The dialectic of journalism crisis: the social metabolism of the capital and its structural limits¹

Abstract

For many communication researchers, the journalism crisis now facing is a product of contradictions underlying the profession itself. In this article, we bet on another interpretation, having the methodological guidance in a dialectical approach. It is evident, therefore, that, although it has its own peculiarities, many of the symptoms of “journalism crisis” are consequences of the structural crisis of capital. This articulates via complex cooperation, technological and managerial innovations, increasing the subsumption of living labor to the current social metabolism system. Chronic unemployment, ideological decay, social barbarism and fall of commodities profit rate are phenomena that directly affect journalistic practice.

Keywords
Theory of Journalism; Capital; Work; Marxism; Crisis

Resumo

Para muitos pesquisadores da comunicação, a crise pela qual passa o jornalismo é um produto de contradições subjacentes à própria profissão. Neste artigo, apostamos em outra interpretação, tendo como direcionamento metodológico uma abordagem dialética. Evidencia-se, assim, que, embora possua particularidades próprias, muitos dos sintomas da “crise do jornalismo” são consequências da crise estrutural do capital. Essa, articula, via cooperação complexa, inovações tecnológicas e gerenciais, intensificando a subsunção do trabalho vivo ao sistema de metabolismo social vigente. O desemprego crônico, a decadência ideológica, a barbárie social e a queda da taxa de lucros das mercadorias são fenômenos que afetam diretamente a prática jornalística.

Palavras-chave
Teoria do Jornalismo; Capital; Trabalho; Marxismo; Crise

Resumen

Para muchos investigadores de la comunicación, la crisis que se enfrenta el periodismo es un producto de las contradicciones que subyacen a la profesión misma. En este artículo, se apostó por otra interpretación, la orientación metodológica de un enfoque dialéctico. Es evidente, por tanto, que, aunque tiene sus propias peculiaridades, muchos de los síntomas de la “crisis del periodismo” son consecuencias de la crisis estructural del capital. Esto se articula a través de la cooperación compleja, las innovaciones tecnológicas y de gestión, el aumento de la subsunción del trabajo vivo al sistema de metabolismo social actual. El desempleo crónico, la decadencia ideológica, la barbarie social y la caída de la tasa de ganancia de las mercancias son fenómenos que afectan directamente a la práctica periodística.

Palabras clave
Teoría del Periodismo; Capital; Trabajo; Marxismo; Crisis

Introduction

Our objective in this article is to offer theoretical subsidies for a critical and dialectical interpretation of the so-called “crisis of journalism”, demonstrating that it is the particular expression of a broader complex of contradictions inserted within the system of capital metabolism. Although it manifests its own and complex tendencies and contradictions, the usual and hegemonic diagnosis of the conjuncture of the journalistic sphere in the 21st century tends to place it as a result of technological changes, which, far from being a false observation, ignores the structures underlying the whole of changes that, in addition to the journalistic field, have affected the totality of social metabolism in the last decades.

Understanding the dynamic reality of journalism as well as investigating the structural changes through which the sector passes requires a critical-dialectical perspective. That is, to understand social phenomena, in particular the role of journalism in contemporary society, it is essential to relate them to the social whole, that is seen here as reproductive material order of the subjects in the process. Historical materialism presents itself as a method that allows “to present the object from the internal elements of its own constitution, from the point of view of the determinations that this object suffers to be what it is” (RANIERI, 2011, p.127). As a praxis, the communication of men involves processes of connection between singular, particular and universal dimensions and, entangled in a complex and dynamic totality, has its own contradictions and mediations between its particularities and the development of total metabolism. The material existence of individuals is the key to the possibility of knowing the processes that affect it. “The social being only has existence in its uninterrupted reproduction; its substance as being is by essence a substance that changes uninterruptedly” (LUKÁCS, 2013, p.147).

Analyzing the defining characteristics of the process through which journalism passes means stripping the mediations between the particularities that define it and the more general processes of a crisis involving the very sociometabolic order of capital, in which the system reaches its structural limits at the same time which reveals their civilizational incapacity. Mészáros (2002) defines the sociometabolism of capital as a comprehensive and uncontrollable social complex characterized by the subsumption of the hierarchical division of labor to the dictates of capital. The constitutive nucleus of this system consists of three fundamental materially constituted dimensions, namely the state, labor, and capital itself. This system subordinates to itself all areas of human activity, being, in this sense, an universal complex mediator of the particular complexes, among them, the cultural and intellectual domains.

