Marx and the Political Economy of the Media

Publisher’s page
Haymarket Books will publish the paperback edition in autumn 2016.

See also the accompanying volume “Marx in the Age of Digital Capitalism”

More than 130 years after Karl Marx’s death and 150 years after the publication of his opus magnum Capital: Critique of Political Economy, capitalism keeps being haunted by period crises. The most recent capitalist crisis has brought back attention to Marx’s works.
This volume presents 18 contributions that show how Marx’s analyses of capitalism, the commodity, class, labour, work, exploitation, surplus-value, dialectics, crises, ideology, class struggles, and communism help us to understand media, cultural and communications in 21st century informational capitalism.
Marx is back! This book is a key resource on the foundations of Marxist Media, Cultural and Communication Studies.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction: Marx is Back – The Importance of Marxist Theory and Research for Critical Communication Studies Today
Christian Fuchs and Vincent Mosco

2. Marx is Back, But Which One? On Knowledge Labour and Media Practice
Vincent Mosco

3. Cultural Work as a Site of Struggle: Freelancers and Exploitation
Nicole S. Cohen

4. Against Commodification: The University, Cognitive Capitalism and Emergent Technologies
Richard Hall and Bernd Stahl

5. Communication and Symbolic Capitalism. Rethinking Marxist Communication Theory in the Light of the Information Society
George Pleios

6. Missing Marx: The Place of Marx in Current Communication Research and the Place of Communication in Marx’s Work
İrfan Erdogan

7. Did Somebody Say Neoliberalism? On the Uses and Limitations of a Critical Concept in Media and Communication Studies
Christian Garland and Stephen Harper

8. The Coolness of Capitalism Today
Jim McGuigan

9. Critical Political Economy of Communication and the Problem of Method
Brice Nixon

10. “Feminism” as Ideology: Sarah Palin’s Anti-feminist Feminism and Ideology
Michelle Rodino-Colocino

11. Propaganda as Production
Gerald Sussman

12. Updating Marx’s Concept of the Alternatives
Peter Ludes

13. Conceptualising and Subverting the Capitalist Academic Publishing Model
Wilhelm Peekhaus

14. Marx, Free Speech and the Indian Media
Padmaja Shaw

15. The Ideology of Media Policy in Argentina
Pablo Castagno

16. “Means of Communication as Means of Production” Revisited
William Henning James Hebblewhite

17. Media and Power for 21st Century Socialism in Venezuela
Lee Artz

18. Dallas Smythe Today – The Audience Commodity, the Digital Labour Debate, Marxist Political Economy and Critical Theory. Prolegomena to a Digital Labour Theory of Value.
Christian Fuchs

Photo by Maximilian Scheffler on Unsplash