What do you think?
Rate this book
Reading Marx in the Information Age: A Media and Communication Studies Perspective on Capital Volume 1
Renowned Marxist scholar and critical media theorist Christian Fuchs provides a thorough, chapter-by-chapter introduction to Capital Volume 1 that assists readers in making sense of Karl Marx’s most important and groundbreaking work in the information age, exploring Marx’s key concepts through the lens of media and communication studies via contemporary phenomena like the Internet, digital labour, social media, the media industries, and digital class struggles. Through a range of international, current-day examples, Fuchs emphasises the continued importance of Marx and his work in a time when transnational media companies like Amazon, Google, and Facebook play an increasingly important role in global capitalism. Discussion questions and exercises at the end of each chapter help readers to further apply Marx’s work to a modern-day context.
- GenresPoliticsNonfiction
418 pages, Kindle Edition
First published November 10, 2015
4 people are currently reading
105 people want to read
About the author
Christian Fuchs
123 books53 followersChristian Fuchs is a leading critical theorist of communication and society. He is a Professor at the University of Westminster, co-editor of the open access journal tripleC: Communication, Capitalism and Critique, and the author of Digital Demagogue (Pluto, 2018) and Social Media: A Critical Introduction (Sage, 2017) amongst other works.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
February 14, 2016
In the wake of the continuing economic crisis beginning in 2007/8 there has been a seeming revival of interest in Marxist economic analyses – not contemporary Marxist economic work, of course, but the safe old stuff such as a brief flurry of sales of the Manifesto of the Communist Party or those occasional comments in 2008 where some columnist in the business press mused that perhaps Marx had it right. Alongside this there has also been widespread interest in, for instance, David Harvey’s lectures on Capital and amongst activists a revival of discussions about not only Marxist analyses but forms of alternative/non-capitalist economics. Some of this new thinking is linked to the emergence of revived forms of horizontalist politics (the indignados, Occupy and since) while others has been associated with analyses of developments in the field of work and labour, such as the rapid growth of the precariat as well as forms of work and labour associated with information economies.
I’ve found much of this discussion remarkably uninformed – the suggestion by many commentators that Thomas Pikkety, in his Capital, had given us Marx’s Capital for the 21st century is absurd (but then so is the sectarian, closed Marxisms view that he is just another reformist to be ignored) – or partial and shallow: Fuchs has a very good appendix to this book exploring responses to Piketty. I am often left wondering how many commentators have read their Marx (or if for them it is just a ‘cool’, radical chic, title on the shelf) or if they have read him, how many have grasped and comprehended his dialectical method.
Happily, Christian Fuchs knows his Capital and even better knows his Marx and as a result manages to avoid many of the simplistic traps commentators often fall into. Marx’s economics are not simple; just consider the extent and diversity of debates over the question of value (exchange-, use-, and value) and how this/these relate(s) to price and profit, or the relationship between commodity and labour – and that’s not even all of chapter one of Volume One of Capital.
Amid everything that is going on in this impressive but problematic introduction to Capital: Vol 1 Fuchs takes on a concept that has been taken up fairly uncritically by leftist scholars of cultural work and industries – the idea of immaterial labour emerging from the very good work by some of the Italian autonomist Marxists: Antonio Negri, Maurizio Lazzarato, Paulo Virno, Christian Marazzi and the like. While immaterial labour has appeal as an analytical idea, Fuchs is convincing in his argument that labelling it immaterial undermines analysis; it is, he contends, material labour of the body and mind (both material), often with intensely material effects and distributed by the material devices of global communication systems. There is, he recognises, a non-physical product – but to label much of what we do in the cultural industries (and others such as education) immaterial is to confuse the product with the labour process of its creation. The distinction between material labour and non-physical product is essential to Fuchs’ case and, conceptually, a useful contribution to current debates in Marxist and other forms of left political economy and economics.