A dialectic research should hold itself on the ability of revealing the endogenous mechanisms of social processes that, unlike of being independents, are articulate in a conflicting system: politics, economy and society. This type of approach allows concrete syntheses in the field of Journalism, according to what Genro Filho (2012, p.23) already explicit.

A truly dialectical-materialist approach must seek the historical concreteness of journalism, at the same time capturing the specificity and generality of the phenomenon. It must establish a dialectical relationship between the transient historical aspect of the phenomenon and its historical-ontological dimension. That is to say, between capitalism (which engendered journalism) and human totality in its self-production. In other words, journalism cannot be reduced to the conditions of its historical genesis, nor to the ideology of the class that brought it to light.

In this sense, we will present the main epiphenomena that articulate the notion of “crisis of journalism” and then discuss its articulation with the organic transformations that delimit the social metabolism in crisis. Given the main aspects of the composite and multifaceted framework of the capital system, it will be possible to deepen the symptoms of the structural crisis of the mode of social reproduction that, in a centrifugal way, exerts extreme power over the cultural, economic and political life of humanity (MÉSZÁROS, 2002). The meeting between the structural crisis and ideological misery (PINASSI, 2009) seems to define the current moment of human history, which affects in a hegemonic way the whole complex, from the most singular microcosms to the universalizing macrostructure of the global system. Crisis-based journalism cannot be thought without of this systematic, on pain of remaining both incompatible with its limitations and its potential for the full realization of human sociability.

Did journalism explode?

There is an undeniable crisis in the prevailing global press model. The growth of the Internet generated a clear change in the role reserved for journalists in producing, disseminating information, with the expertise of a profession whose stability allowed the development and sale of news merchandise. The most imposing change is in the circulation of journalistic information. Today, it is more like a fluid running through channels that are ever more reticular than a unit, a product shaped by the consciousness industry (ENZENSBERGER, 2003). The Fordist economic model of creation, which imitated the industrial logic of capitalist modernity, was altered and journalistic practice itself needed a readjustment. “The logic of online information is to throw information in a rough (or sometimes even approximate) state and then correct it, modify it or enrich it incessantly, every hour, every moment...” (RAMONET, 2012, p.17).

With the rise of the prosumers (consumer users and content creators) there is an increasing questioning of the role of journalists in the elaboration of news narratives. This crisis of identity is added to a constant and gradual loss of credibility of the conventional media that, by assuming an accelerated mercantile logic, has provided the emptying of its investigative power. The old fourth power has surrendered to the apologists’ strategies of its financiers and, altering the noblest aims of the Enlightenment (MORETZSOHN, 2007) in assisting democratic processes, has been directed at reducing the space of multiplicity of opinions and the role of elaborating information capable to form autonomous individuals. The information wall also aided in this loss of credibility of the media: with the overabundance of data, there is a blockage of access to knowledge, mainly because the media has assumed, without hesitation, its role as an ideological apparatus of globalization.

For Ramonet (2012) and for the famous report of Columbia University (ANDERSON; BELL; SHIRKY, 2013) it is a change of the media ecosystem that undermines the bases that had defined journalism until then. Our question here is whether this set of changes would also be an epiphenomenon of a transformation in the overall dynamics of the reproductive order.

In Brazil, Pereira and Adghirni (2011, p.52) say that “profound changes affect different dimensions of journalism, altering radically the way it will be practiced in the future”. The authors highlight three major changes affecting the journalistic scene: changes in the way news is produced, changes in the profile of journalists and changes in the relationship between newspapers and the public. For them, “conventional media revenues are falling number of readers, the lack of credibility and the migration of advertising to the web” (PEREIRA; ADGHIRNI, p.40). Although they clearly present a debate of structural scope, there is no more universal questioning of the relationship between these transformations and the global systemic reproductive order. However, they point to the more empirical phenomenon, revealing singular aspects of the “tectonic” movement in the journalistic field, pointing, in an optimistic way, the appearance of new arrangements in the three axes debated by them. This is because the authors foresee a great agreement among those involved in this scenario, which would generate a new stability in the structure.

