1st Edition
Marxism Karl Marx’s Fifteen Key Concepts for Cultural and Communication Studies
This introductory text is a critical theory toolkit on how to how to make use of Karl Marx’s ideas in media, communication, and cultural studies.
Karl Marx’s ideas remain of crucial relevance, and in this short, student-friendly book, leading expert Christian Fuchs introduces Marx to the reader by discussing 15 of his key concepts and showing how they matter for understanding the digital and communicative capitalism that shapes human life in twenty-first century society. Key concepts covered include: the dialectic, materialism, commodities, capital, capitalism, labour, surplus-value, the working class, alienation, means of communication, the general intellect, ideology, socialism, communism, and class struggles.
Students taking courses in Media, Culture and Society; Communication Theory; Media Economics; Political Communication; and Cultural Studies will find Fuchs' concise introduction an essential guide to Marx.
1. Introduction
2. The Dialectic
3. Materialism: The Base/Superstructure-Problem
4. Commodities, Capital, Capitalism
5. Labour and Surplus-Value
6. The Working Class
7. Alienation
8. Means of Communication and the General Intellect
9. Ideology
10. Socialism and Communism
11. Class Struggles
Biography
Christian Fuchs is a professor of media and communication studies and a critical theorist of communication and society. He is co-editor of the journal tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique (http://www.triple-c.at) and author of many books, including Communication and Capitalism: A Critical Theory, Rereading Marx in the Age of Digital Capitalism, Nationalism on the Internet: Critical Theory and Ideology in the Age of Social Media and Fake News, Social Media: A Critical Introduction, Digital Demagogue: Authoritarian Capitalism in the Age of Trump and Twitter, Digital Labour and Karl Marx, and Internet and Society: Social Theory in the Information Age.
