tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique  

Marx is Back (Special Issue)

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Christian Fuchs, Vincent Mosco

This paper introduces the overall framework for tripleC’s special issue “Marx is Back. The Importance of Marxist Theory and Research for Critical Communication Studies Today”. We point out why there is a return of the interest in Marx (“Marx is back”) and... see more

Nicole S. Cohen

This paper argues that Marxist political economy is a useful framework for understanding contemporary conditions of cultural work. Drawing on Karl Marx’s foundational concepts, labour process theory, and a case study of freelance writers, I argue that the... see more

Mattias Ekman

The aim of this article is to discuss and use Marx’s theory on primitive accumulation, outlined in the first volume of Capital, in relation to media and communication research. In order to develop Marx’s argument the discussion is revitalized through Harv... see more

Eran Fisher

Abstract: The notion of audience labour has been an important contribution to Marxist political economy of the media. It revised the traditional political economy analysis, which focused on media ownership, by suggesting that media was also a site of prod... see more

Richard Hall, Bernd Stahl

This paper investigates how four specific emergent technologies, namely affective computing, augmented reality, cloud-based systems, and human machine symbiosis, demonstrate how technological innovation nurtured inside the University is commodified and fe... see more

William Henning James Hebblewhite

This paper seeks to examine the claim made by Raymond Williams that the means of communication are a means of production. While agreeing with the central claim by Williams, the paper argues that the model which Williams’ represents this claim with is insu... see more

Vincent R. Manzerolle, Atle Mikkola Kjøsen

This paper argues that questions concerning the circulation of capital are central to the study of contemporary and future media under capitalism. Moreover, it argues that such questions have been central to Marx’s analysis of the reproduction of capital ... see more

George Pleios

Communication is examined in the realm of Marxist theory not as an autonomous social field, but as a component in the total social structure. It is argued that there was a shift from the initial Marxist idea of forms of communication as relations of produ... see more

Robert Prey

The ‘network metaphor’ impoverishes our understanding of power. Its binary logic of inclusion/exclusion leaves it blind to relations of exploitation. However, instead of ideological critique – the standard Marxist approach - this paper reconstructs Marx’s... see more

Jernej Prodnik

Commodity-form played an important, if often overlooked role in the studies of capitalism. Processes of transforming literally anything into a privatized form of (fictitious) commodity that is exchanged in the circulation process are of fundamental import... see more

Jens Schröter

Since 1994 when the first browsers made their appearance the internet became the ‚new medium‘ par excellence. As is always the case with new media, there was an intense discussion about the future usage and effects of the new technology. One of the centra... see more

Andreas Wittel

This is the claim: In the age of mass media the political economy of media has engaged with Marxist concepts in a rather limited way. In the age of digital media Marxist theory could and should be applied in a much broader sense to this field of research.... see more

Pablo Castagno

This article contends that for socialist emancipation to occur it is crucial to investigate how political cadres conceal, regulate or displace the demands of citizens and workers in the context of the calamitous effects of global capitalism. Analyzing the... see more

Irfan Erdogan

This study was designed (1) to test Marx’s theoretical statements on the nature of dominant ideas in a society by investigating the character of scholarly practices in academic publishing, and (2) to demonstrate the falseness of claims about Marx’s disint... see more

Christian Fuchs

This article gives an overview of example approaches of Critical Internet Studies and points out key concepts of this field. Critical Cyberculture Studies and Critical Political Economy/Critical Theory of the Internet are identified as two approaches in C... see more

Christian Garland, Stephen Harper

This paper explores the political-economic basis and ideological effects of talk about neoliberalism with respect to media and communication studies. In response to the supposed ascendancy of the neoliberal order since the 1980s, many media and communi... see more

Jim McGuigan

This paper is about the reconciliation of cultural analysis with political economy in Marxist-inspired research on communications. It traces how these two traditions became separated with the development of a one-dimensional and consumerist cultural studi... see more

Brice Nixon

This article argues that the quality that defines critical political economy is its critical method. Definitions of the critical political economy of culture are considered and shown to focus on specific theoretical concerns while not fully addressing the... see more

Michelle Rodino-Colocino

The point of this essay is threefold: to describe the main tenets of Marx’s theory of ideology by critically engaging in the work of Marx and Engels, to flesh out the claim that Sarah Palin’s  “feminism” works ideologically as Marx and Engels describe, an... see more

Gerald Sussman

Abstract: Informed by the works of Marx and his progeny (Lukács, Gramsci, Althusser) as well as more recent marxian scholarship, the purpose of this paper is to explore the role of ideology and propaganda in the production and circulation of commodities a... see more