We can then assume that the famous “newspaper crisis” is nothing more than a myth. In fact, the data suggest a slight shift from traditional media readers to online and digital media - just as the job market shows a shift in journalism to the institutional communications sectors. The speed of this process and its consequences, however, are difficult to measure. That is, it would be hasty to say that the newspapers are on the verge of extinction or will be replaced by the new news platforms

(PEREIRA; ADGHIRNI, 2011, p.50).

For Salaverría (2015), less focused on the debate about the need for news and more concerned with understanding the sector’s structural crisis, there are two processes on the horizon: a crisis of accumulation (involving the entire world economy) and a technological crisis (connected to the paradigm shift from analog to digital). About the first, it elucidates how the foundations of the “public” affect the press:

The reduction of the purchasing power of citizens has made them decide much more carefully where to spend their money. And in this attitude are harmed especially cultural products as those offered by the media: between bread and newspaper, money goes to the bread. At the same time, the deterioration of all economic sectors has closed the advertising investment boom, doubling the reduction in the incoming accounts of newspaper companies

(SALAVERRÍA, 2015, p.80).

In the conception of technological crisis, Salaverría (2015) says that it is something less cyclical and fleeting (the way he sees economic crises) and sees that the game of journalism has changed. The digitization created important cracks that substantively altered journalism as a “business”: breaking the boundaries (digitization internationalized the media market without monopoly), breaking barriers (there is a new market available and lowering production costs), (the digital media require numerous editorial products), a break in the monopoly of the word (horizontality between producers and recipients, social control) and, finally, a breakdown of the business model (the difficulties of economic support and the fall in sales is something visible). In the meantime, journalistic organizations tend to ruin. However, the author believes that the redefinition of modes of reporting should be the most urgent requirement in these new times, although it still points to the need for a new form of financial support for the new paradigm.

Serrano (2013) highlights aspects of the journalism crisis: crisis of mediation, crisis of credibility, crisis of objectivity, crisis of authority, crisis of information, crisis of distribution. With another approach, the researcher points out nuances that have already been highlighted by several authors: attention directed to the technological and commercial context and, in the specific case of Serrano, criticism of the incompetence of big companies in not producing quality information.

Also admiring the positivity of this moment of crisis, Viana (2013) sees with good eyes the collapse of the great journalistic conglomerates. As the music industry, which has been heavily modified over the Internet, with the drastic drop in CD sales, she believes that journalism, in the same vein as music, will not disappear. She is one of the founders of the Public Agency, a website that invests in investigative reporting sponsored by foundations and crowdfundings and defends the new economic arrangements of independent projects as outputs for the sector. However, in the ocean of medias, we need a denser assessment of the role of these ventures and their content as a safe navigation through the information available on the network.

In line with this vision, Anderson, Bell and Shirky (2013) point out innumerable forecasts and solutions for the sector and the main defense is that journalism needs to take on new characteristics if it wants to face the earthquake in its ecosystem. In this approach, the entry of software that enhances data search and inescapable collaboration of sources and active audiences must become virtues. However, the scene of employability and job security dreamed up by many students of Communication would have to be replaced by “entrepreneur” spirit, where professionals would live “projects” ephemeral. In other branches of the economy, we can see the proletarianization of these “producers”, with routines not very different from precarious wage earners.

Structural crisis of capital and chronic unemployment

One of the most prominent features among journalism analysts in the 21st century is the explosive reduction in the number of contracted professionals. Around the world, layoff data is increasing every day. According to Ramonet (2012), between 2008 and 2010, the US daily press fired more than 25.000 journalists, in Spain were more than 3.500, while in Switzerland, Belgium, Italy and Germany hundreds of unemployed people in the sector are increasing. In Brazil, according to the Volt Agency for Data Journalism, a little more than three years (2012 to June 2015), at least 1.084 journalists were dismissed in about 50 newsrooms, including the main Brazilian media companies, the large majority due to cost cuts. The so-called “passaralhos” (mass layoffs) clearly show the mechanism for the reduction of living labor applied to journalistic production.

