Introduction

Abstract

This study shares the tendency, which has been widely maintained in Europe over recent years, to approach the problems of communication and the Culture Industry with the tools of economic theory. With regard to the Marxist analyses which adopt this approach, the oldest approaches to the mass communications media have often been criticized, basically viewed from the standpoint of political domination and ideological reproduction. The criticism of the communication and culture economy, by contrast, is that attention has been focused on investigating the functions of the media in the process of capital accumulation, prioritizing the problems of advertising and the mass communications media as a privileged locus for the accumulation of capital at the current stage of capitalist development.