The Mirror of Production

Author: Jean Baudrillard Year: 1975 (French original Le Miroir de la Production, 1973; trans. Mark Poster, Telos Press, 1975) Source type: book Raw file: raw/books/baudrillard_1975-the_mirror_of_production.md

Attribution note. The raw file opens with Mark Poster's Translator's Introduction (pp. 1–16), a critical exposition of the book that is Poster's text, not Baudrillard's. Everything below from the Preface (p. 17) onward is Baudrillard. Poster's own claims (the comparison with the Frankfurt School, the charge of "pure relativism," the critique of la parole's "centered presence") are attributed to him explicitly and are not counted as Baudrillard's key claims.

Pagination note. The raw file carries no page breaks; page references follow the pagination of the Telos Press 1975 translation as given by the book's own table of contents (section start pages), and are accurate to the section, not to the line.

Summary

The Mirror of Production is the book in which Baudrillard turns his semiotic analysis of consumption against Marxism itself. Its thesis: historical materialism is not the transcendence of political economy but its mirror — Marx made a radical critique of the contents of political economy (exchange value, surplus value, private property) while reproducing, unexamined, its forms: production, labor, value, and representation. In unmasking the "anthropology of needs and of use value" behind exchange value, Marx did not exit political economy; he completed and "interiorized" it, since use value is "only the horizon of exchange value." Baudrillard's counter-thesis is twofold. Anthropologically, the primitive/archaic symbolic order knows neither production, nor scarcity, neither labor nor a law of necessity; the gift, the counter-gift, festive waste and anti-production are not an "underdeveloped mode of production" but a different principle of exchange, and projecting the mode of production onto them is an ethnocentrism of the code ("the materialist missionaries have arrived"). Genealogically, political economy has entered a third phase that Marx only foresaw: the passage from the form-commodity to the form-sign, in which "the signifier becomes its own referent," demand and need are simulated, and the system is held together not by the exploitation of labor power but by the monopoly of the code. The locus of contradiction therefore shifts from the sphere of production to the "demobilized" and "desublimated" sphere; the revolutionary subject is no longer the proletariat but the "non-marked terms" (Blacks, women, youth, the excluded) whose revolt aims "at the abolition of the code." Against the code Baudrillard poses symbolic exchange, the reversible cycle of giving, receiving, returning and wasting that the law of value has destroyed — "the mirror of production in which all Western metaphysics is reflected, must be broken."

Key Claims

I. The concept of labor: Marx's unexamined form

1. Use value is not the outside of exchange value but its horizon. "Far from designating a realm beyond political economy, use value is only the horizon of exchange value." Marxist strength and weakness lie in the exchange-value/use-value distinction. See use-value, political-economy-of-the-sign.
2. The generic human producer is a product of political economy, not its presupposition. "The system of political economy does not produce only the individual as labor power that is sold and exchanged: it produces the very conception of labor power as the fundamental human potential." Man's "double generic face" (needs + labor power) is "only man as produced by the system of political economy." See labor-power, productivism.
3. Marxism therefore assists capital. "And in this Marxism assists the cunning of capital. It convinces men that they are alienated by the sale of their labor power, thus censoring the much more radical hypothesis that they might be alienated as labor power, as the 'inalienable' power of creating value by their labor."
4. The real rupture is between work and symbolic exchange, not between abstract and concrete labor. "The real rupture is not between 'abstract' labor and 'concrete' labor, but between symbolic exchange and work (production, economics)." Concrete/qualitative labor already carries "repression, sublimation, objective finality, 'conformity to an end,' and rational domestication of sexuality and nature." See symbolic-exchange.
5. Marx's thought excludes the Bataillean register entirely. "If there was one thing Marx did not think about, it was discharge, waste, sacrifice, prodigality, play, and symbolism. Marx thought about production (not a bad thing), and he thought of it in terms of value." Against Kristeva's attempt to read "the labor of the sign" into Marx: "There is a choice to be made between value and non-value. Labor is definitely within the sphere of value."
6. The Marxist critique of political economy is "basically completed." "Today we are exactly at the same point with respect to Marx. For us, the critique of political economy is basically completed." As Marx moved from the critique of religion to the critique of political economy, so we must move "to a radically different level": symbolic exchange and "the critique of the political economy of the sign." See historical-materialism-critique.

