ABSTRACT
The political economy of communication tradition often draws upon Marx’s account of commodity fetishism, whereby manifestations and mediations of commodity exchange obscure the social relations of labor exploitation. This central insight can be enriched by considering certain epistemes of time – epochality, temporality, time reckoning, and coevalness. Thus, commodity exchange and consumer culture ex-nominate the epochal demarcations of global capitalism, obfuscate just-in-time reckonings of worker productivity/exploitation, and reify a hyper-mediated global present. This elides the human temporalities of poverty, precarity, and dispossession. Commodity fetishism also obscures global capitalism’s ecologically destructive dependence upon raw materials, industrially produced food, and carbon energy. The gravity of this dependence is expressed by critical conceptions of the Anthropocene. The planetary feedback loops associated with rising CO2 emissions and multiple greenhouse effects existentially threaten the future of humanity. Fossil fuels are extracted by corporations enabling electricity grids to power manufacturing plants, urban settlements and infrastructures, and international transport networks. Consumption of the goods and services that are produced and distributed worldwide contributes to a transnational carbon footprint unprecedented in human history. Within this earth-social totality, the structural dynamics of labor exploitation and irreversible ecological destruction are obscured by a 24/7 real-time world of global television, social media, cosmopolitan consumerism, and corporate image advertising. The elision of temporal and coeval understandings which this entails is exacerbated by the slow invisible violence of long-term ecological and biospheric damage. Against this background, I suggest new research directions for a political economy of communication informed by the interconnectedness of time, ecology, and commodity fetishism.
