15.06.2020 Tahsin Mert Saygın Blindspot’s Path: Displacing the Concepts 1. Introduction The political economy of communication and media has witnessed a range of debates about various subjects on which concerns its sphere. As Mosco (2009: 26) has remarked once, the political economy is concerned with the society as a totality, focusing on social change and history with a moral philosophy. Therefore, for political economists studying media and communication systems, various aspects of the sphere and regarding relationships have been subject to investigation from different approaches. One of the approaches that begun to develop in the late 1970s was of Dallas W. Smythe’s. His game changer essay Communications: Blindspot of Western Marxism (1977) was influential on several counts such that today’s literature on new media and social networking sites (SNS) from a critical political economy perspective had been mostly built upon his initial arguments. My purpose is to lay out his specific arguments in the light of the historical period he lived in and then to trace his intellectual followers as well as critics that might be seen as cornerstones. While doing that, I will try to link and relate these intellectuals with the ideas of Marx, not for using him as a standard for a glorification but because almost all of them use his concepts and points of departure in their various essays, as we will see below. As we shall see, foundational assumptions of Smythe paves the way for an image of “the almighty capitalism” that is nearly impossible to overcome and by displacing the concepts, abandons the dialectical method with a unilateral emphasis on advertising sector.