II. Marxist anthropology and the domination of Nature

7. "Nature" is the concept of a dominated essence. "Nature is the concept of a dominated essence and nothing else"; "Everything that invokes Nature invokes the domination of Nature." See domination-of-nature.
8. Scarcity is produced by the market economy, not given. "Scarcity, which itself arises in the market economy, is not a given dimension of the economy. Rather, it is what produces and reproduces economic exchange." Primitive man "does not guage himself in relation to Nature. He is not aware of Necessity." See primitive-societies-as-alterity.
9. Marxism kept the moral philosophy of the Enlightenment. "Marxism has not disencumbered itself of the moral philosophy of the Enlightenment": it secularizes the "good/bad Nature" split in the economic concept of scarcity, keeping "the moralizing phantasm of a Nature to be conquered" while translating it into Law and Necessity.
10. Nature, Law and castration share one origin: the rupture of symbolic exchange. Reading Vernant's Lycurgus myth, Baudrillard argues that "the violence against nature (the rupture of exchange with and symbolic obligation toward it) is immediately expiated," whence Necessity, Law, repression and the unconscious. "Law, which is called the foundation of the symbolic order and of exchange, results instead from the rupture of exchange and the loss of the symbolic."
11. The Judaeo-Christian rupture is the precondition of the domination of Nature. Citing Lynn White's "Uniquely in its Western form, Christianity is the most anthropocentric religion the world has ever known," Baudrillard roots the separation in the soul/Nature dissociation: "although science, technology, and material production subsequently enter into contradiction with the cultural order and the dogmas of Christianity, nonetheless their condition of possibility remains the Christian postulate of man's transcendence of nature."

III. Historical materialism and primitive societies

12. There is neither production nor a mode of production in primitive societies. "There is neither a mode of production nor production in primitive societies. There is no dialectic and no unconscious in primitive societies. These concepts analyze only our own societies, which are ruled by political economy." Hence the demand: "Instead of exporting Marxism and psychoanalysis… we bring all the force and questioning of primitive societies to bear on Marxism and psychoanalysis." See mode-of-production, primitive-societies-as-alterity.
13. "Subsistence plus surplus" is a projection. "There are no producers; there are no 'means of production' and no objective labor, controlled or not. There are no needs and no satisfactions that orient them: this is the old illusion of subsistence economy!" Exchange-gift "operates not according to the evaluation or equivalence of exchanged goods but according to the antagonistic reciprocity of persons." See anti-production.
14. Symbolic circulation is primordial; "scarcity" is its condition, not its deficit. "Symbolic circulation is primordial." Exchanged goods "are apportioned and limited, often imported from far away according to strict rules. Why? Because, given over to individual or group production, they would risk being proliferated and thereby break the fragile mechanism of reciprocity." It is "the exact opposite of our economy based on unlimited production of goods."
15. Magic is not a faulty technology of production. Primitive practice is "in a different form as full of ritual as the exchange-gift": "Primitive man does not chop one tree or trace one furrow without 'appeasing the spirits' with a counter-gift or sacrifice." Articulating magic and labor in one "interior and indivisible unity," as Godelier does, "only seals their disjunction" and disqualifies symbolic practice as irrational. "The materialist missionaries have arrived."
16. The miscomprehension of primitive societies is internal to historical materialism, not peripheral. "Historical materialism does not know how to grasp earlier societies in their symbolic articulation. It only finds in them what it could find under its own light, that is, its artificial mode of production." And this blindness is not separable from its blindness about capitalism: "historical materialism results only in reactivating its model at a world-wide level."

IV. The archaic/feudal mode: slave, artisan, and the symbolic remainder

17. Slavery is reconstructed backwards from wage labor, losing what was exchanged in it. "A relation of reciprocity exists between them" — master and slave are not separated "in the manner of the free proprietor" and the free laborer. "Domination, as distinct from alienation and exploitation, does not involve the objectification of the dominated, but an obligation that always carries an element of reciprocity." See artisanal-mode.
18. Freedom is the interiorization of separation; "self-management" is productive management. "He is alienated not insofar as he sells his labor power, but insofar as he is an owner, 'disposing' of it as if it were his own goods." Of the artisan-ideal: "He 'disposes' of himself; he is his own usufruct. This is self-management at the level of the individual producer, but self-management as we know is nothing but the metamorphosis of productive management."
19. Work, unlike labor, is symbolic: it includes destruction, loss and death. "Work is a process of destruction as well as of 'production,' and in this way work is symbolic… The work of art and to a certain extent the artisanal work bear in them the inscription of the loss of the finality of the subject and the object." "The world of production, our world, has eliminated this ambivalence."

