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Baudrillard and the Crisis of Marxism: Beyond the Metaphysics of Production

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Distant Revolutions , Agitprop Art . AI image Thesis This article argues that Jean Baudrillard’s significance lies not in revising Marxism, but in revealing the extent to which Marxism remains bound to the same conceptual framework as capitalist political economy. In The Mirror of Production, Baudrillard contends that Marxism reproduces the modern Western privileging of labor, production, and utility even as it attempts to oppose capitalism. Rather than offering a corrective to historical materialism, his critique exposes the internal dependence of Marxism upon the very categories it seeks to transcend. The Crisis of Western Marxism By the middle of the twentieth century, confidence in classical Marxism had begun to erode among European intellectuals. Advanced capitalist societies had not collapsed under the weight of their contradictions, nor had the industrial proletariat emerged as the revolutionary force Marx anticipated. Instead, postwar Western societies experienced ris...

Baudrillard and the Logic of Consumption: Freud, Saussure, and Lévi-Strauss

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The Economy of Signs, in Rauschenberg ’s style. AI image Introduction: Consumption as a System of Signs In For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign , Jean Baudrillard rejects the familiar notion that people purchase goods simply to satisfy practical needs. He dismisses the image of the rational consumer choosing useful objects as a “thoroughly vulgar metaphysic” (Baudrillard, 1981, p. 63). A handbag, a tailored suit, or a luxury car cannot be understood merely through utility because their significance lies elsewhere: in the meanings they communicate socially. Rather than approaching consumption through economics alone, Baudrillard interprets it as a network of signs governed by hidden relations. To construct this theory, Baudrillard draws heavily on several major intellectual influences, especially Sigmund Freud, Ferdinand de Saussure, and Claude Lévi-Strauss. Freud provides a model of unconscious desire, Saussure contributes a theory of linguistic difference, and Lévi...