>>2675284
>Also be wary of chuds that claim that Baudrillard, Derrida, et al. were postmodernists. Surefire sign that they haven't read them.
Here's me going through The Mirror of Production by Jean Baudrillard (translation by Mark Poster). Page 30:
<the double potentiality of man as needs and labor power, this double "generic" face of univers al man, is only man as produced by the system of political economy
The idea that people have abilities and needs is a spook now.
Page 32 got lots of words and sentence fragments in quotes and gives as a source the 1844 manuscripts of Marx. There is a note by the translator: "I have not been able to locate this quotation." (I suppose the bit there about labor becoming a prime vital need Baudrillard got from Critique of the Gotha Programme.)
<There is neither a mode of production nor production in primitive societies.
(That's page 49.) He seems (he is a very unclear writer, despite being very verbose) to think of production as something that is necessarily complex; but simple acts of extraction, like plucking fruits, can also be put under the umbrella of production. So, when defined that way, yes they did have production.
<Marxism is the projection of the class struggle and the mode of production onto all previous history
Division of society with different people doing different tasks (sometimes a division fixed by birth) predates capitalism. Hierarchy, with some people owning multiple times as much wealth as others (whether you look at square meters of land or owned consumed things measured in work time to produce them), predates capitalism. That the biggest differences in wealth don't come from one being proportionally better at plucking fruits or what have you, but from a position in society that allows control over other people and being a parasite also predates capitalism.
Page 70: Once again Baudrillard seems to quote some other thinker, and the translator can't find the sources.
On page 82 is Baudrillard's pomo solipsism in a nutshell, when he talks about primitive agrarian societies (as he imagines them):
<Effort is not "invested labor power" recovered many times over in value at the end of a production process. It is in a different form as full of ritual as the exchange-gift lost and given without economic calculation of return and compensation.
I'm pretty sure that when something takes time to do, that aspect does not disappear just because you stop measuring and recording the time. Even for a group that doesn't use money, an anthropologist taking notes of the physical inputs and outputs can use this data for analysis and help with predicting growth, stability, or decline, whether these sort of calculations are completely alien to the group or not. If the result of the harvest spells out imminent doom, your refusal to read the data won't make the problem go away.
Page 122:
<This new ideological structure, that plays on the hieroglyphs of the code, is much more illegible than that which played on productive energy. This manipulation, that plays on the faculty of producing meaning and difference, is more radical than that which plays on labor power.
Word games by big thinkers are more important than what's actually going on, don't you forget that, you anti-intellectuals!
Page 134: Baudrillard says that
<there is a major role for students, youth who are disqualified in advance, voluntarily or not, as well as all types of social groups, of regional communities, ethnic or linguistic, because, by the process of the centralization and technocratic pyramidalization of the system, they fall into marginality, into the periphery, into the zone of disaffection and irresponsibility. Excluded from the game, their revolt henceforth aims at the rules of the game. Desocialized, they defeat the capitalist social reality principle, and not merely their exploitation by the system (…) The Black revolt aims at race as a code, at a level much more radical than economic exploitation.
Breaking news: Idpol more important than class, says well-off academic.
Page 152:
<Marxism is incapable of theorizing total social practice (including the most radical form of Marxism) except to reflect it in the mirror of the mode of production. It cannot lead to the dimensions of a revolutionary "politics."
Verdict: A mountain of anti-class-struggle make-believe POMO BULLSHIT. Worse than Jordan Peterson.