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Porträt aus Werbung, in the style of Arcimboldo. AI image Introduction:   The Primacy of  Production In classical political economy, production occupies a privileged position. Factories, labor, and material output appear as the decisive forces shaping society, while consumption is often treated as a secondary moment in which goods are merely used or exhausted. Jean Baudrillard challenges this hierarchy by arguing that modern consumer society operates less through the production of objects than through the circulation of signs. Commodities do not simply satisfy needs; they communicate distinctions, aspirations, and forms of identity. His analysis emerges partly from the structuralist tradition influenced by Ferdinand de Saussure, although Baudrillard extends those concepts well beyond their original linguistic framework. Production and Its Privilege According to Baudrillard, both classical economists and Marx inherited what he describes as a productivist orientation. Even...

Thesis This article argues that Jean Baudrillard does not merely criticize Marxist economics but exposes the metaphysical privilege granted to labor and production within Marx’s system. While Karl Marx appears to overturn classical political economy, he preserves its foundational structure by elevating labor into the hidden ground of truth, consciousness, and historical emancipation. Baudrillard’s intervention begins at the point where this “mirror of production” destabilizes, and where signification gradually displaces production as the organizing principle of advanced capitalism. Introduction: Breaking the Mirror of Production Marx’s critique of capitalism is often read as a decisive rupture with classical political economy. Against the framework developed by economists such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo, Marx shifts attention toward labor, production, and exploitation as the real conditions underlying exchange (Marx & Engels, 1970). Jean Baudrillard, however, contests ...

Retro Museum Display with Vintage Objects. AI image Thesis This article argues that contemporary consumer society has transformed not only the economy of objects but also humanity’s temporal and symbolic relation to them. Drawing on the work of Jean Baudrillard, the essay suggests that the ecological and existential tensions of modernity are tied not merely to overproduction, but to the disappearance of durable relations between people, objects, and memory. Things that once mediated continuity, inheritance, and ritual meaning now circulate as disposable commodities within an accelerated system of production and consumption. Introduction — Objects That Outlived Their Owners There was a time when ordinary possessions accompanied an entire human life. A couple married and purchased a refrigerator, a sewing machine, a bicycle, perhaps a radio. Those items remained in the household for decades. Children inherited them. Grandchildren sometimes used them as well. Over the years, such th...