V. The third phase of political economy and the code

20. Political economy has a third phase: the passage from form-commodity to form-sign. "Phase 3 is as revolutionary in relation to phase 2 as phase 2 is in relation to phase 1." "This mutation concerns the passage from the form-commodity to the form-sign, from the abstraction of the exchange of material products under the law of general equivalence to the operationalization of all exchanges under the law of the code." This is "a revolution of the capitalist system equal in importance to the industrial revolution." See form-sign.
21. The sign becomes its own referent; the referent is abolished. "The signifier becomes its own referent and the use value of the sign disappears to the benefit of its commutation and exchange value alone. The sign no longer designates anything at all." And "it is the code that becomes the instance of absolute reference, and, at the same time, the object of a perverse desire."
22. Monopoly capital means the monopoly of the code, not (only) of the means of production. "The monopolistic stage signifies less the monopoly of the means of production (which is never total) than the monopoly of the code." Demand and need become "a mode of simulation": "the system produces all the responses, it annihilates the question in the same blow."
23. The form-sign is universal, not a class ideology of distinction. "The form-sign applies to the whole social process and it is largely unconscious. One must not confuse it with the conscious psychology of prestige and differentiation." The system "comprises neither materialism nor idealism, nor infrastructure nor superstructure"; it "is its own determination in the last instance." See determinant-instance.
24. Contradiction has been displaced from production to the demobilized sphere. "It is no longer in the sphere of productive exploitation, but in the 'demobilized,' the repressively 'desublimated' sphere, in relation to production, that the contradictions today emerge." The system "needs only that everyone play the game"; whole groups are "neutralized" as producers while maintained as consumers. See non-marked-terms.

VI. Subversion: the code, the non-marked terms, and symbolic demand

25. The new revolts aim at the code, not at exploitation. "The Black revolt aims at race as a code, at a level much more radical than economic exploitation. The revolt of women aims at the code that makes the feminine a non-marked term. The youth revolt aims at the extremity of a process of racist discrimination in which it has no right to speak." "No culture but ours has produced this systematic abstraction in which all the elements of symbolic exchange between the sexes have been liquidated to the profit of a binary functionality."
26. The working class is no longer the revolutionary subject. "The working class is no longer the gold standard of revolts and contradictions. There is no longer a revolutionary subject of reference." An alliance between workers and students "under the pious invocation of a common exploitation is impossible." See revolution-as-finality.
27. Capitalism's fatal malady is symbolic, not economic. "Its fatal malady is not its incapacity to reproduce itself economically and politically, but its incapacity to reproduce itself symbolically." "To consume is to start producing again. All that is expended is in fact invested; nothing is ever totally lost." See cultural-revolution.
28. What haunts the system is the symbolic demand. "Nothing can be given without being returned, nothing is ever won without something being lost, nothing is ever produced without something being destroyed, nothing is ever spoken without being answered. In short, what haunts the system is the symbolic demand."

VII. The economic as ideology; class; utopia

29. The autonomization of the economic is itself the ideological operation. "Ideology always proceeds by an autonomization of a partial totality; all autonomized partial totalities immediately have an ideological value." Applied to the economy: "There are no economic truths, or better, we have fashioned the truth of the economic as an arbitrary instance." The "cultural revolution" therefore "must make itself against the economic-political revolution."
30. Class is a bourgeois rationalist concept; there has only ever been one class. "In a sense, there has always been and there will always be only one class, the bourgeoisie." Marxist class consciousness is the product of organization: "It is the bureaucracy itself which, in line with the extension of its power, secretes class consciousness as its ideology." (Nietzsche: "the workers have elevated into a cardinal value the very sign of their slavery, just as the Christians did with suffering.")
31. Revolution-as-finality is the autonomization of means. "The Revolution as 'end' is in fact equivalent to the autonomization of the means." Communism "profoundly suffers from not 'taking its desires as reality'"; the utopian form of time "must be abolished" because the deferral itself is repression.
32. Utopia is present, not future; the subject is already total. "Each man is totally there at each instant. Society also is totally there at each instant." "To enclose the 'exploited' within the single historical possibility of taking power has been the worst diversion the revolution has ever taken." "Utopia wants speech against power and against the reality principle which is only the phantasm of the system and its indefinite reproduction. It wants only the spoken word; and it wants to lose itself in it." See utopia, revolution-as-finality.

