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.

Table of Contents:
Introduction Part I: Commodities and Money 1. Prefaces, Postfaces and Chapter 1: The Commodity 2. The Process of Exchange 3. Money, or the Circulation of Commodities Part II: The Transformation of Money into Capital 4. The General Formula for Capital 5. Contradictions in the General Formula 6. The Sale and Purchase of Labour-Power Part III: The Production of Absolute Surplus-Value 7. The Labour Process and the Valorization Process 8. Constant Capital and Variable Capital 9. The Rate of Surplus Value 10. The Working Day 11. The Rate and Mass of Surplus-Value Part IV: The Production of Relative Surplus-Value 12. The Concept of Relative Surplus-Value 13. Co-operation 14. The Division of Labour and Manufacture 15. Machinery and Large-Scale Industry Part V: The Production of Absolute and Relative Surplus-Value 16. Absolute and Relative Surplus-Value 17. Changes of Magnitude in the Price of Labour-Power and in Surplus-Value 18. Different Formulae for the Rate of Surplus-Value Part VI: Wages 19. The Transformation of Value (and Respectively the Price) of Labour-Power into Wages 20. Time-Wages 21. Piece-Wages 22. National Differences in Wages Part VII: The Process of Accumulation of Capital 23. Simple Reproduction 24. The Transformation of Surplus-Value into Capital 25. The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation Part VIII: So-Called Primitive Accumulation 26. Part VIII: So-Called Primitive Accumulation 27. Appendix: Results of the Immediate Process of Production 28. Conclusion Appendix 1: Thomas Piketty’s Book "Capital in the Twenty-First Century", Karl Marx, and the Political Economy of the Internet Appendix 2: Knowledge, Technology, and the General Intellect in the Grundrisse and its Fragment on Machines

About the Author :
Christian Fuchs is Professor at the University of Westminster’s Communication and Media Research Institute. He is author of Culture and Economy in the Age of Social Media (Routledge, 2015), Social Media: A Critical Introduction (Sage, 2014), OccupyMedia! The Occupy Movement and Social Media in Crisis Capitalism (Zero Books, 2014), Digital Labour and Karl Marx (Routledge, 2014), Foundations of Critical Media and Information Studies (Routledge, 2011), and Internet and Society: Social Theory in the Information Age (Routledge, 2008). He edits the open access journal tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique.

Review :
"Christian Fuchs has emerged as one of this generation's most prolific and important scholars in communication and media studies. Reading Marx in the Information Age is chock full of valuable insights and revelations on Karl Marx and communication, by focusing on Volume One of Capital. This book is mandatory reading for all scholars of the political economy of communication, as well as critical media scholars in general." —Robert W. McChesney, author of Blowing the Roof Off the 21st Century