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.

What is political economy and how can it be applied to the study of media communication? The Political Economy of Communication is the definitive critical overview of the discipline for students of the social sciences. It explains in detail the analytic tools that political economy can apply to today's increasingly global and technological information society. Mosco presents an historical overview of the discipline and defines political economy by its focus on the relation between the production, distribution and consumption of communication in historical and cultural context. This comprehensive analysis of the 'commodity form' is communication includes an examination of print, broadcast and new electronic media, the role and function of the audience, and the problem of social control. It concludes by addressing the relationship of political economy to the increasingly important fields of policy studies and cultural studies.

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.

"This edition of The political economy of Marx, Second edition is published by arrangement with Longman Group UK Limited"--T.p. verso.

How the media are organised and funded is central to understanding their role in society. Critical Political Economy of the Media provides a clear, comprehensive and insightful introduction to the political economic analysis of contemporary media. Jonathan Hardy undertakes a critical survey of political economy scholarship encompassing worldwide literature, issues and debates, and relationships with other academic approaches. He assesses different ways of making sense of media convergence and digitalisation, media power and influence, and transformations across communication markets. Many of the problems of the media that prompted critical political economy research remain salient, he argues, but the approach must continue to adapt to new conditions and challenges. Hardy advances the case for a revitalised critical media studies for the 21st century. Topics covered include: media ownership and financing news and entertainment convergence and the Internet media globalisation advertising and media alternative media media policy and regulation Introducing key concepts and research, this book explains how political economy can assist students, researchers and citizens to investigate and address vital questions about the media today.

One of the most notorious works of modern times, as well as one of the most influential, Capital is an incisive critique of private property and the social relations it generates. Living in exile in England, where this work was largely written, Marx drew on a wide-ranging knowledge of its society to support his analysis and generate fresh insights. Arguing that capitalism would create an ever-increasing division in wealth and welfare, he predicted its abolition and replacement by a system with common ownership of the means of production. Capital rapidly acquired readership among the leaders of social democratic parties, particularly in Russia and Germany, and ultimately throughout the world, to become a work described by Marx's friend and collaborator Friedrich Engels as 'the Bible of the Working Class'.

How is labour changing in the age of computers, the Internet, and "social media" such as Facebook, Google, YouTube and Twitter? In Digital Labour and Karl Marx, Christian Fuchs attempts to answer that question, crafting a systematic critical theorisation of labour as performed in the capitalist ICT industry. Relying on a range of global case studies--from unpaid social media prosumers or Chinese hardware assemblers at Foxconn to miners in the Democratic Republic of Congo--Fuchs sheds light on the labour costs of digital media, examining the way ICT corporations exploit human labour and the impact of this exploitation on the lives, bodies, and minds of workers.

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.

This textbook offers a comprehensive guide to the systematic structure of capitalism, while at the same time introducing readers to all three volumes of Marx’s Capital. Based on his extensive expertise on Marx’s critique of political economy, the author reveals the specific structure of production in capitalist societies and explicates what sets this system apart from other modes of production. Marx’s political economy is explained in a systematic and easy-to-understand manner, using numerous illustrative diagrams to complement the text. This textbook will appeal to all students and scholars looking for a more comprehensive, systematic and theoretical explanation of capitalism, equipping them with a solid theoretical understanding of its core structure.

Marx in the Field is a unique edited collection illustrating the relevance of the Marxian method to study contemporary capitalism and the global development process. Essays in the collection bring Marx ‘to the field’ in three ways. They illustrate how Marxian categories can be concretely deployed for field research in the global economy, they analyse how these categories may be adapted during fieldwork and they discuss data collection methods supporting Marxian analysis. Crucially, many of the contributions expand the scope of Marxian analysis by combining its insights with those of other intellectual traditions, including radical feminisms, critical realism and postcolonial studies. The book defines the possibilities and challenges of fieldwork guided by Marxian analysis, including those emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic. The collection takes a global approach to the study of development and of contemporary capitalism. While some essays focus on themes and geographical areas of long-term concern for international development – like informal or rural poverty and work across South Asia, Southern and West Africa, or South America – others focus instead on actors benefitting from the development process - like regional exporters, larger farmers, and traders – or on unequal socio-economic outcomes across richer and emerging economies and regions – including Gulf countries, North America, Southern Europe, or Post-Soviet Central and Eastern Europe. Some essays explore global processes cutting across the world economy, connecting multiple regions, actors and inequalities. While some of the contributions focus on classic Marxian tropes in the study of contemporary capitalism – like class, labour and working conditions, agrarian change, or global commodity chains and prices – others aim at demonstrating the relevance of the Marxian method beyond its traditional boundaries – for instance, for exploring the interplays between food, nutrition and poverty; the links between social reproduction, gender and homework; the features of migration and refugees regimes, tribal chieftaincy structures or prison labour; or the dynamics structuring global surrogacy. Overall, through the analysis of an extremely varied set of concrete settings and cases, this book illustrates the extraordinary insights we can gain by bringing Marx in the field.