Communication is the process by which meaning moves between people. This sounds simple, but the simplicity conceals a political question: who gets to produce meaning, through what channels, and on whose terms?
The transmission model — sender encodes message, channel carries it, receiver decodes it — treats communication as neutral delivery. A pipe through which content flows. This model misses almost everything that matters. Communication is not the transfer of pre-existing meanings from one head to another. It is the process through which meaning is produced. What you can say, what can be heard, what counts as a legitimate statement, what gets amplified and what gets silenced — these are not features of the message but of the social structure in which the message circulates.
Communication as social construction
When people communicate, they do not simply exchange information. They construct and maintain shared reality. A conversation between neighbors about a fence establishes not just the fence’s location but the relationship between the neighbors, the norms of the neighborhood, and the implicit rules about property and obligation. A political speech does not merely convey a platform; it constructs an audience, defines who belongs, and establishes what counts as a legitimate concern.
This means communication is never politically neutral. Every act of communication reproduces or challenges existing structures of meaning. The language available to describe your experience shapes what experiences are possible to have — or at least to share. A society that has no word for a particular form of domination has difficulty organizing against it. A society that produces specialized vocabularies for efficiency, productivity, and optimization but not for rest, reciprocity, or collective care has already communicated its priorities before anyone speaks.
Communication and power
Domination shapes communication in at least three ways:
Access: Who can speak, to whom, through what channels. The history of media is a history of access: from the pulpit to the printing press to broadcast to platforms, each technology reconfigures who can reach whom and under what conditions. Access is never merely technical — it is structured by class, race, gender, and the institutional gatekeeping that determines whose speech circulates.
Legitimacy: What counts as a valid statement. Not all speech is treated equally. The expert’s claim outweighs the worker’s testimony. The official statement outweighs the rumor. The peer-reviewed article outweighs the lived experience. These hierarchies of communicative legitimacy are not natural — they are structures that privilege certain speakers and certain forms of knowledge while marginalizing others.
Form: The structures through which communication happens shape what can be communicated. A tweet cannot carry the same meaning as a letter. A press conference cannot carry the same meaning as a conversation. Platform algorithms that select for engagement produce communication optimized for reaction, not understanding. The form is not neutral infrastructure — it is a political structure that shapes what can be said and how it is received.
Communication and anarchism
Anarchist analysis recognizes communication as a site of domination and a practice of liberation. The state monopolizes not only legitimate force but legitimate speech — through law, media regulation, classification, and the production of official narrative. Capitalism commodifies communication — speech becomes content, attention becomes a resource, and the conditions for genuine exchange are subordinated to the conditions for profit.
Against this, anarchist practice has consistently developed forms of communication that refuse these structures: zines, free schools, assemblies, clandestine presses, propaganda of the deed, direct speech in affinity groups. These are not merely alternative channels for the same messages. They are attempts to construct communicative relationships that embody the non-hierarchical relations anarchism seeks — communication as mutual aid rather than as broadcast, persuasion, or command.
Related
- media — the technologies and institutions that structure communication
- narrative — the structured form through which experience is communicated as story
- propaganda of the deed — action as communication
- ideology — the system of meanings communication reproduces
- spectacle — communication displaced into image
- the symbolic order — the structure of meaning within which communication operates