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In the Reading Room. AI image Introduction: Why Marxism Isn’t Enough Anymore Marxism remains one of the most powerful frameworks for understanding capitalism, particularly its dynamics of exploitation, inequality, and crisis. Yet by the late 1960s, Jean Baudrillard was already arguing that something fundamental had changed. Advanced capitalist societies, he suggested, were no longer organized primarily around production, but around consumption, signs, and meaning. Today, in a world structured by platforms, algorithms, and artificial intelligence, that shift appears even more pronounced. If capitalism no longer operates chiefly through labor and material production, then the question returns with renewed urgency: what exactly is Marxism missing—or more provocatively, what does it continue to presuppose that now obscures the system it seeks to critique? From Production to Signs Classical Marxism distinguishes between use-value (what a thing does) and exchange-value (what it is ...

Introduction: Why Does the Worker Vote Like the Employer? In a recent political debate in the United States, a question emerged that was as simple as it was unsettling: how is it possible that a Starbucks employee votes the same way as the CEO of Starbucks? Formulated with visible bewilderment, the question points to a paradox that seems to challenge the traditional categories of social analysis. If the interests of workers and employers are structurally opposed, why do they not translate into divergent political choices? Why, instead of conflict, do we find convergence? Perhaps the difficulty lies not in the answer, but in the way the question itself is framed. The Classical Framework: Class, Interest, and Consciousness From the perspective of Karl Marx, society is organized around its mode of production. Economic relations—the so-called “base”—condition political, legal, and ideological forms. Within this framework, social classes are defined by their position in the produc...

Death and Fatality, Piranesi Style. AI image Introduction: Crossing Death and Fatality Twentieth-century critical thought often sought to reveal what lies beneath appearances. From Marx’s critique of political economy to Freud’s psychoanalysis and Lévi-Strauss’s structural anthropology, theory promised to expose hidden mechanisms—exploitation, repression, or structural regularities. Yet advanced capitalism demonstrates an unsettling resilience: critique itself may have lost its subversive efficacy, becoming instead internal to the very processes it intends to challenge. It is at this juncture that Jean Baudrillard introduces the notion of fatal theory . Unlike inherited modes of analysis, this approach does not aim to uncover hidden truths. Rather, it confronts systems that absorb, circulate, and neutralize critique. Crucially, fatal theory is tied to what Baudrillard calls death —not as a biological phenomenon, but as a structural limit that systems attempt to exclude yet cannot ...

 To Mateo Introduction Karl Marx’s distinction between base and superstructure remains central to social theory. By grounding culture, politics, and ideology in the organization of production, he offered a powerful framework for explaining how societies reproduce themselves. Yet the transformations of late capitalism—marked by mass consumption, media saturation, and digital technologies—raise questions about whether this hierarchy still holds. Jean Baudrillard provides one of the most radical challenges to this model. Rather than simply reversing the relation, he calls into question the very categories through which this distinction is made. This essay argues that Baudrillard destabilizes the base/superstructure distinction by showing that production, value, and reality are themselves structured by systems of signification. In the digital age, this process intensifies: code emerges as an operational logic that reorganizes both economic and cultural life, rendering the distincti...