests of the dominated classes’ (Poulantzas, 2008: 80). The modern state can cut taxes for transnational corporations and the rich just like it can strive to redistribute income from the rich and big corporations to the poor and the working class through the tax system and the welfare state. The modern state can heavily subsidise and reduce the taxes of the capitalist tabloid press just like it can help advance a rich public sphere where Public Service Media that act independently from the capital and the state, not-for-profit cultural co-operatives, and high-quality critical newspapers, platforms and magazines play important roles. This means that the modern state is an antagonistic institution, a terrain of political and class struggles.

The state in Khaldûn’s historical context was quite different, which is why he writes that ‘the finances of a ruler can be increased, and his financial resources improved, only through the revenue from taxes’ (Khaldûn, 2015: 234), that the ruling class through the state ‘disposes alone of the whole income from taxes’ (235), or that the rulers of the state ‘consider their people and entourage and, indeed, all their subjects as slaves’ (236):

“When Khaldûn was alive the main contradiction in the Maghrib was that between royal (state) authority and tribal structures that struggled against the power of the ruling royal authority, unless they collaborated with it. This contradiction emanated from the emergence of a privileged minority in every dynasty when conquered by another, pitting tribes against each other to influence the ruling dynasty” (Yalvaç, 2016: 88).

Given the state was a feudal class state in Khaldûn’s context, I do not agree that Khaldûn was ‘a precursor of neoliberalism’.

We can merely speculate about how Khaldûn would have assessed Adam Smith’s notion of the invisible hand, Mark Zuckerberg, Silicon Valley’s Californian ideology, Ronald Reagan and so on. It is difficult to draw parallels here, which is why I did not engage with the question of how Khaldûn conceived of the state in my paper. A full paper on what we can today learn from and how we should best interpret Khaldûn’s analysis of the feudal state in the context of the Political Economy of Communication would certainly be a highly interesting endeavour.

Khaldûn (2015: 238–239) tells a story of a king who, upon listening to an owl’s cry, talks to a priest who explains that the king ‘went after the farms and took them away from their owners and cultivators. They are the people who pay the land tax’, which would be a form of injustice, ‘an unjust burden’ (Khaldûn, 2015: 239). What Khaldûn describes as land tax is in fact feudal rent that aristocratic landlords obtained from agricultural workers. In the story, the farms are taken away from the ruler and given into the hands of their cultivators. In Khaldûn’s story, this development is not due to a rebellion or revolution but the consequence of the king’s moral insights. Although this is a philosophically idealist assumption, one here sees that Khaldûn advanced a certain critique of class society. Following this story, Khaldûn turns to Political Economy’s dimension of moral philosophy. He says that whoever uses someone ‘for forced labour [. . . ] does an injustice to that particular person’ (Khaldûn, 2015: 240) and that one ‘of the greatest injustices’ is ‘the use of the subjects for forced labour’ (241). Forced labour includes a variety of relations of production and coercion such as slavery, fief systems, capitalist wage labour, unpaid labour and so on.

We do not know and can merely speculate on how Ibn Khaldûn would have assessed Adam Smith’s works, Karl Marx’s ideas, 19th-century industrial capitalism, Silicon Valley, Reagonomics, Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook/Meta, or 21st-century digital capitalism. My preferred interpretation of Khaldûn is that he, just like Karl Marx, is a critical analyst of class society.

Ibn Khaldûn, Mark Zuckerberg, Ronald Reagan

Graham Murdock points out that Mark Zuckerberg (2015) and Ronald Reagan (1981) referred positively to Khaldûn. One certainly cannot expect a philosophical and theoretical interpretation from both. Zuckerberg writes that much of what ‘was believed then is now disproven after 700 more years of progress’ and that it is ‘very interesting to see what was understood at this time and the overall worldview’. Zuckerberg does not try to learn something from Khaldûn in the age of digital capitalism but sees him in a historical relativist manner.