Poster's Translator's Introduction (Mark Poster, not Baudrillard)

33. Poster's framing and his reservations. Poster summarises the argument — "Marx's theory of historical materialism… is too conservative, too rooted in the assumptions of political economy" — and names the difficulty: "to claim that this inadequacy in Marxism is due to the analytic nature of its concepts and to claim that a standpoint in the present, however critical, provides no basis for illuminating past structures courts the danger of pure relativism." Of Baudrillard's recourse to la parole: "this celebration of la parole implies a false assumption about the total presence of the exchangers. It implies an ontology of centered presence." He also places Baudrillard between Marcuse and Habermas: "the resort to symbolic exchange is like the German's effort to complement the concept of labor with the concept of symbolic interaction."

Connections

Concepts: political-economy-of-the-sign (the book's own program) · mirror-of-production (its central figure) · historical-materialism-critique (its target) · primitive-societies-as-alterity (its anthropology) · mode-of-production · labor-power · use-value · sign-value · productivism · anti-production · form-sign · domination-of-nature · ethic-of-labor-and-esthetic-of-play · determinant-instance · non-marked-terms · cultural-revolution · revolution-as-finality · artisanal-mode · symbolic-exchange (the alternative) · ideology · representation · structuralism · semiotics · psychoanalysis · enlightenment · utopia · play · praxis · species-essentiality · humanism · primitivism · consumption · consumerism · spectacle · absolute-commodity · semiocapitalism · mirror

Authors: Jean Baudrillard (author) · Karl Marx · Henri Lefebvre (the "signals" argument Poster cites) · Claude Lévi-Strauss (the Bororos; the "raw and the cooked" reflexivity) · Sigmund Freud (repression, the unconscious, castration) · Friedrich Nietzsche (the workers' "cardinal value") · Jürgen Habermas (symbolic interaction read against symbolic exchange, via Poster) · Theodor Adorno · Walter Benjamin (quoted on the workers' movement's "Protestant ethic of work") · Pierre Bourdieu (the autonomy effect of scholarly/cultural systems, cited for the ideological autonomy of the economic) · Poster also discusses Marcuse, Althusser, Godelier, Kristeva, Bataille, Vernant, Castoriadis ("Cardan"), Galbraith, Sahlins, and Lukács — none yet paged in this wiki except those above.

Debates: structuralism-vs-poststructuralism (Baudrillard's break with the Marxist structuralism of Althusser and Godelier; the code as the site of critique) · universalism-vs-relativism (the ethnocentrism charge; Poster's "pure relativism" objection) · theory-of-the-everyday (the critique of the productivist reduction of the everyday to material production) · power-and-space (the code as the new locus of power/domination) · critical-theory-and-architecture (the Frankfurt-School adjacency; the critique of critique)

Related source notes: The System of Objects (Baudrillard 1968) — the first book, whose consumption-as-sign-manipulation thesis this book radicalizes into a critique of Marx · Fatal Strategies (Baudrillard 1983) — the later development of symbolic exchange, the object's strategy, and the code · Simulacra and Simulation (Baudrillard 1981/1994) — the form-sign pushed to the simulacrum and value without referential · Structures of Atmosphere (Baudrillard 1968/2006) — the interior-scale sign-system this book names as the political economy of the sign · Critique of Everyday Life (Lefebvre 1947/1991) — the everyday/production frame Baudrillard's critique of Marx bears on · Bourdieu and Marx (Paolucci ed. 2022) — the adjacent Marxism-and-critique cluster · The History of Everyday Life (Lüdtke ed. 1995) — the Marxist-historiographical everyday, against which Baudrillard's anti-productivism reads sharply.

