Author: christian.f

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New tripleC special issue: Critical Perspectives on Digital Capitalism: Theories and Praxis.

Thomas Allmer, Sevda Can Arslan, and Christian Fuchs, eds. 2024. Critical Perspectives on Digital Capitalism: Theories and Praxis. Communication, Capitalism & Critique 22 (1): 140-433.

Full issue: DOI: https://doi.org/10.31269/triplec.v22i1.1501

Table of Contents https://www.triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC/issue/view/49

tripleC’s special issue on “Critical Perspectives on Digital Capitalism: Theories and Praxis” presents 14 papers and an introduction that contribute to establishing foundations of critical theories and the philosophy of praxis in the light of digital capitalism. In Marxist theory, a theoretical and analytical strand has emerged that is focused on the roles that knowledge, communication, media, digital media, and digital communication play in and beyond capitalism. This special issue is a contribution to this type of Marxian analysis and theory construction.

More info and link to all articles can be found here.

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Textbook on media, economy, and society

Christian Fuchs has published a textbook on the foundations of media, economy, and society. It is available in English and German.

Christian Fuchs. 2024. Media, Economy and Society: A Critical Introduction. Abingdon: Routledge.
Christian Fuchs. 2023. Grundlagen der Medienökonomie: Medien, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. München: UVK/utb

The book introduces a variety of methods and topics, including the political economy of communication in capitalism, media concentration, advertising, global media and transnational media corporations, class relations and working conditions in the capitalist media and communication industry, the Internet and digital media, the information society and digital capitalism, the public sphere, Public Service Media, the Public Service Internet and the political economy of media management. Each chapter features a highly accessible introduction, recommended readings and lots of practical exercises where you will apply the Political Economy approach to concrete examples and cases.

More information: English book version, German book version

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New article about Stuart Hall’s communication theory

Christian Fuchs. 2023. A Marxist-Humanist Perspective on Stuart Hall’s Communication Theory. Theory and Society. Online First, DOI: 
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-023-09524-5 

At the end of his life, Stuart Hall called for the reengagement of Cultural Studies and Marxism. This paper contributes to this task. It analyses Stuart Hall’s works on communication and the media.

The goal of the paper is to read Stuart Hall in a manner that can inform the renewal of Marxist Humanism and the development of a Marxist-Humanist theory of communication. This involves reconstructing elements of Hall’s approach, criticising certain aspects of his work, and through this engagement developing new theory elements.

The article’s analysis of Stuart Hall’s theory of communication and the media is conducted in four steps. First, the paper reengages and re-evaluates what Hall called the two paradigms of Cultural Studies: Structuralism and “Culturalism”/Humanism. It discusses the role of human agency in society. Second, the paper engages with Hall’s and Althusser’s notions of articulation and sets the notion of articulation in relation to the concept of communication. Third, it discusses the relationship between communication and work in the context of Hall’s works. Fourth, the article revisits and engages with Hall’s encoding/decoding-model in the context of digitalisation.

This paper grounds a dialectical concept of communication that is based on the dialectic of articulating and articulatedness, the dialectic of work and communication, as well as the dialectic of communication in the public sphere and society’s power forcefields. It shows how a critical, dialectical theory of communication benefits from engagement with Stuart Hall’s works. The present work argues with, for, against, and beyond Stuart Hall in order or productively draw on ideas that emerge from this engagement.

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Journal article about base/superstructure and ideology in the works of Stuart Hall, Georg Lukács, and Raymond Williams.

Christian Fuchs. 2023. The Problems of Base/Superstructure and Ideology in the Works of Stuart Hall, Georg Lukács, and Raymond Williams. The Communication Review. Online First, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/10714421.2023.2242068

We live in times of deep crisis. General crises of society often are accompanied by ideological struggles. Given this context, it is important that social theory reinvigorates the analysis of ideology. For doing so, it makes sense to engage with classical theories of ideology. This paper contributes to this task. It asks: How are the economic and the non-economic related? What is ideology? This article deals with the base/superstructure problem and the problem of ideology via an engagement with selected aspects of Stuart Hall’s, Georg Lukács’s and Raymond Williams’s works. The commonality of Hall’s, Lukács’s and Williams’s thoughts that makes a joint engagement with their works feasible is that they all three dealt with aspects of culture from a critical theory perspective and are in one way or another representatives of Cultural Marxism. While Lukács’s works and Cultural Studies are often presented as conflicting approaches, this paper shows that concerning the question of how the economic and the non-economic are related and how we can think of ideology, the approaches of Lukács, Williams, and Hall complement each other, which allows critical theories of culture to draw on all three approaches and to combine elements from them in a synergistic manner. There are parallels between Williams’, Hall’s, and Lukács’s solutions to the base/superstructure problem. Williams argues that the economic exerts pressures on and sets limits to the non-economic. Hall writes that the economic determines the non-economic in the first instance. Lukács argues that the economic circumscribes subjectivity and the non-economic

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Der digitale Kapitalismus

Neues Buch, veröffentlicht im Jahr 2023:
Christian Fuchs. 2023. Der digitale Kapitalismus. Arbeit, Entfremdung und Ideologie im Informationszeitalter. Buchserie „Arbeitsgesellschaft im Wandel” (Hrsg./Eds.: Brigitte Aulenbacher, Birgit Riegraf, Karin Scherschel). Weinheim: Beltz Juventa. ISBN 978-3-7799-7144-3. 305 Seiten.
Mehr Information

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Digital Humanism

Published in autumn 2022:
Christian Fuchs 2022. Digital Humanism. A Philosophy for 21st Century Digital Society. SocietyNow Series. Bingley: Emerald. ISBN 9781803824222. 272 pages.

This book introduces the approach of Digital Humanism and outlines foundations of a Radical Digital Humanism.
“Digital Humanism refuses to transform humans into machines and to think of machines as humans. This is why this book is such an important and timely intervention.”
– Eva Illouz, Director of Studies at EHESS, Paris
More information 

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Digital Capitalism


Christian Fuchs. 2022. Digital Capitalism: Media, Communication and Society Volume Three. London: Routledge. ISBN: 978-1-032-11918-2 (hbk). ISBN: 978-1-032-11920-5 (pbk). ISBN: 978-1-003-22214-9 (ebk). 342 pages.

The book “Digital Capitalism” is the third volume in Christian Fuchs’s Media, Communication and Society book series. It illuminates what it means to live in an age of digital capitalism.
More information is available here.