Reagan (1981) takes a different approach. He provides one quote by Khaldûn that he uses to argue for policies that ‘reduce government spending’ (Reagan, 1981). Just like there are left- and right-wing interpretations of Aristotle and Hegel, there can also be left- and right-wing interpretations of Khaldûn. Reflecting on Reagan’s speech, Nagarajan (1982: 119) writes that Khaldûn also points out ‘the beneficial effects of governmental activity in promoting political stability and a communal or group unity’ while stressing that the ‘enlarged government is a symptom of a desperate ruler determined to hold onto power and attendant luxuries’, which is an analysis of the feudal state that cannot be equated with Reagan’s ‘Deregulation Fervor’.

Both ‘Marxists and supporters of supply-side economics (including, famously, Ronald Reagan) have hailed Ibn Khaldûn as an ancestor’ (Leezenberg, 2021: 347). This circumstance is a manifestation of the fact that almost everything can be subsumed under capital. Also almost every idea can be subsumed under bourgeois ideology. Even Karl Marx is not safe from the subsumption under capitalist interests. For example, Time Magazine showed Marx on its cover on 2 February 2009, and asked with respect to capitalism‘s crisis: ‘What would Marx think?’. In the cover story, Marx was presented as the saviour of capitalism and was thereby mutilated beyond recognition: ‘Rethinking Marx. As we work out how to save capitalism, it’s worth studying the system’s greatest critic’. On the occasion of Marx’s 200th birthday, The Economist, which Marx (1852: 170) characterised as the ‘European organ’ of the ‘finance aristocracy’, in a story urged ‘Rulers of the world: Read Karl Marx!’. ¹ The point is that no thinker and no idea is safe from subsumption. Therefore, we should provide critical interpretations that can inspire progressive social change.

‘Decolonisation’ and ‘de-Westernisation’

Graham Murdock situates my article on Khaldûn in the context of attempts to and calls for the ‘de-Westernisation’ and ‘decolonisation’ of Media and Communication Studies. I certainly am convinced that we can and should learn from knowledge generated in different parts of the world, including the Global South.

Ahmad Murad Merican (2022: 215) argues that it is important to see that ‘perspectives on society are also theorized from those outside the West’. He argues in this context that Abu Nasr Muhammad al-Farabi and Ibn Khaldûn should be seen as communication theorists. The Muqaddimah is ‘a corpus for communication and a new science of society’ (223). ‘Khaldun’s insights into the nature of information and factuality, its acquisition, evaluation and transmission are certainly valuable in journalistic work and to the subject of media criticism’ (226).

I agree with Graham Murdock that Media and Communication Studies focuses too much on national and regional studies and associations and that internationally comparative studies are an important counterweight to methodological nationalism. Importantly, he stresses that the development of transnational approaches is not simply a question of morality but a material question of political economy that requires ‘a substantial redistribution of academic resources’.

The decolonisation of academia is not a moral question and not a question of individual behaviour, but, first and foremost, a question of political economy and power. Commonification, democratisation, and self-management as decolonisation of the academic field mean the creation of not-for-profit academic publishers; the abolishment of academic rankings, metrics and reputational hierarchies; the establishment of new transparent, inclusive, open and democratic forms of doing academia; publicly funded universities that throughout the world realise the human right to education, which includes the right of everyone to afford attending university and equitable access to higher education and requires proper taxation of capital and wealth in order to support the funding of higher education throughout the world; overcoming the gaps in wealth, reputation, influence and resources between rich and poor universities; the transformation of the neoliberal university into self-managed universities that are democratically managed by academic workers and students and that have no CEOs and executive boards; the creation of a classless higher education, research and academic system where class status does not determine the chances of humans to enter and succeed in, respectively, to be excluded from and fail in academia.

Global capitalism shapes the situation of students, scholars, and academic knowledge production in the Global South in manifold ways. The globalisation of capitalism and society has also resulted in the globalisation of higher education. More children from well-situated families in the Global South now attend Western universities and take on professional and academic jobs in the West. Globalisation has not meant the creation of general access to higher education and the resulting careers for children from poor families throughout the world. Decolonising academia requires globally challenging the gaps between the rich and the poor, capital and labour, the powerful and the powerless, the dominant class and subordinated classes. It requires the decommodification of higher education and to advance the logic of higher education, academia, knowledge, and research as public goods and commons in societies worldwide.