Fuchs returns to this problem throughout the text, teasing out its implications for work in and around the media and communications industries, considering the implications for understandings of value, of audience and therefore market creation, for how we understand technology, alienation, manufacture, the character of the products of cultural work and how the non-physical character of many of those products has an impact on the way we understand the economics of value and wealth production in those fields. He is also able to effectively draw on this distinction to critique a longstanding tendency to economism in Marxist thinking, where a crude materialism affects even analysts of the calibre of David Harvey, leading to a denigration of cultural work and non-physical products as forms of idealism (he is, in general, very complimentary of Harvey, but it is not uncritical).
In my reading it is the contrast with Harvey that I find most difficult to set aside: Fuchs may know his Marx and Capital but I’m afraid his explanation of the text could be better. Unlike other commentators he moves through the book, chapter by chapter, outlining what Marx was doing, encapsulating the case, highlighting how it can and should be read to be useful in the contemporary fields of media and communication studies, setting (in places quite challenging, but all important) tasks for readers/students and providing a critical extension of Capital to a much changed social and economic area.
The difficulty I have is that I am not sure who Fuchs is writing for. The ‘Introduction’ is an impressive and brief case in favour of the importance of reading Marx, sketching key issues and aspects of political economy, outlining issues in the writing and translations of Capital and providing a brief, useful introduction to the Hegelian dialectic – all suggesting that Fuchs assumes an intelligent lay reader. But then, following Marx, he leaps right into the incredibly dense chapter on ‘The Commodity’, which Marx himself acknowledged is perhaps the most difficult part of Capital. It is, quite rightly, at the beginning; it is the fundamental element of a capitalist economy that needs to be understood and provides the basis of the critique of classical political economics that the Marixian project rests upon. Whereas Harvey (in the on-line lectures) presents an explanation that helps new, lay readers to begin to grasp the problem and the issue, unfortunately Fuchs relies too heavily on outlining what Marx says rather than exploring and discussing the issues in the chapter: as with all those readers of Capital who never get through the chapter on the commodity let alone past it, I fear this first chapter is likely to repulse Fuchs’ lay readers, no matter how intelligent – so it might be useful to spend an hour or so listening to Harvey’s relevant lecture before diving into this book.
Thereafter it picks up and although in places dense and demanding nothing is quite so perplexing: Fuchs makes effective use of equations, and explains them very well. The one difficulty I had is the intermittent, and in a couple of places quite long, diversions debating the translations being used, focusing especially on the work/labour distinction: while I understand the need and get the significance of correct terminology, in places these lapse into philological detail that tested my patience. It no doubt reflects my specific interests at the moment, but I found the final substantive chapter on ‘so-called primitive accumulation’ and appendix two dealing with Fragment on Machines and with the ‘general intellect’ in The Grundrisse particularly useful in the contextualisation of and economic rigour in the approach to ‘accumulation by dispossession’ (as Harvey calls it) and the critique of ‘immaterial labour’.
So, in short, this is essential for anyone wanting to grapple with current issues in the political economy not only of media and communication but more generally aspects of cultural work – but it will be a demanding read, and may well need to be broken up by diversions into related (or other) issues.
I’ve found much of this discussion remarkably uninformed – the suggestion by many commentators that Thomas Pikkety, in his Capital, had given us Marx’s Capital for the 21st century is absurd (but then so is the sectarian, closed Marxisms view that he is just another reformist to be ignored) – or partial and shallow: Fuchs has a very good appendix to this book exploring responses to Piketty. I am often left wondering how many commentators have read their Marx (or if for them it is just a ‘cool’, radical chic, title on the shelf) or if they have read him, how many have grasped and comprehended his dialectical method.
Happily, Christian Fuchs knows his Capital and even better knows his Marx and as a result manages to avoid many of the simplistic traps commentators often fall into. Marx’s economics are not simple; just consider the extent and diversity of debates over the question of value (exchange-, use-, and value) and how this/these relate(s) to price and profit, or the relationship between commodity and labour – and that’s not even all of chapter one of Volume One of Capital.
