The Mirror of Production. Translated with an Introduction by Frank Poster

This book is a reflection on contemporary capitalism and the social system, viewed as a totalising oppressive apparatus built around the despotic imposition of a code of equivalential meaning. It is constructed as a critique of political economy in both its mainstream and critical forms. Though constructed as a critique of Marx, it also draws heavily on Marxist theory to move beyond it. Aside from any critical value (and even for Marxists), the book is highly useful as an alternative view of the functioning of globalised, neoliberal capitalism.

Baudrillard seeks to move beyond Marx by digging deeper into the origins of social oppression. For Baudrillard, Marxism is flawed because the escape from capitalism it presumes remains within the categories of production, history and political economy, and hence within the frame set by capital. In particular, use-value is the internal other of exchange-value and not something which exceeds it, and the forces to be liberated in Marxism are identified with the forces of production of capitalism itself. Marxism thus represses the more primordial refusal or hierarchy which constructs capitalism: the suppression of symbolic exchange and the subordination of the whole of social existence to the sign (which is to say, to capitalist equivalence as despotic signifier). For Baudrillard, people are "alienated" as labour power, not simply as its sale; it is the construction of humans as (primarily) productive or labouring agents which is central to social oppression, not their exploitation once constructed in this way (which is possible only based on the prior reduction to the code). Indeed, the autonomy of the economic (even as determinant instance) can itself disguise and mystify the system as totality, in which the moments are not really autonomous.

Marxism is criticised for reading capitalist categories (mode of production, economic and cultural factors) backwards onto other societies, especially in relation to indigenous societies, which Baudrillard, following Mauss and Clastres, views as refusing such separations. This mistake is taken as embracing the separation itself and hence the fundamental aspect of capitalist political economy. It hence echoes the ethnocentrism and the global-local false universalism of the capitalist code. But it is also inadequate for the most "advanced" capitalist societies. Particularly in contemporary capitalism, use-value no longer has autonomy because consumer society manufactures demand ("anticipated response") as well as supply. Increasingly the rule of the system is tautological and circular, defined in an "operationalist" way by is own functioning, and hence arbitrary - the code and signifiers refer more and more only to themselves, losing their referential and symbolic value and the intensities they might otherwise carry. The social system is denounced as totalising, almost totalitarian; the choices within it are either devoid of content or simply simulate competition in a condition of oligopoly.

Hence, the Marxist model of liberation is for Baudrillard at best repressive desublimation, at worst asceticism which delays gratification constantly into the future. Against this, Baudrillard celebrates the resistances of a radical outside, from the marginal and excluded, those who reject the code for its systematic discriminations, "irruptions" of revolt such as the Luddites and the 1968 uprisings, utopias in which "one is already totally there in one's revolt". Immediacy and radical antagonism are definitive of this kind of revolt. Radical antagonism hence replaces internal contradiction and the dialectic. Baudrillard's approach to resistance is suggestive in the light of the growing importance of autonomous social movements, the supposed "problem" of the "anti-social" and the rise of anti-capitalist practices based on refusal and marginality rather than a status of included-but-exploited.

The book is written polemically, and invites the criticism that the Marxism it attacks is selective. Although containing a brief section towards the end where alienation is criticised as essentialist and rationalist (assuming the theorist knows a "true" self and can bring it to the subject), on the whole the critique applies mainly to later Marx and to economistic and structural Marxisms (Althusser is an implicit target throughout). Baudrillard can be constructively cross-read with the early Negri, who maintains a Marxist framework while otherwise having a very similar account of capitalism to Baudrillard.