Direct Quotes

"A specter haunts the revolutionary imagination: the phantom of production. Everywhere it sustains an unbridled romanticism of productivity. The critical theory of the mode of production does not touch the principle of production." (Preface, p. 17)

"In rational terms, this gigantic secondary elaboration hallucinates man's predestination for the objective transformation of the world (or for the 'production' of oneself…). Everywhere man has learned to reflect on himself, to assume himself, to posit himself according to this scheme of production which is assigned to him as the ultimate dimension of value and meaning." (Preface, pp. 17–18)

"At the level of all political economy there is something of what Lacan describes in the mirror stage: through this scheme of production, this mirror of production, the human species comes to consciousness [la prise de conscience] in the imaginary." (Preface, p. 18)

"These are the two great unanalyzed forms of the imaginary of political economy that imposed their limits on him. The discourse of production and the discourse of representation are the mirror by which the system of political economy comes to be reflected in the imaginary and reproduced there as the determinant instance." (Preface, pp. 19–20)

"In the distinction between exchange value and use value, Marxism shows its strength but also its weakness. … Far from designating a realm beyond political economy, use value is only the horizon of exchange value." (ch. I, "Critique of Use Value and Labor Power," pp. 22–23)

"The definition of labor power as the source of 'concrete' social wealth is the complete expression of the abstract manipulation of labor power: the truth of capital culminates in this 'evidence' of man as producer of value." (ch. I, "Critique of Use Value and Labor Power," p. 23)

"Failing to conceive of a mode of social wealth other than that founded on labor and production, Marxism no longer furnishes in the long run a real alternative to capitalism. Assuming the generic schema of production and needs involves an incredible simplification of social exchange by the law of value." (ch. I, "The Concrete Aspect of Labor," pp. 25–30)

"In a word, man is not only quantitatively exploited as a productive force by the system of capitalist political economy, but is also metaphysically overdetermined as a producer by the code of political economy." (ch. I, "Man's Double 'Generic' Face," p. 30)

"And in this Marxism assists the cunning of capital. It convinces men that they are alienated by the sale of their labor power, thus censoring the much more radical hypothesis that they might be alienated as labor power, as the 'inalienable' power of creating value by their labor." (ch. I, "Man's Double 'Generic' Face," pp. 30–31)

"If there was one thing Marx did not think about, it was discharge, waste, sacrifice, prodigality, play, and symbolism. Marx thought about production (not a bad thing), and he thought of it in terms of value." (ch. I, "Marx and the Hieroglyph of Value," p. 41)

"The real rupture is not between 'abstract' labor and 'concrete' labor, but between symbolic exchange and work (production, economics)." (ch. I, "Marx and the Hieroglyph of Value," p. 42)

"In order to find a realm beyond economic value (which is in fact the only revolutionary perspective), then the mirror of production in which all Western metaphysics is reflected, must be broken." (ch. I, "Marx and the Hieroglyph of Value," p. 42)

"This constitutes a most astonishing theoretical aberration—and a most reactionary one. There is neither a mode of production nor production in primitive societies. There is no dialectic and no unconscious in primitive societies. These concepts analyze only our own societies, which are ruled by political economy." (ch. I, "Epistemology I: In the Shadow of Marxist Concepts," pp. 47–48)

"Instead of exporting Marxism and psychoanalysis (not to mention bourgeois ideology, although at this level there is no difference), we bring all the force and questioning of primitive societies to bear on Marxism and psychoanalysis." (ch. I, "Epistemology I," p. 49)

"Today we are exactly at the same point with respect to Marx. For us, the critique of political economy is basically completed. The materialist dialectic has exhausted its content in reproducing its form." (ch. I, "The Critique of Political Economy Is Basically Completed," p. 50)

"Nature is the concept of a dominated essence and nothing else. … Everything that invokes Nature invokes the domination of Nature." (ch. II, "Marxist Anthropology and the Domination of Nature," p. 55)

"Marxism has not disencumbered itself of the moral philosophy of the Enlightenment. It has rejected its naive and sentimental side… but it holds onto the religion: the moralizing phantasm of a Nature to be conquered. By secularizing it in the economic concept of scarcity, Marxism keeps the idea of Necessity without transforming it." (ch. II, "The Moral Philosophy of the Enlightenment," pp. 56–57)

"Scarcity, which itself arises in the market economy, is not a given dimension of the economy. Rather, it is what produces and reproduces economic exchange. … in his symbolic exchanges primitive man does not guage himself in relation to Nature. He is not aware of Necessity, a Law that takes effect only with the objectification of Nature." (ch. II, "The Moral Philosophy of the Enlightenment," pp. 57–58)