Amid everything that is going on in this impressive but problematic introduction to Capital: Vol 1 Fuchs takes on a concept that has been taken up fairly uncritically by leftist scholars of cultural work and industries – the idea of immaterial labour emerging from the very good work by some of the Italian autonomist Marxists: Antonio Negri, Maurizio Lazzarato, Paulo Virno, Christian Marazzi and the like. While immaterial labour has appeal as an analytical idea, Fuchs is convincing in his argument that labelling it immaterial undermines analysis; it is, he contends, material labour of the body and mind (both material), often with intensely material effects and distributed by the material devices of global communication systems. There is, he recognises, a non-physical product – but to label much of what we do in the cultural industries (and others such as education) immaterial is to confuse the product with the labour process of its creation. The distinction between material labour and non-physical product is essential to Fuchs’ case and, conceptually, a useful contribution to current debates in Marxist and other forms of left political economy and economics.
Fuchs returns to this problem throughout the text, teasing out its implications for work in and around the media and communications industries, considering the implications for understandings of value, of audience and therefore market creation, for how we understand technology, alienation, manufacture, the character of the products of cultural work and how the non-physical character of many of those products has an impact on the way we understand the economics of value and wealth production in those fields. He is also able to effectively draw on this distinction to critique a longstanding tendency to economism in Marxist thinking, where a crude materialism affects even analysts of the calibre of David Harvey, leading to a denigration of cultural work and non-physical products as forms of idealism (he is, in general, very complimentary of Harvey, but it is not uncritical).
In my reading it is the contrast with Harvey that I find most difficult to set aside: Fuchs may know his Marx and Capital but I’m afraid his explanation of the text could be better. Unlike other commentators he moves through the book, chapter by chapter, outlining what Marx was doing, encapsulating the case, highlighting how it can and should be read to be useful in the contemporary fields of media and communication studies, setting (in places quite challenging, but all important) tasks for readers/students and providing a critical extension of Capital to a much changed social and economic area.
The difficulty I have is that I am not sure who Fuchs is writing for. The ‘Introduction’ is an impressive and brief case in favour of the importance of reading Marx, sketching key issues and aspects of political economy, outlining issues in the writing and translations of Capital and providing a brief, useful introduction to the Hegelian dialectic – all suggesting that Fuchs assumes an intelligent lay reader. But then, following Marx, he leaps right into the incredibly dense chapter on ‘The Commodity’, which Marx himself acknowledged is perhaps the most difficult part of Capital. It is, quite rightly, at the beginning; it is the fundamental element of a capitalist economy that needs to be understood and provides the basis of the critique of classical political economics that the Marixian project rests upon. Whereas Harvey (in the on-line lectures) presents an explanation that helps new, lay readers to begin to grasp the problem and the issue, unfortunately Fuchs relies too heavily on outlining what Marx says rather than exploring and discussing the issues in the chapter: as with all those readers of Capital who never get through the chapter on the commodity let alone past it, I fear this first chapter is likely to repulse Fuchs’ lay readers, no matter how intelligent – so it might be useful to spend an hour or so listening to Harvey’s relevant lecture before diving into this book.
Thereafter it picks up and although in places dense and demanding nothing is quite so perplexing: Fuchs makes effective use of equations, and explains them very well. The one difficulty I had is the intermittent, and in a couple of places quite long, diversions debating the translations being used, focusing especially on the work/labour distinction: while I understand the need and get the significance of correct terminology, in places these lapse into philological detail that tested my patience. It no doubt reflects my specific interests at the moment, but I found the final substantive chapter on ‘so-called primitive accumulation’ and appendix two dealing with Fragment on Machines and with the ‘general intellect’ in The Grundrisse particularly useful in the contextualisation of and economic rigour in the approach to ‘accumulation by dispossession’ (as Harvey calls it) and the critique of ‘immaterial labour’.
So, in short, this is essential for anyone wanting to grapple with current issues in the political economy not only of media and communication but more generally aspects of cultural work – but it will be a demanding read, and may well need to be broken up by diversions into related (or other) issues.
Displaying 1 of 1 review