{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"dadb939e-7360-4727-a1fb-be08c2f7a611","title":"Critical Theory of Communication New Readings of Lukács, Adorno, Marcuse, Honneth and Habermas in the Age of the Internet","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9781911534044","requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"dadb939e-7360-4727-a1fb-be08c2f7a611","id":"dadb939e-7360-4727-a1fb-be08c2f7a611","uuid":"dadb939e-7360-4727-a1fb-be08c2f7a611","title":"Critical Theory of Communication New Readings of Lukács, Adorno, Marcuse, Honneth and Habermas in the Age of the Internet","normalized_title":"criticaltheoryofcommunicationnewreadingsoflukácsadornomarcusehonnethandhabermasintheageoftheinternet","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9781911534044","isbns":["9781911534044","9781911534051","9781911534068","9781911534075"],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":236,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/dadb939e-7360-4727-a1fb-be08c2f7a611","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/Critical%20Theory%20of%20Communication%20New%20Readings%20of%20Luk%C3%A1cs%2C%20Adorno%2C%20Marcuse%2C%20Honneth%20and%20Habermas%20in%20the%20Age%20of%20the%20Internet","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/dadb939e-7360-4727-a1fb-be08c2f7a611/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/dadb939e-7360-4727-a1fb-be08c2f7a611/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/dadb939e-7360-4727-a1fb-be08c2f7a611","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/dadb939e-7360-4727-a1fb-be08c2f7a611/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/dadb939e-7360-4727-a1fb-be08c2f7a611/search"},"page":{"printed_page":16,"pdf_page":20,"physical_index":20,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"61d4d9d1c964cdedbdea0de5fbabc7d2f7d5cc75e8fa937a47b982128c7c6217"},"chapter":"C H R I S T I A N F U C H S CRITICAL THEORY OF COMMUNICATION","content":"Today we need readings of Marx that rethink the relationship of work and communication, labour and ideology, productive forces and language, class and identity, the economy and culture (Fuchs 2015a). I suggest that a way forward is to bring Frankfurt School’s critical theory into a dialogue with Raymond Williams’ approach of Cultural Materialism. Dialectical Cultural Materialism can thereby be used for grounding foundations of a dialectical critical theory of communication. In response to the overestimation of culture, traditional Marxism has often simply neglected engaging with information, communication and signification although cultural labour and the means of communication have at the same time become more important in contemporary capitalism. A critical theory of communication allows us to think about these topics in a dialectical, non-reductionist manner.\n\n1.2.9. The Law of Value in the Computer Age\n\nThe rise of computer technology, science and knowledge in production has further deepened the antagonism between value and labour time. Marx has described this contradiction in the Grundrisse:\n\nWhat capital adds is that it increases the surplus labour time of the mass by all the means of art and science, because its wealth consists directly in the appropriation of surplus labour time; since value directly its purpose, not use value. It is thus, despite itself, instrumental in creating the means of social disposable time, in order to reduce labour time for the whole society to a diminishing’ minimum, and thus to free everyone’s time for their own development. But its tendency always, on the one side, to create disposable time, on the other, to convert it into surplus labour. If it succeeds too well at the first, then it sufers from surplus production, and then necessary labour is interrupted, because no surplus labour can be realized by capital (Marx 1857/1858, 708).\n\nIt is a mistake to assume that the rise of digital capitalism brings about the end of the law of value and the labour theory of value. Negri (1991, 172) argues that in the Grundrisse the ‘Law of Value dies’. Virno (2004, 100) says that the law of value is ‘shattered and refuted by capitalist development itself’. Hardt and Negri (2004, 145) argue that the ‘temporal unity of labor as the basic measure of value today makes no sense’. Vercellone (2010, 90) writes that ‘cognitive capitalism’ has resulted in the ‘crisis of the law of value’ and ‘a crisis of measurement that destabilizes the very sense of the fundamental categories of the political economy; labor, capital and obviously, value’ (90). Value’s contradictions have been deepened in digital capitalism, but as long as capitalism exists, value is the foundation of the economy and there is capital’s exploitation of surplus-value generating labour that is expended over time. Postone (2008, 126) stresses, in this respect, that the crisis of value in capitalism is ‘not simply superseded by a new form of wealth’, but rather value ‘remains the necessary structural precondition of capitalist society’. ‘Capitalism does give rise to the possibility of its own negation, but it does not automatically evolve into something else’ (Postone 2008, 127). One of the theoretical tasks today for a critical theory is to think about the changes of value in the digital age (see Fisher and Fuchs 2015).\n\n16\n\nCritical Theory of Communication","previous_page":15,"next_page":17}