"We have seen how materialism's reference to 'objective' Necessity led it to fantasize in its revolutionary perspectives the reverse schemes of Freedom and Abundance (the universality of needs and capacities) which are only the sublimated counterparts of Law and Necessity." (ch. II, "Lycurgus and Castration," p. 61)

"In this sense law, which is called the foundation of the symbolic order and of exchange, results instead from the rupture of exchange and the loss of the symbolic. This is why there is properly neither Necessity nor Scarcity nor Repression nor the Unconscious in the primitive order, whose entire symbolic strategy aims at exorcizing the apparition of Law." (ch. II, "Lycurgus and Castration," p. 61)

"Uniquely in its Western form, Christianity is the most anthropocentric religion the world has ever known. In absolute contrast to ancient paganism and oriental religions, Christianity not only institutes a dualism of Man and Nature but also affirms that God's will is that man exploit Nature according to his own ends." (ch. II, "Judaeo-Christian Anti-Physis," p. 63, quoting Lynn White)

"Marxism is the projection of the class struggle and the mode of production onto all previous history; it is the vision of a future 'freedom' based on the conscious domination of nature. These are extrapolations of the economic. To the degree that it is not radical, Marxist critique is led despite itself to reproduce the roots of the system of political economy." (ch. II, "Epistemology II: Structural Limits of the Marxist Critique," pp. 65–68)

"There are no producers; there are no 'means of production' and no objective labor, controlled or not. There are no needs and no satisfactions that orient them: this is the old illusion of subsistence economy!" (ch. III, "Surplus and Anti-Production," p. 74)

"Symbolic circulation is primordial. Things of functional use are taken from that sphere… Nothing remains because survival is not a principle. We have made it one. For the primitives, eating, drinking, and living are first of all acts that are exchanged: if they are not exchanged, they do not occur." (ch. III, "Surplus and Anti-Production," pp. 76–77)

"It is the exact opposite of our economy based on unlimited production of goods and on the discontinuous abstraction of contractual exchange. In primitive exchange, production appears nowhere as an end or a means: the meaning occurs elsewhere." (ch. III, "Surplus and Anti-Production," p. 77)

"For all these objects and men lost in their primitive limbo, this is the baptism of production: the baptism of labor and value for nature and goods lost in the gratuity of their richness… The materialist missionaries have arrived." (ch. III, "Surplus and Anti-Production," pp. 79–80)

"Primitive man does not chop one tree or trace one furrow without 'appeasing the spirits' with a counter-gift or sacrifice. This taking and returning, giving and receiving, is essential. … The final product is never aimed for." (ch. III, "Magic and Labor," pp. 81–83)

"Historical materialism does not know how to grasp earlier societies in their symbolic articulation. It only finds in them what it could find under its own light, that is, its artificial mode of production." (ch. IV, "Epistemology IV: Marxism and Miscomprehension," p. 107)

"This miscomprehension is not a peripheral or secondary weakness. … just as a people that oppresses another cannot be free, so a culture that is mistaken about another must also be mistaken about itself." (ch. IV, "Epistemology IV," p. 107)

"A relation of reciprocity exists between them—not in the modern and psychological sense of a bi-univocal relation of two individualized subjects… but in the sense of an obligation, of a structure of exchange and obligation where the specification of the terms of exchange in autonomous subjects… does not yet exist." (ch. IV, "The Slave," pp. 93–95)

"Domination, as distinct from alienation and exploitation, does not involve the objectification of the dominated, but an obligation that always carries an element of reciprocity." (ch. IV, "The Slave," p. 95)

"Work is a process of destruction as well as of 'production,' and in this way work is symbolic. Death, loss and absence are inscribed in it through this dispossession of the subject, this loss of the subject and the object in the scansion of the exchange." (ch. IV, "The Artisan," p. 100)

"The world of production, our world, has eliminated this ambivalence. To project it everywhere else is a theoretically fraudulent operation, but also a failure to the extent that it annihilates its object in order to avoid its radical contradiction." (ch. IV, "The Artisan," p. 100)

"He 'disposes' of himself; he is his own usufruct. This is self-management at the level of the individual producer, but self-management as we know is nothing but the metamorphosis of productive management." (ch. IV, "The Artisan," p. 104)

