Marxist Media Theory

Introduction

Course: American Media Today

This website is aimed at presenting media within the framework of Marxist Social Theory. Neo-Marxist approaches flourished from the late '60s until early '80s, however their influence still remained. Read more...

Karl Heinrich Marx (1818-1883) was a 19th century philosopher and political economist... Read more about Karl Marx

Biography
Source: Wikipedia

Karl Heinrich Marx was born the third of seven children of a Jewish family in Trier, in the Kingdom of Prussia's Province of the Lower Rhine. His father Heinrich (1777–1838), who had descended from a long line of rabbis, converted to Christianity.
Marx was educated at home until the age of thirteen. After graduating from the Trier Gymnasium, Marx enrolled in the University of Bonn in 1835 at the age of seventeen to study law, where he joined the Trier Tavern Club drinking society and at one point served as its president; his grades suffered as a result. He was interested in studying philosophy and literature, but his father would not allow it because he did not believe that his son would be able to comfortably support himself in the future as a scholar.
The following year, his father forced him to transfer to the far more serious and academically oriented Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Berlin. During this period, Marx [...] absorbed the atheistic philosophy of the Young Hegelians who were prominent in Berlin at the time. Marx earned a doctorate in 1841 with a thesis titled The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature, but he had to submit his dissertation to the University of Jena as he was warned that his reputation among the faculty as a Young Hegelian radical would lead to a poor reception in Berlin.
Towards the end of October 1843, Marx arrived in Paris, France. There, on August 28, 1844, at the Café de la Régence on the Place du Palais he began the most important friendship of his life, and one of the most important in history – he met Friedrich Engels. Engels had come to Paris specifically to see Marx, whom he had met only briefly at the office of the Rheinische Zeitung in 1842. He came to show Marx what would turn out to be perhaps Engels' greatest work, The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844.

In Paris Marx wrote for the most radical of all German newspapers in Paris, indeed in Europe, the Vorwärts, established and run by the secret society called League of the Just. In January 1845, after the Vorwärts expressed its hearty approval regarding the assassination attempt on the life of Frederick William IV, King of Prussia, Marx, among many others, were ordered to leave Paris. He and Engels moved on to Brussels, Belgium.

Here, Marx devoted himself to an intensive study of history and elaborated on his idea of historical materialism, particularly in a manuscript (published posthumously as The German Ideology), the basic thesis of which was that "the nature of individuals depends on the material conditions determining their production." Marx traced the history of the various modes of production and predicted the collapse of the present one—industrial capitalism—and its replacement by communism.
Next, Marx wrote The Poverty of Philosophy (1847), a response to Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's The Philosophy of Poverty and a critique of French socialist thought. These works laid the foundation for Marx and Engels' most famous work, The Communist Manifesto, first published on February 21, 1848, as the manifesto of the Communist League, a small group of European communists who had come to be influenced by Marx and Engels. Marx moved to London in May 1849, where he was to remain for the rest of his life. He briefly worked as correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune in 1851.
[...] In 1867, well behind schedule, the first volume of Capital was published, a work which analyzed the capitalist process of production. Here, Marx elaborated his labor theory of value and his conception of surplus value and exploitation which he argued would ultimately lead to a falling rate of profit and the collapse of industrial capitalism. Volumes II and III remained mere manuscripts upon which Marx continued to work for the rest of his life and were published posthumously by Engels.

Following the death of his wife Jenny in December 1881, Marx developed a catarrh that kept him in ill health for the last fifteen months of his life. It eventually brought on the bronchitis and pleurisy that killed him in London on March 14, 1883
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Marx's views were developed by the theorists of the 'Frankfurt School' Read more about the Frankfurt School

Site structure:

1. In order to understand the role of mass media, one has to be familiar with some key concepts of the Marxist Social Theory

2. According to Marxists, the mass media plays a special role in society: it reproduces the society itself and controlled by the ruling elite to maintain their power.

3. Critics (British Cultural Studies & Postmodern theories): Society neither to be divided into 'high' and 'low' culture, nor to monolithic mass culture vs. authentic arts. Ideology has a different nature from what Marxists propose.

4. Bibliography

5. Handout and Power Point presentation available here

5. Contact me!

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