ABSTRACT

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.

chapter |12 pages

Introduction

Reading Marx in the Information Age: A Media and Communication Studies Perspective on Capital Volume 1

part I|52 pages

Commodities and Money

chapter 2|3 pages

The Process of Exchange

chapter 3|10 pages

Money, or the Circulation of Commodities

part II|24 pages

The Transformation of Money into Capital

chapter 4|8 pages

The General Formula for Capital

chapter 5|5 pages

Contradictions in the General Formula

chapter 6|9 pages

The Sale and Purchase of Labour-Power

part III|56 pages

The Production of Absolute Surplus-Value

chapter 8|4 pages

Constant Capital and Variable Capital

chapter 9|10 pages

The Rate of Surplus-Value

chapter 10|19 pages

The Working Day

chapter 11|7 pages

The Rate and Mass of Surplus-Value

part IV|90 pages

The Production of Relative Surplus-Value

chapter 12|15 pages

The Concept of Relative Surplus-Value

chapter 13|9 pages

Cooperation

chapter 14|15 pages

The Division of Labour and Manufacture

chapter 15|49 pages

Machinery and Large-Scale Industry

part V|28 pages

The Production of Absolute and Relative Surplus-Value

part VI|20 pages

Wages

chapter 20|3 pages

Time-Wages

chapter 21|5 pages

Piece-Wages

chapter 22|5 pages

National Differences in Wages

part VII|22 pages

The Process of Accumulation of Capital

chapter 23|3 pages

Simple Reproduction

chapter 25|14 pages

The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation

part VIII|36 pages

So-Called Primitive Accumulation

chapter 26|22 pages

Part VIII: So-Called Primitive Accumulation

chapter 27|8 pages

Appendix

“Results of the Immediate Process of Production”

chapter 28|4 pages

Conclusion