There is a term that gets bantered about a lot in Guyana. I loathe the term: cultural industries. Every time I hear it, I cringe. For me, it is synonymous with culture industry, a term coined by German philosophers Theodor Adorno (1903 – 1969) and Max Horkheimer (1895 – 1973) to describe the insidious nature of cultural production on a large scale for mass consumption. This is in relation to film, radio, and television, in their formulation as producers of cultural material work in response to or under the direction of the moneyed and leisured owners of the industry. These owners use cultural production to decide the programming of the labouring class and thus are able to maintain the status quo. In other words, the owners are able to perpetuate their status as owners by using cultural production to keep the labouring classes in their positions of servitude. The irony of this is that the producers of cultural material are themselves labourers so these producers of culture are in fact labouring to maintain their own subjugation.
