From Base to Code: Rethinking Marx’s Base/Superstructure through Baudrillard in the Digital Age
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...