Political Economy Capitalism And Popular Culture

This entertaining and enlightening book provides a guide to basic concepts and practices in capitalism, neoclassical economics, and political economy through an interpretation of popular films and novels of the past sixty years. Including works as varied as The Matrix, Lord of the Flies, The Dark Knight, Fight Club, and The Return of Martin Guerre, Ronnie D. Lipschutz describes and analyzes their essential role in the production and reproduction of contemporary society. His thoughtful and imaginative critique will bring to life the concepts and practices of economics and political economy for all readers.

Several of the most important and influential political economists of communication working today explore a rich mix of topics and issues that link work, policy studies, and research and theory about the public sphere to the heritage of political economy. Familiar but still exceedingly important topics in critical political economy studies are well represented here: market structures and media concentration, regulation and policy, technological impacts on particular media sectors, information poverty, and media access. The book also features new topics for political economy study, including racism in audience research, the value and need for feminist approaches to political economy studies, and the relationship between the discourse of media finance and the behavior of markets.

In this lively and wide-ranging book, Ellen Meiksins Wood argues that what is supposed to have epitomized bourgeois modernity, especially the emergence of a "modern" state and political culture in Continental Europe, signaled the persistence of pre-capitalist social property relations. Conversely, the absence of a "modern" state and political discourse in England testified to the presence of a well-developed capitalism. The fundamental flaws in the British economy are not just the symptoms of arrested development but the contradictions of the capitalist system itself. Britain today, Wood maintains, is the most thoroughly capitalist culture in Europe.

Drawing on Marxist theory and concepts, as well as on various theoretical contributions developed by prominent political economists, Bolaño develops a unique approach to understanding the culture industry, offering an interesting intervention in debates surrounding media and communication.

Considering Class offers international, interdisciplinary perspectives on class analysis today. It explores the gap between the class forces shaping the world and the paucity of class-consciousness at a popular level. The book shows the importance of the cultural struggle.

How Popular Culture Destroys our Political Imagination: Capitalism and its Alternatives in Film and Television explores the representations of capitalism, the state, and their alternatives in popular screen media texts. Acknowledging the problems that stem systemically from capitalism and the state, this book investigates an often-overlooked reason for why society struggles to imagine alternative economic and political systems in our neoliberal age: popular culture. The book analyzes over 400 screen media texts in search of critiques and alternative representations of these systems and demonstrates the ways in which film and television shape the way we collectively see the world and imagine our political futures. It suggests that popular culture is the answer to the question of why it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Contributing to the areas of sociology, media studies, and utopian studies, this book provides insights into the topic of popular culture and politics in a theoretically informed and entertaining manner. The book will be useful to both students and scholars interested in these topics, as well as activists and organizers seeking to make the world a better place.

A leading exponent of the political economy approach to mass communication poses an intellectual challenge to the currently dominant postmodernist and information-society theories. His essays investigate the role of the media and cultural institutions in contemporary capitalist societies.

Among the theories and ideas the book introduces are mass culture, the Frankfurt School and the culture industry, semiology and structuralism, Marxism, feminism, postmodernism and cultural populism.