Rethinking Marxism

A Journal of Economics, Culture & Society

ISSN: 0893-5696 (Print) 1475-8059 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rrmx20

Reading Marx in the Information Age: A Media and

Communication Studies Perspective on “Capital,”
Volume 1, by Christian Fuchs

Amit Basole

To cite this article: Amit Basole (2017): Reading Marx in the Information Age: A Media and
Communication Studies Perspective on “Capital,” Volume 1, by Christian Fuchs, Rethinking
Marxism, DOI: 10.1080/08935696.2017.1358496

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08935696.2017.1358496

Published online: 25 Sep 2017.

Submit your article to this journal

View related articles

View Crossmark data

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rrmx20

Download by: [Purdue University Libraries] Date: 26 September 2017, At: 12:19
 RETHINKING MARXISM, 2017
https://doi.org/10.1080/08935696.2017.1358496

Review

Reading Marx in the Information Age: A Media and Communication

Downloaded by [Purdue University Libraries] at 12:19 26 September 2017

Studies Perspective on “Capital,” Volume 1, by Christian Fuchs.

New York: Routledge, 2016.

Amit Basole

The book Reading Marx in the Information Age: A Media and Communication
Studies Perspective on “Capital,” Volume 1, by Christian Fuchs, follows the
structure of Karl Marx’s first volume, bringing in theoretical concepts and empirical
examples from the world of media and communications studies for each chapter. The
author ably demonstrates the relevance of Marxian analysis to the Internet economy
and the information age. The book will work great as a supplementary text alongside
Capital in any course dealing with Marx, whether in economics, sociology, or
communication studies.

Key Words: Capital, Information Age, Karl Marx, Media Studies, Political
Economy

Since the Internet revolution of the 1990s, Marxists have steadily and productively
engaged with the profound implications of the new information and communica-
tions technologies and the changing social relations they have brought with them.
Principal theoretical challenges have been to critique grand claims of an entirely
new world order and economy made by bourgeois theorists and to identify conti-
nuity with industrial capitalism while doing justice to new social relations. In this
effort Christian Fuchs has been making important contributions for the past few
years. He has made a name for himself applying Marxian theory to the information
age and, in my opinion, is one of the few scholars able to take a balanced approach
that acknowledges what makes this period different from the preceding industrial
age while also paying due attention to the essential continuities of capitalism in
terms of class, exploitation, competition, and so on. He also carefully avoids
both techno-optimism and techno-pessimism, offering instead a dialectical view
of the relationship between technology and society. His 2007 book, Internet and

© 2017 Association for Economic and Social Analysis

 2 Basole

Society: Social Theory in the Information Age, was one such attempt. Since then he has
published extensively on labor in the information age, social media, and the like
(Fuchs 2013, 2014).
His latest book, Reading Marx in the Information Age, is a very interesting exper-
iment in creating a media and communications studies handbook for volume 1 of
Capital (hereafter Capital). As a dense text of 375 pages, in this review I can only try
to give a flavor of the kinds of issues discussed by giving a selective overview of
some key chapters.
This book is not primarily a new theoretical contribution; rather, it is a textbook
Downloaded by [Purdue University Libraries] at 12:19 26 September 2017

of sorts that introduces students to what a Marxian perspective on the information