Brian Brown, Anabel Quan-Haase

In this paper, we propose a new ethnographic method for the study of produsage (Bruns 2008) in social media contexts. The proposed method is based on three lines of thought: Marx’s method of ‘A Workers’ Inquiry’, the autonomists’ method of co-research, an... see more

Katarina Giritli Nygren, Katarina L Gidlund

The purpose of this paper is to bring Foucault’s elaboration on ‘the pastoral modalities of power’ into play in order to rethink alienation in digital culture. Pastoral power is not displacing other conceptions of power, but provides another level of anal... see more

Miriyam Aouragh

Abstract: This article discusses the socio-political implications of user-generated applications and platforms through the prism of the Arab revolutions. Popular postmodern conceptualisations such as (post-nation state) network societies, (post-class) imm... see more

Lee Artz

The Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela has built mass organizations of workers and communities that have erratically challenged class and market relations—verifying that taking political power is difficult but essential to fundamental social change an... see more

Peter Ludes

The analysis of Marx’s works will be prepared by outlining a more encompassing research project of intergenerational dialogues, in section 1. Section 2 will review Marx’s concept of an alternative, classless society, which was based, e.g., in the projecti... see more

Vincent Mosco

The global economic crisis has led to a resurgence of interest in the work of Karl Marx. This paper acknowledges this interest, but asks on which of the many shades of Marx, communication scholars should be focusing their research attention. The most gene... see more

Wilhelm Peekhaus

This paper interrogates and situates theoretically from a Marxist perspective various aspects and tensions that inhere in the contemporary academic publishing environment. The focus of the article is on journal publishing. The paper examines both the... see more

Sebastian Sevignani

In this paper, l examine the alternative social networking site Diaspora* from a Marxist standpoint. The investigation focuses on privacy, and contributes to a better understanding of this issue within the context of capitalism in general. First, I descri... see more

Padmaja Shaw

Marx was a practicing journalist for most of his adult life. He was editor, columnist and special correspondent at different times and his journalistic work provided significant inputs for his later theoretical work. Marx, through his engagement with t... see more

Christian Fuchs

This paper is a rejoinder to an article by Adam Arvidsson and Eleanor Colleoni: Arvidsson, Adam and Eleanor Colleoni. 2012. Value in informational capitalism and on the Internet. The Information Society 28 (3): 135-150. Arvidsson and Colleoni’s paper is a... see more

Yiannis Mylonas

This article critically studies the hegemonic discursive construction of the EU’s current (2012) economic crisis, as it is articulated by political and economic elites and by mass media. The study focuses on the political economy of the particular crisis ... see more

Paolo Caputo, Antonino Campenni, Elisabetta Della Corte

In the actual context of globalization, carmakers face a highly competitive market. The pace of technological innovation, the increase in international competition, the saturation of markets and the shortening of product lifespan are but some of the facto... see more

Ekaterina Petrovna Netchitailova

With the increasing use of online social networks such as Facebook in recent years, a lot of research has been focussing on the privacy issue of the network. The main question being asked is: how do users navigate their privacy on Facebook? While this res... see more

Christian Fuchs

Due to the global capitalist crisis, neoliberalism and the logic of commodification of everything have suffered cracks, fissures and holes. There is a return of the interest in Marx, which requires us to think about the role of Marxism in Media and Commun... see more

Ejvind Hansen

This paper proposes the following question: Is it possible to transfer human rights like the freedom of expression – or at least to preserve the formal protections guarding speech acts from arbitrary suppression – in a post-national setting? The quest... see more

Linus Andersson

The article discusses the concept of “the alternative” and the media through four sections. The first section discusses neoliberalism and the connection between neoliberal doctrine and mainstream media. This connection is described as promoting “public am... see more

Henrik Juel

My reflections in this paper concern revitalizing the critical potential of certain core concepts of Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment (first published 1944) and bringing it to bear on the digital era in general and in part... see more

Jernej Amon Prodnik

This article is a review of Thomas Allmer’s book “Towards a Critical Theory of Surveillance in Informational Capitalism”. The book was published in 2012 by the publishing house Peter Lang (in Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, New York, Oxford […]). In the start ... see more

Christian Fuchs

This paper provides critical reflections on Manuel Castells’ (2012) book Networks of Outrage and Hope. Social Movements in the Internet Age that analyses the “nature and perspectives of networked social movements” (p. 4) and gives special focus to the rol... see more