At the heart of the imperialist heartland of Europe, two capitalist goliaths now wrestle for control over the media apparatus, demonstrating the inevitable outcome of bourgeois property relations: the commodification of public consciousness itself. The voracious Czech investor, PPF, and the notorious Berlusconi clan—who have long ensnared Italian public discourse in their reactionary media web—now regard ProSiebenSat.1 not as a vehicle for peoples’ enlightenment, but as an object for plunder, to be traded and reshaped in their insatiable hunt for profit and capitalist influence.
What we witness here is not a healthy “competition” as the defenders of the free market would claim, but the cannibalistic nature of monopoly capital. The media, rather than serving as the enlightening torch for working people, is treated simply as another portfolio asset, subject to hostile takeovers driven not by social need or cultural benefit, but by the thirst for dividends and control over the ideological superstructure. Each group, with slick PR and empty phrases of “flexibility” and “shared vision,” attempts to disguise their real motives: class domination and maintaining their oligarchic hold over the critical channels of information and culture.
The German government’s handwringing over “editorial independence” and the self-serving protestations of the national journalists’ associations ring hollow. The bourgeois state, ever the defender of capital’s interests, pretends concern while abetting the commodification and internationalization of national resources—here, the lifeblood of public debate. Their supposed worry for jobs or national identity is facile window-dressing; they gladly presided over the gutting of worker protections, job cuts, and ideological colonization for decades, so long as it served capital’s logic.
It is especially revealing that MediaForEurope, the Berlusconi conglomerate whose own reactionary credentials are well documented, can make such a brazen bid for a leading broadcaster. Their claim to preserve “editorial identity” should be met with nothing but contempt. Under capitalism, all media are organs of their owners’ class interest—there can be no “neutrality” when profit and political power dictate every editorial line, every staffing decision, every production hour.
Moreover, the temptation for so-called “institutional investors” to simply hold out for higher bids exposes the true character of today’s financial aristocracy: their loyalty lies not with viewers, journalists, or the German working population, but with the golden calf of maximum short-term profit. This is the modern stock market—a casino where the fate of public information, jobs, and cultural life are gambled away by faceless managers who never sweat at the factory floor nor create a single frame of honest content.
The market fever lifting share prices is but a thin gloss over the reality of decline: since 2015, this “giant” has shed 85% of its value, showing that monopoly capital breeds only decay, short-termism, and the slow rot of all social goods. Listing on the SDAX, consigned to minor status, ProSiebenSat.1 exemplifies how private capital can never guarantee social progress or stability.
What the workers and the people must demand is not a better “deal” from one foreign capitalist or another; it is not a choice between Czech speculation or Italian reaction. The only valid alternative is the complete socialization of media, the overthrow of its status as private property, and the construction of a true people’s press—free from the dictatorship of profit, and dedicated to the revolutionary education of the masses. Only under such socialist conditions can media fulfill its true function: fostering internationalism, consciousness, and the advance of humanity toward collective emancipation.