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 16 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 the Internet and social media in 21st century digital capitalism.

Marx is back! This book is a key resource on the foundations of Marxist Internet and Digital Media 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. Towards Marxian Internet Studies
Christian Fuchs

3. Digital Marx: Toward a Political Economy of Distributed Media
Andreas Wittel

4. The Relevance of Marx’s Theory of Primitive Accumulation for Media and Communication Research
Mattias Ekman

5. The Internet and “Frictionless Capitalism”
Jens Schröter

6. Digital Media and Capital’s Logic of Acceleration
Vincent R. Manzerolle and Atle Mikkola Kjøsen

7. How Less Alienation Creates More Exploitation? Audience Labour on Social Network Sites
Eran Fisher

8. The Network’s Blindspot: Exclusion, Exploitation and Marx’s Process-Relational Ontology
Robert Prey

9. 3C: Commodifying Communication in Capitalism
Jernej Prodnik

10. The Construction of Platform Imperialism in the Globalisation Era
Dal Yong Jin

11. Foxconned Labour as the Dark Side of the Information Age: Working Conditions at Apple’s Contract Manufacturers in China
Marisol Sandoval

12. The Pastoral Power of Technology. Rethinking Alienation in Digital Culture
Katarina Giritli Nygren and Katarina L Gidlund

13. The Problem of Privacy in Capitalism and Alternative Social Media: The Case of Diaspora*
Sebastian Sevignani

14. ‘A Workers’ Inquiry 2.0’: An Ethnographic Method for the Study of Produsage in Social Media Contexts
Brian Brown and Anabel Quan-Haase

15. Social Media, Mediation and the Arab Revolutions
Miriyam Aouragh

16. Marx in the Cloud
Vincent Mosco