ABSTRACT
Marx begins his main work Capital Volume 1 with the following famous sentence: “The wealth of societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails appears as an ‘immense collection of commodities’; the individual commodity appears as its elementary form”. Marx also, in the preface to the first edition of Capital Volume 1, argues that “for bourgeois society, the commodity-form of the product of labour, or the value-form of the commodity, is the economic cell-form”.
A commodity is a good that a company sells on a market in order to achieve a monetary profit, which is a sum of money that goes beyond the investment costs. In order to understand capitalism, one needs to understand the commodity form and how commodities are produced, distributed, and consumed. This is the task of political economy. What makes political economy a “critical political economy” or “critique of the political economy” is that such an approach sets out to understand and outline how capitalism and class societies in general create crises, inequalities, are based on social antagonisms, and create the objective need for an alternative framework of society, a socialist society, where there is wealth for all and political decisions are made in a participatory manner so that everyone benefits.
The task of this chapter is to look at the logic of commodities and capital as outlined by Marx. Section 4.2 focuses on commodities, Section 4.3 on cultural commodities, Section 4.4 on capitalism, and Section 4.5 on cultural and digital capitalism.
The culture industry is that part of the capitalist economy in which culture is organised as commodity. There are different forms of cultural commodities. The digital culture industry differs in a number of respects from the traditional culture industry, such as the capacity that consumers become producers (“prosumers”) of information, which has resulted in new capital accumulation models.
Capitalism is a dialectical unity of many different capitalisms. Cultural and digital capitalism forms a significant moment of contemporary capitalism. It interacts with other forms of capitalism such as finance capitalism, hyper-industrial capitalism, or mobility capitalism.