There should be proper taxation of transnational corporations, capital and billionaires. The global redistribution of this wealth would support proper public funding and public organisation of universities around the world. We need a public university instead of a capitalist university.

Parts of the endowed wealth of the world’s richest universities should be socialised and globally redistributed in order to support poor universities and individuals from disadvantaged backgrounds. Society should rethink and reposition the role of universities in society away from the corporate university that serves capitalist society towards the public interest and commons-oriented university that, as public service, advances critical knowledge, critical thinking, critical reading, critical writing, critical presenting, critical debate, critical making, critical creativity, and critical co-operation. Critique is the essence of a progressive university. Critique is the opposite of instrumentalism. Knowledge is instrumental if it is an instrument of capitalism, governments or undemocratic forces. Critical knowledge challenges instrumentalism and stands in the interest of a good society that benefits all.

There should be free access to higher education for everyone and more support for children from poor and working-class families in the form of scholarships and affirmative action that increase the share of students and faculty from lower socio-economic backgrounds and poor families.

There should be public funding, support, and encouragement of not-for-profit (Diamond) Open Access journals and not-for-profit open-access book publishers as well as open-access mandates for this type of open-access publishing. Diamond Open Access is the best way of advancing global access to academic knowledge for everyone (Fuchs and Sandoval, 2013), which especially benefits poor universities and their scholars and students. For-profit open access models that make profits by high article processing charges (APCs) are just like models where rich libraries pay high subscription fee mechanisms that exclude the poor from access. Especially senior scholars should commit to and should publish more in radical, Diamond Open Access journals and books so that there is a shift away from for-profit capitalist publishing and capitalist Open Access publishing towards Diamond Open Access.

Metrification and ‘evaluitis’ in the academic system should be abolished and replaced by qualitative systems of knowledge search and meta-data that encourage the encounter of and debate between humans and the engagement with their ideas. We need public funding for, support of, and the establishment of repositories and databases that include an index and do not quantify knowledge published in the not-for-profit (Diamond) Open Access publications. Web of Science and similar metric systems characteristics for university capitalism should be replaced by such new diamond databases and repositories. As long as metric systems such as Web of Science exist, there should be mandates that not-for-profit (Diamond) Open Access journals must be included.

Universities need proper infrastructures and means of production. The general redistribution of wealth by taxing capital and the rich should benefit poor universities so that they can hire an adequate number of staff, increase staff salaries, and create an adequate infrastructure (technology, quality of buildings, rooms and libraries, etc.).

There should be a weakening of research funding nationalism, that is, the establishment of more national and international research funds that support international research cooperation so that partners from different countries, including from the Global South, can obtain funding that enables them to dedicate significant amounts of research time to the critical investigation of key problems and to conduct local and transnational research and international research co-operation.

English has become the academic lingua franca, which undoubtedly has to do with the US dominance of the world system since the Second World War and gives advantages in global academia to those whose native language is English. At the same time, if the world’s academics were to publish only in their native languages, then isolated and fragmented national and regional academic systems of knowledge production would be the result. Not publishing in English is also no solution. What we need is academic publishing in multiple languages and proper public funding of academic translations. Not-for-profit, academic publishers should receive special public funds for making and publishing translations. Making non-Western scholars globally visible is not simply a matter of morality but also one of language, translation, availability, accessibility, and the funding of these processes. It is a question of political economy.

At the level of academic content, there should be encouragement of the production and use of critical knowledge in research and the classroom that helps advance the public good and a good society for all, which includes knowledge that critically analyses exploitation and domination, capitalism, racism, nationalism, classism, gender-based oppression and so on.

Conclusion

Ibn Khaldûn’s works are precursors of Critical Political Economy and the Critical Political Economy of the Media and Communication. It is pleasing to see that while we continue to have discussions on how to interpret Marx in the light of 21st-century communicative and digital capitalism, comparable discussions have also emerged in respect to Ibn Khaldûn’s works.