Marx and the Problem of Advertising

Abstract: Why didn’t Marx write about advertising? While not a few Marxist theorists have attempted to account for advertising’s role in the later development of capitalism, Marx’s own inattention to this economic form has only rarely been recognized as the genuine puzzle that it is. Here we examine the role of advertising in Marx’s own time and his strange silence about it in his work. We demonstrate that prevailing Marxist accounts of advertising’s development not only fail to explain its absence from Capital but also underplay its significance for capitalist dynamics today. Yet we argue as well that Marx’s own concepts can in fact clarify fundamental aspects of how advertising functions in our time, as in his—but only if those concepts are turned against his own apparent view about how advertising should be understood.