"And historical materialism could only be the Euclidean geometry of this history." (ch. V, "A Euclidean Geometry of History?", pp. 111–118)

"It is only in the mirror of production and history, under the double principle of indefinite accumulation (production) and dialectical continuity (history), only by the arbitrariness of the code, that our Western culture can reflect itself in the universal as the privileged moment of truth (science) or of revolution (historical materialism)." (ch. V, "A Euclidean Geometry of History?", p. 116)

"This mutation concerns the passage from the form-commodity to the form-sign, from the abstraction of the exchange of material products under the law of general equivalence to the operationalization of all exchanges under the law of the code." (ch. V, "The Third Phase of Political Economy," p. 121)

"The signifier becomes its own referent and the use value of the sign disappears to the benefit of its commutation and exchange value alone. The sign no longer designates anything at all. It approaches its true structural limit which is to refer back only to other signs. All reality then becomes the place of a semiurgical manipulation, of a structural simulation. And… here it is the code that becomes the instance of absolute reference, and, at the same time, the object of a perverse desire." (ch. V, "The Third Phase of Political Economy," p. 123)

"The monopolistic stage signifies less the monopoly of the means of production (which is never total) than the monopoly of the code." (ch. V, "The Third Phase of Political Economy," pp. 121–123)

"The form-sign applies to the whole social process and it is largely unconscious. One must not confuse it with the conscious psychology of prestige and differentiation, just as one must not confuse the form-commodity, the abstract and general structure of exchange value, with the conscious psychology of profit and economic calculation." (ch. V, "The Third Phase of Political Economy," p. 121)

"It is no longer in the sphere of productive exploitation, but in the 'demobilized,' the repressively 'desublimated' sphere, in relation to production, that the contradictions today emerge." (ch. V, "Contradiction and Subversion: The Displacement of the Political," pp. 129–130)

"The Black revolt aims at race as a code, at a level much more radical than economic exploitation. The revolt of women aims at the code that makes the feminine a non-marked term. The youth revolt aims at the extremity of a process of racist discrimination in which it has no right to speak." (ch. V, "Contradiction and Subversion," pp. 138–139)

"No culture but ours has produced this systematic abstraction in which all the elements of symbolic exchange between the sexes have been liquidated to the profit of a binary functionality." (ch. V, "Contradiction and Subversion," pp. 135–136)

"The working class is no longer the gold standard of revolts and contradictions. There is no longer a revolutionary subject of reference." (ch. V, "Contradiction and Subversion," p. 143)

"Its fatal malady is not its incapacity to reproduce itself economically and politically, but its incapacity to reproduce itself symbolically." (ch. V, "Political Revolution and 'Cultural' Revolution," p. 144)

"To consume is to start producing again. All that is expended is in fact invested; nothing is ever totally lost. Even when coffee stocks burn, when enormous wealth is squandered in war, the system cannot stop having this lead to a widening reproduction." (ch. V, "Political Revolution and 'Cultural' Revolution," p. 145)

"We are faced with coding, super-coding, universalization of the code, proliferating axiomatization of the capitalist system (Deleuze). But against the triumphant abstraction… the demand arises that nothing can be given without being returned, nothing is ever won without something being lost, nothing is ever produced without something being destroyed, nothing is ever spoken without being answered. In short, what haunts the system is the symbolic demand." (ch. V, "Political Revolution and 'Cultural' Revolution," p. 146)

"Ideology always proceeds by an autonomization of a partial totality; all autonomized partial totalities immediately have an ideological value. … The economic sphere is supported by science. For all detached fields as such secrete a myth of rigor, of objectivity, of truth. … There are no economic truths, or better, we have fashioned the truth of the economic as an arbitrary instance." (ch. V, "The Economic as Ideology and Simulation Model," pp. 147–149)

"The symbolic is the abolition of the imaginary of political economy (and of all other detached fields). In this sense, the cultural revolution is no longer tied to the economic-political revolution. … Because today the system has no better strategy than that of the dialectic of political economy, the cultural revolution must make itself against the economic-political revolution." (ch. V, "The Economic as Ideology and Simulation Model," pp. 150–151)

"(Nietzsche is right: the workers have elevated into a cardinal value the very sign of their slavery, just as the Christians did with suffering.)" (ch. V, "Marxist Theory and the Workers' Movement: The Concept of Class," p. 157)

