Fuchs, Christian. 2016. Reading Marx in the Information Age: A Media and Communication Studies Perspective on Capital Volume 1. New York: Routledge. ISBN 9781138948563 (paperback), ISBN 9781138948556 (hardback). 416 pages.
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.
The book is especially suited as accompanying literature for existing reading groups, new reading groups and individual readers of Marx’s “Capital”. It provides a general introduction for each chapter as well as connections to media and communications topics. The chapters can be read all together in combination with Marx’s book, but are also written in a way that they can be used in modules and reading groups as companions to single chapters in Marx’s “Capital”. At the end of each chapter, there are multiple exercises that allow readers a practical understanding of Marx.
Sample chapters: Introduction: http://fuchs.uti.at/wp-content/uploads/introduction.pdf Appendix 2: Knowledge, Technology, and the General Intellect in the Grundrisse and its Fragment on Machines: http://fuchs.uti.at/wp-content/uploads/Grundrisse.pdf
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Call for contributions to two panels about media and communications at the conference “Marx 2016”: http://www.triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC/announcement/view/26