or knowledge age might look like. That the book is written primarily with a teach-
ing purpose in view is also clear from the fact that each chapter ends with a list of
exercises for students. The structure of the book exactly follows, chapter by chapter
(with the exception of the last section on “So-Called Primitive Accumulation”), the
structure of Capital. In each chapter Fuchs summarizes Marx’s argument and sup-
plements the original with examples as well as theoretical perspectives coming
from the field of media and communications studies. Thus, the book tries to do
two things: introduce the reader to Marx’s key ideas in each chapter of Capital
and demonstrate the relevance of those ideas to knowledge production, distribu-
tion, and consumption. I should say that the explication of Marx’s ideas is not
standalone. That is, it will only make sense to a reader who has either already
read Capital or is simultaneously reading it. The book will work great as a supple-
mentary text alongside Capital in any course dealing with Marx, whether in eco-
nomics, sociology, or communication studies.
In the very first chapter, on the commodity, Fuchs discusses the peculiarities of
information as a use value and an exchange value. This is a recurring theme in
many different contexts throughout the book. In almost every chapter, he articu-
lates how Marxian theory can be used to understand contemporary phenomena
such as digital piracy, outsourcing and working hours in the software industry,
the political economy of media and advertising, unpaid work performed by users
of social media and viewers of advertising (“audience labor”), and so on. This
last concept of audience labor, a controversial one in media studies, is alluded to
at several points in the book. The concept, for those not familiar with it, claims
that audience labor creates an “audience commodity” that media companies sell
to advertisers (see Sherman 2014). Fuchs argues that this old idea has gained
new relevance with the arrival of social media because consumers perform labor
that generates value for Facebook, Twitter, and so on. Without coming down on
one or the other side of this issue, the book does provide a great way to engage stu-
dents on such subjects that are bound to be popular in any classroom of today.
They can also provide an excellent way to get students interested in Marx by
linking the theoretically crucial category of “labor” to their daily experiences.
Marx’s chapter 10, on the working day, is a justly celebrated chapter from
Capital, offering extensive empirical data on capitalist strategies to increase the
 Review 3

length of the working day or to fight against its decrease. Fuchs’s reprise of this
chapter does justice to the original by nicely updating the empirical evidence to
include web resources on the “factory inspectors” of today (corporate watchdog
sites), unregulated labor in the Internet economy, child labor in the toy industry,
internship labor, shift work in the global software industry, and so on. From a ped-
agogical perspective, I think this chapter would be an excellent one to use when
discussing political economy of labor in the Internet economy. The juxtaposition
of Marx’s original evidence and arguments with new data and sources offers a
clear picture of both continuity and change as far as the laws of motion of capital-
Downloaded by [Purdue University Libraries] at 12:19 26 September 2017

ism are concerned.

As mentioned earlier, a dialectical treatment of technology is one of Fuchs’s
strong points. The treatment of chapters 12–15, on relative surplus value and ma-
chinery, clearly bear this out. These are excellent chapters that situate Marx’s anal-
ysis of technology in the context of the information economy. For example, the
chapter on relative surplus value and on division of labor contains small sections
on unequal development between nations; unequal exchange of surplus value in
the tradition of Samir Amin, Emmanuel, and so on; and on the international divi-
sion of labor. Chapter 15, on machinery, has an interesting discussion on Luddism,
including Marx’s arguments, E. P. Thompson’s take on the Luddite movement, and
contemporary opposition to the Internet. In a section titled “Why Not to Quit the
Internet,” Fuchs argues against those who push for “opting out” and says, “The In-
ternet should not be abolished but should be transformed from a capitalist Internet
to a socialist Internet … which requires qualitative changes of both society and the
Internet.” This is of course unexceptionable as a general comment, but even as
Fuchs demonstrates sensitivity to avoiding technological determinism and a
blind faith in the “productive forces” of capitalism, he nevertheless adopts the or-
thodox Marxian position on technology as far as the Internet goes. What happens
to the exploitative system of the international division of labor (design and creative
labor versus mining and manufacturing) that sustains the physical infrastructure
on which the Internet rests? What happens to the ecological sustainability of the
Internet? It feels like an important chance was missed to discuss such difficult
issues.
Also in chapter 15 is a section entitled “Information Technology and the Antag-
onism between the Productive Forces and the Relations of Production.” Here
Fuchs discusses Marx’s well-known concept in the context of the contradiction
between the nonrival nature of information and the attempt to create private prop-
erty. While the section itself is short, it can offer a good way to raise the issue in the
classroom and have students discuss how private property can impede the free
flow and creation of new knowledge. While not strictly relevant to a media-
studies reading, chapter 16, on “Absolute and Relative Surplus Value,” includes a
very important section on reproductive labor and Marxism-feminism that briefly
discusses important thinkers such as Selma James, Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Maria
Meis, and others. This discussion on unpaid work then leads to an account of
 4 Basole