"In a sense, there has always been and there will always be only one class, the bourgeoisie. This capitalist bourgeois class is defined not only by the ownership of the means of production, but by the rational finality of production." (ch. V, "The Concept of Class," pp. 158–159)

"It is the bureaucracy itself which, in line with the extension of its power, secretes class consciousness as its ideology. … To the imaginary subject of history corresponds profoundly the paranoic machine of the bureaucracy." (ch. V, "The Concept of Class," p. 158)

"The Revolution as 'end' is in fact equivalent to the autonomization of the means. What has happened is clear: it has the effect of stifling the current situation, of exorcizing immediate subversion, of diluting (in the chemical sense of the term) explosive reactions in a long term solution." (ch. V, "Revolution as Finality: History in Suspense," p. 162)

"Each man is totally there at each instant. Society also is totally there at each instant. Courderoy, the Luddites, Rimbaud, the Communards, the people of the savage strikes, those of May, 1968—in every case the revolution does not speak indirectly; they are the revolution, not concepts in transit." (ch. V, "The Radicality of Utopia," p. 166)

"To enclose the 'exploited' within the single historical possibility of taking power has been the worst diversion the revolution has ever taken." (ch. V, "The Radicality of Utopia," pp. 166–167)

"Utopia wants speech against power and against the reality principle which is only the phantasm of the system and its indefinite reproduction. It wants only the spoken word; and it wants to lose itself in it." (ch. V, "The Radicality of Utopia," p. 167)

Open Questions

• Is the critique of Marx internally consistent? Baudrillard simultaneously (a) claims the concepts of historical materialism are pure products of capitalism with no validity beyond it, and (b) claims they "fail to account for" primitive societies and for our own. Poster's objection stands: if no standpoint can illuminate other formations, what licenses the assertion that the model "misses" them? Does the wiki's universalism-vs-relativism debate already frame this?
• Symbolic exchange: anthropology or construct? The book derives symbolic exchange (gift, counter-gift, festive waste, anti-production) largely from Mauss/Bataille through polemic rather than ethnographic argument; Sahlins and Vernant are cited, but the empirical grounding is thin. How does this compare with the wiki's symbolic-exchange page (presently sourced from Fatal Strategies and Mauss references)? Should the page now carry the 1975 anthropological statement?
• Is the "third phase" periodisation falsifiable? Baudrillard dates the form-sign to monopoly capitalism, but says the change "is largely unconscious" and that the quantitative dominance of the commodity is irrelevant to the theoretical decision. On what evidence could the thesis be wrong?
• Productive forces and the future. Baudrillard abandons the productive-forces/relations contradiction as the motor of history and replaces it with the "impossibility of participation"/symbolic disintegration. Does this make any future political economy unthinkable — and is "self-management" really only "productive management"?
• Women, race, youth as "non-marked terms." Men, whites, and adults are the "marked" terms; the revolt of the unmarked "aims at the abolition of the code." Yet Baudrillard says the "marked" position can be seized without breaking the code ("The 'White' Black man"). How does this sit with the wiki's non-marked-terms and mutedness material?
• The status of nature. Is the "domination of Nature" concept (with its Judaeo-Christian genealogy via Lynn White) compatible with the wiki's ecological/environmental register (ecology, symbolic-ecology, unnatural-nature), or does it remain a purely philosophical construct?
• The Kristeva/Bataille dispute. Baudrillard's reading of Marx against Kristeva and via Bataille ("sacrificial economy or symbolic exchange is exclusive of political economy") rests on a strong claim about the inability of labor to leave the sphere of value. Is that claim defensible, or does it foreclose a materialist account of non-productive practice (de Certeau's tactics, the everyday)?
• Poster's own objections as wiki questions. Poster charges Baudrillard with "an ontology of centered presence" in la parole and with an untheorised discontinuity in his own history of social systems; the wiki should record these as the standing critique of the book, not as Baudrillard's positions (see baudrillard-jean).
• Not-yet-paged figures. The book centrally engages Godelier, Althusser, Castoriadis ("Cardan"), Vernant, Kristeva, Sahlins, Galbraith, Lukács, Marcuse, Bataille, Mauss and Vernant's Mythe et pensée chez les Grecs — several warrant author or concept pages or at least PAGE NEEDED entries in log.md.