In the newsrooms the restructuring is general, the data systems and the information banks are interconnected, and with this the research and the calculation change of pace, form and structure. Many functions disappear. The graphic reforms with colors and small formats start to play the leading role of journalistic companies. Enter the market the communication agencies that provide public relations and communication advisory services

(FIGARO, 2015, p.31).

The change in the profile of the professionals evidences the feminization of the jobs and an intensification of the hours worked, being that the majority of the professionals unfold in more of an activity and job. They are advisors, freelancers, reporters ... they work 8-10 hours a day, and most are young (up to 35). It is also extended to “pejotização”, in which the contracts made by the companies exempt them from the taxes related to employee rights (FIGARO; LIMA; GROHMANN, 2013). The fragility of critical ideological principles is similar to the precariousness of journalistic work, which is attested in the research of Figaro (2015) and Mick and Lima (2013).

The expressions of a productive restructuring in journalistic work are becoming clearer. Something that, in the toyotista line, fragments and precarizes the labor activities, intensifying the estrangement. The context of professional flexibility permeates media conglomerates, who re-adjust their productive routines to restructuring, giving journalists new functions that play behind their backs the variations of the information market. Precarious labor with flexible working hours, unsecured contracts – temporary and autonomous – knowledge workers (HUWS, 2013) are part of this new working-class condition. The productive restructuring of the class-that-living-of-the-work (ANTUNES, 1999), as well as structural unemployment and the ideological misery of a society of fetishized information are superficial expressions of the structural crisis of capital.

Flexible rules mean “the precariousness of the workforce in the highest practicable degree, in the hope of improving the prospects of accumulation profitable capital while pretending a concern with the guarantee of jobs and reducing unemployment” (MÉSZÁROS, 2002, p.330). This reality, unfortunately, is not typical of journalists, what has been seen on the scene since the mid-1970s is the attempt to rearticulate the world of work to increase the degree of profitability lost, a combined action of articulation between technological and managerial innovations and the equalization of the overall exploitation rate. The Welfare State proved unable to contain these changes.

It is one thing to imagine the relief or removal of the negative impact of mass unemployment from one, or even more than one, particular country - by transferring its burden to some other part of the world, by ‘improving the competitive country or countries concerned: a traditional remedy in the texts, of which up to now we hear about it. However, it is quite another to dream about this solution when disease affects the whole system, setting an obvious limit to what a country can do to “beg the neighbor” or even the rest of the world if it is the hegemonic country powerful case of the United States in the post-World War II period. Under these circumstances, the “population explosion”, in the form of chronic unemployment, is activated as an absolute limit of capital

(MÉSZÁROS, 2002, p.333).

This is because there is a trend fall in the average rate of profits within the capital system, resulting from the increase of its organic composition. Another vital aspect of Mészáros’s (2002) reading is the decreasing rate of socially produced goods and services, as well as the overwhelming environmental destruction and social barbarism that results from the intensification of social inequalities. There is also the financialization of capitalist wealth, which gives the tone of the globalization of capital. Some characteristics allow the differentiation of the current structural crisis from the simple episodic and cyclical crises of capital.

• (1) its character is universal, rather than restricted to a particular sphere (e.g, financial or commercial, or affecting this or that particular branch of production, applying to this and not to that type of work with its specific range skills and degrees of productivity, etc.);

• (2) its reach is truly global (in the most literal and threatening sense of the term), rather than limited to a particular set of countries (as were all major crises in the past);

• (3) its scale of time is extensive, continuous, if you prefer, permanent, rather than limited and cyclical, as were all previous crises of capital;

• (4) in contrast to the most spectacular and dramatic eruptions and collapses of the past, its mode of unfolding could be called a creeping one, provided we add the proviso that not even the most vehement or violent convulsions could be excluded in (ie, when the complex machinery now actively engaged in “crisis management” and the more or less temporary “displacement” of growing contradictions loses its energy)

(MÉSZÁROS, 2002, p.795-796).