unpaid work in a media and communications sense, where Fuchs returns to the
concept of audience labor alluded to earlier.
Two more interesting things from a pedagogical perspective are worth mention-
ing, both in the chapters on primitive accumulation. One is the extension of the
concept to the enclosure of the knowledge and cultural commons via patents,
along with lawsuits against open-source and file-sharing programs, and the
other is a discussion of the correspondence between Marx and the Russian activist
and thinker Vera Zasulich on whether all societies need to follow Western
Europe’s historical trajectory. I was pleasantly surprised to see this discussed. It
Downloaded by [Purdue University Libraries] at 12:19 26 September 2017

is an important but all too often neglected aspect of the debate on historical mate-
rialism. Both of these are vital debates that are bound to create much discussion in
the classroom.
As will be clear from the above list, it is not always the case that Fuchs is attempt-
ing any new theorization or even bringing new examples to bear. Rather, the
strength of the book lies in fitting many disparate issues that arise in contemporary
information economies into a Marxian framework and showing the link between
these new phenomena and older ones theorized by Marx. The strong points of the
book are Fuchs’s solid grounding in dialectics and Marxist philosophy (of the
Frankfurt School type) and his extensive knowledge of the new information
economy and media studies.
Before ending, I do have a few minor quibbles. Since Fuchs is also well versed
with Marx in the original German, he spends a fair amount of time, especially in
the earlier chapters, discussing the shortcomings of existing popular English trans-
lations of Marx. In some cases, such as the discussion on “work” versus “labor,”
these discussions on translation issues are useful. But at times this does get a bit
tedious to read since he extensively quotes Marx in the original German and in
the English translations in order to point out problems and to offer his own sug-
gestions. While Marxologists may be interested in this, it is unlikely to be of
much interest to scholars and students who are concerned with applying Marx’s
ideas to their own work.
Another recurring feature of several chapters is a diagrammatic representation
of the dialectical process of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis (or subject, object, and
subject-object) in different contexts: for example, between essence, appearance,
and actuality, or between variable capital, constant capital, and the valorization
process. But I did not find these representations too helpful beyond the verbal de-
scriptions in the text.
In a few places, Fuchs also ventures into economic analysis using data sources
such as OECD STAN as well as AMECO1 to make some calculations on profit

1. STAN refers to the OECD’s STructural ANalysis Database. See http://www.oecd.org/sti/ind/

stanstructuralanalysisdatabase.htm. AMECO is the annual macro-economic database of the
European Commission. See https://ec.europa.eu/info/business-economy-euro/indicators-statisti
cs/economic-databases/macro-economic-database-ameco_en.
 Review 5

rates, the organic composition of capital, and the rate of surplus value in informa-
tion-related industries of various OECD countries. While this is useful to give some
indication of how quantitative work can be done in the Marxian tradition, it is not
Fuchs’s strong suit. The analysis consists only of some simple evaluations of trends.
Indeed, there are now a variety of more substantial studies out there on doing rig-
orous quantitative work using Marxian categories and national accounts or other
macro data.2
On the whole, however, this is an excellent addition to the literature on Marxian
political economy of the information age. I plan to use it myself in the classroom
Downloaded by [Purdue University Libraries] at 12:19 26 September 2017

and would recommend it to others without hesitation.

References

Basu, D. 2017. Quantitative empirical research in marxist political economy: A selective

review. Journal of Economic Surveys. doi:10.1111/joes.12218.
Fuchs, C. 2007. Internet and society: Social theory in the information age. New York: Routledge.
. 2013. Social media: A critical introduction. London: Sage.
. 2014. Digital labour and Karl Marx. New York: Routledge.
Sherman, Z. 2014. Pricing the eyes of passersby: The commodification of audience
attention in U.S. public spaces, 1890–1920. Review of Radical Political Economics 46 (4):
502–8. doi:10.1177/0486613414537992.

2. See Basu (2017) for a recent review of this literature.