INTENDED for students, this book is billed as an introductory toolkit to critical theory. In it, Christian Fuchs attempts to show how Marx’s ideas are still supremely relevant in the areas of the media, communications and critical studies.

While such a toolkit is undoubtedly much needed, it does not adequately fulfil the task. What Fuchs has to say is valid but he is not a natural pedagogue or communicator.

His first chapter on the dialectic is unnecessarily dense and intractable and, instead of demonstrating in a readily accessible way how dialectical thinking can help us understand reality as a continuing process of change, he gets bogged down in its Hegelian roots and his use of expressions like sublation, social working class or subject-object dichotomy makes for hard going.

While Fuchs takes too much philosophical understanding for granted, nevertheless the book does include interesting discussions on a whole number of aspects of social development and on how technology is shaping society and how the media, particularly the internet, is impacting on all our lives.

Fuchs stresses how all these developments and changes are not the result of objective, uncontrollable forces but of class contradictions between capital and labour.

He emphasises that technology itself does not cause the specific changes we are witnessing but that these are the result of decisions taken by the ruling elite and serve to consolidate their powers and wealth.

In his conclusion, the author underlines the importance of class struggles and argues that communists, socialists and the trade unions require new strategies and new methods of struggle in the age of digital capitalism.

Marxism: Karl Marx’s Fifteen Key Concepts for Cultural and Communication Studies is published by Routledge, £22.99.