A structural crisis is one that covers the whole of a system, affecting its constituent parts and the complexes related to it. It is only possible to shift the contradictions of a crisis as long as it is partial. In the processes that make up a structural systemic crisis, all its limits are challenged and, in this sense, its structure becomes corrupted. Now the destruction of raw materials, as well as of humanity itself, victimized by the corrosive and uncivilizing dimension of the uncontrollable devices of the metabolic order of capital, are part of a process of intensification of the negative pole of capitalist destructiveness. The three fundamental dimensions of capital – production, consumption, and circulation / distribution / realization – are motivated by self-expansion, and in the context of structural crisis they encounter their own insurmountable barriers. “Whoever thinks this sounds too dramatic should look around, in all the directions. You can find any sphere of activity or any set of human relations not affected by the crisis?” (MÉSZÁROS, 2002, p.800).

However, to consider the structural crisis of capital as a reality of the order of metabolic reproduction does not mean to foresee the end of the system and the birth of a new and joyful day of an emancipated society. There is no guarantee of automatic post-overthrow improvement of capital, as the system is composed of humanity itself, its ruin is synonymous with dehumanization on an unprecedented scale. Alves (2011) deals with the increasingly serious expression of socio metabolism of barbarism, that is, how flexible accumulation demands changes that bring together technological and organizational advances in order to intensify the valorization of capital. He also draws the ideological contributions of this process, calling toyotism as the organic ideology of the system of social metabolism.

The reproductive order of capital and its current division of labor has appropriated the informational “revolution”, placing the digital network as the main mediator of production in the sphere of work, leisure and consumption. As pointed by Frederico and Teixeira (2008), the complex cooperation provides the keynote of this capital dynamics. There is a powerful interaction between productive and unproductive, material and non-material, intellectual and manual labor, which makes it very difficult to understand value creation and value extraction. Complex cooperation would be a mode of control of social production that intensifies the subsumption of work to capital, through machinery and information technologies. From the limits of this article we cannot characterize the role of journalistic work, but we believe that the Fuchs (2015) findings are important insights into the connection between content production activities and the network that reaches the extractors of ores present in laptops and smartphones. That is, the extraction of value from living work is linked to a large interrelated global machinery, which needs to be considered when thinking about the specificities of the crisis of journalism². As Huws points out (2013, p.39) we cannot ignore “that real people with real bodies have contributed in real time to the development of these “immaterial” goods”.

In summary, there is a complex relationship between the layoffs and chronic unemployment arising from the structural crisis that involves the metabolic mechanisms of reproduction of capital. The restructuring of the world of work and organizational changes, also expressed by technological innovations, are directed towards an attempt to recover ever smaller profits, a consequence of the uncontrollable dynamics of capital in the phase of flexible accumulation and financialization of the economy (HARVEY, 1993). All forms of industry have gone through similar processes, and far from embracing the thesis that we live in a post-industrial society, there is in fact a redesign of capitalist dynamics in complex cooperation, bringing about a new morphology of work and a new context for dissemination of products, mainly in a market-wide abundant.

Crisis of the knowledge forms

Within this process of crisis there are evident dimensions related to the function of technologies in the complex cooperation demanded by capital in crisis. The digitization of social life and human reproduction colonizes and dominates the daily life, changing the understanding of free time and replacing it with consumption, leisure time and activities linked to the metabolic system (think of the actions of payment of bills and resolution of problems and the unpaid time of thousands of young people who provide information on the network). Although open to communicative possibilities hitherto unthought (or dreamed up by philosophers such as Enzensberger (2003), for example) the Internet and the broad digitization through which society passes, cannot be fetishized. It is a determinant / determined part of the sociometabolic order of capital, even though, contradictorily, it makes possible the expansion of certain sociabilities hitherto non-existent.

In fact, the mass of media (RAMONET, 2012), by providing mechanisms of freer social expression (even allowing a high degree of vigilance) opens space for the revelation of contradictions. Communicational activism in social networks and in the digital sphere has expanded, but even they, by organizing themselves in platforms, websites, software and using satellites, cables, computers, cell phones, finally, products developed in the logic of capital and produced in a way industrial, in its structure, do not objectively deny the prevailing order, quite the opposite.

The media leverages different lexicons to try to put all lexicon inside them, serving particular goals. Words and expressions that belonged traditionally to the lexicon of the left (reform, inclusion, social transformation, revolution) were usurped by conservatism and re-signified by pro-market discourses, especially at the height of neoliberalism’s hegemony in the 1980s, 1990s and part of 2000

(MORAES, 2016, p.115).

Journalistic products have lost their exchange value precisely because they have to compete with the most varied forms of infotainment, which populate the everyday of the audience-active, increasingly connected in media convergences based on the spectacle. Journalism, seen as a narrative of a democratic society, a bastion of the rule of law and vigilant of powers, seems increasingly out of place. In an increasingly inhuman society (whose structural crisis reveals the uncivility and irreformality of capital), how can we maintain the use value cultivated in modernity? How can we recover a time when the industrial revolution and the ideals of the republic demanded a stimulating commodity of the public sphere?

The crisis of exchange value implies a crisis of news use value, because there is an exponential growth – potentialized by the “network society” – of ideological misery. The journalistic commodity understood as the mainstay of transformations of consciousness and formation of citizens for an ascending capitalism no longer corresponds to the consumption needs of a strange crowd that supports crisis capital. The shortage in the offering of this type of news product was intensifying with the progressive shortening of news production time and the collapse of the fourth power. Seated journalism, specializing in biased coverage of the ruling classes and/or connected to entertainment and fun, has begun to bury the republican ideal that inspired the status of the profession. Although not generalized, the ideological decay (LUKÁCS, 2009) of a bourgeoisie that had previously assumed progress and human emancipation, and which had become an apologetic of capitalist exploitation, was also expressed in journalistic practice.

For Pinassi (2009) the structural crisis of capital finds ideological misery as its corollary. This decay is evidenced by the high degree of corrosion that all forms of knowledge have suffered in recent decades. Content emptying and distortion generated by irrationalism and neopositivist inlays, driven by individualism and the maintenance of social order are the ideological tonic of this historical moment. It is worth noting that theoreticians of different matrices have perceived, from a critical point of view, the subjective estrangement of late capitalism, since the new spirit of capitalism of Boltanski and Chiapello (2009); the corrosion of Sennet’s character (2009); the capture from the subjectivity of Alves (2011); the new reason of the world, the neoliberalism, by Dardot and Laval (2016), among others. It is evident that with distinct singularities, emphasizing certain mediations to the detriment of others, the important thing here, without wanting to flatten the diversity of these thoughts, is to announce the malaise of the subjectivity strangled by the economic model in vogue.

These processes of emptying in the field of knowledge (whose enlightenment universalization was abandoned by the apologetic bourgeoisie), added to the postmodern irrationalism that advances in the academy and common sense, as well as the subsumption of the subjectivity of the class-that-lives-of-work to the dogmas of neoliberalism and its mantras of “man-enterprise,” and entrepreneurship as a discourse of the competitive individualism of manipulative capitalism are expressions of the broader and more destructive crisis of capital. Social barbarism, ideological misery and corrosion of living labor affect the media system as well as journalistic practice.

To enumerate, however, the existence of a deep articulation between the structural crisis of capital and the ideological decadence and how it impacts the circulation and production of journalistic information does not mean embracing pessimism. What must be perceived and reflected constantly is the wear and tear of the use value of a type of commodity capable of producing autonomous subjects for developed capitalism and your “human” appearance. For Mészáros (2002), there is no possible solution to the serious problems of the order of metabolic reproduction of capital within the system itself.

The reified singularity, expressed by bourgeois journalism, has now been absorbed by the spontaneous common sense of the masses. The reformist ideological role of the defense of a progressive, developed, humanized capitalism typical of a revolutionary bourgeoisie (something real in the nineteenth century) seems to have no place at all. At this time of serious social problems, humanity needs much more than that.

Final considerations

Even in this presented context, which reveals the contradictory mediations between the precariousness of knowledge workers; the place of technologies in the reproduction of capital in complex cooperation; and the decrease, with the infotainment and the speed in the flow of information – symptom of ideological decay – of journalistic content, we see that this practice was not extinguished. But why, like a phoenix that rises from the ashes, would journalism be necessary?

We believe that use value of journalism is in its ability to destabilize the consensus and demystify the reified reality in order to overcome it. The essence of journalism as a social form of knowledge (GENRO FILHO, 2012) puts it, together with science and the arts, as a vital necessity for the recognition of the reality in which we live. It is wrong to read this exponent of Brazilian journalistic studies the understanding that any form of news would be a relevant knowledge crystallized in the singular aspects of reality. Nevertheless, Genro Filho’s critique of the reified singular in many products of the bourgeois press testifies that his analysis points to a different type of journalism that would resist even with the overthrow of the capitalist system that produced it. The hegemonic predominance of a continuous present without horizons, in which the strangeness of individuals is potentiated in the reticular sphere, this white blindness metaphorized by Saramago (1995), requires a substantive critical intervention. The journalist as a social mediator capable of realistically promoting the relationship between the singular aspects and their totalizing dimension is not only necessary, but indispensable if we want to insert in the social totality a new social metabolism.

Far from putting a project whose practice in the current context it would be unrealistic, we agree with Moretzsohn (2007) that there are situations where the critical work and creative denies the estranged character of the structure where it is produced, this is because the capital and its mechanisms of corrosion of both subjectivity and journalistic practice is never complete, total. To widen the existing fissures in the system, which undergoes a structural crisis, in order to contribute to the potentialization of the essential transformations is a fundamental step to be taken.

Critical emancipatory journalism is not restricted to the mere defense of a program, be it reformist or revolutionary, it is associated with ontological and ideological presuppositions capable of allowing the fundamental and dialectical abstraction of the denudation of capitalist reification. The point of arrival of this journalism, enunciating in a singular narrative, becomes knowledge by allowing clues to the contradictions of social metabolism. Realistically, this kind of account of the objective world has a value beyond the organic needs of capital, since it would be its predecessor, the anticipation of another sociability. It is not up to expose here, because of the limits of this article, examples this journalistic practice. However, one can perceive expressions of production of this singularity – which points to a critique of the existent – in varied news and reports available both in the conventional media, as well as in the interior of the products of the new journalistic collectives and in the alternative radical medias (DOWNING, 2002). The element to be highlighted is that, even in situations of control and precarization, the gaps in the system are always present, part of the contradictions of the metabolic system, and it is up to the critical journalist to broaden them. “Thinking against the facts means preserving the relationship of journalism with the immediate, giving it the double movement of covering the forest from the trees to reveal them in their unique connection to the universe to which they belong” (MORETZSOHN, 2007, p.289).

When Enzensberger (2003) reported on the potential of the media to allow the popularization of collective production, in which each receiver would be a potential transmitter and control of socialized media would allow political learning, he did not imagine that this process would be instituted by the machinery capitalist. This stalled this potentiality within the limits of the order in crisis, democratizing the ideological decay. When people finally have an advanced communicational production technology to create content for the world, it’s a strange decision to turn the focus for themselves, in narcissistic selfs, tweets, snapchats, and blogs.

Very close to education in their task of preparing a counter consciousness, it is up for journalists to direct the creative aspect of his work in setting up a realistic way of news practice and, in addition to his professional particularity, act in the collective composition work as hegemonic alternative to capital. The mediations for the construction of this professional permeates the sphere of the university, but also the constant learning with those who struggle for a different society, a role that includes social movements, parties revolutionary and anti - capitalist organizations.

Just as educators are essential for catharsis – raising the egotistic-passionate condition to the ethical-political (GRAMSCI, 2006) – journalists need to take on the task of critically articulating their news praxis, and can be a fundamental guide in these times of informative chaos. However, they should be aware that this task involves more commitment to activism for another world possible, and necessary, than the guarantee a professional tranquility.

• 1
  An early version of this study was presented at the 39^th Brazilian Congress of Communication Sciences in 2016.
• 2
  In times of complex cooperation of contemporary capitalism, value is defined by interrelated collective work in world productive chains. This means that digital, informational, work would not exist without a material infrastructure generated by paid workers in global territorialities. The workforce (combining physical and cultural labor) in its articulation with the means of production are the foundations of hegemonic financial capitalism.

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Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  May-Aug 2018

History

• Received
  22 Sept 2016
• Accepted
  16 July 2018