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••• Speculation to the Death •••

needs, based on their relative, social nature and determination (1981: 81; 1998a: 73)
and the Durkheimian argument that such survivalist economies do not exist, as the
production of social relationships and distinctions or an excess for feasts and rites
takes precedence over individual need in tribal societies (1981: 74, 76, 81). The
flawed survivalist anthropology was, therefore, only the creation of political econ-
omy, enabling it to establish a ‘human essence grounded in nature’, naturalizing,
supporting and ideologically legitimizing the existence and organization of its eco-
nomic system (1981: 72; 80).
Thus, for Baudrillard, the concept of ‘needs’ is created by political economy itself
to mobilize us to consume and thus to reproduce the system (1998a: 74–5). This con-
sumption, for Baudrillard, therefore, has no relationship to physical or psychological sat-
isfaction or happiness, instead, following Barthes, Veblen and Marcuse respectively, he
sees it as a system of communication, of social hierarchy and distinction, and of
social integration and control (ibid.: 60–1, 94). It does not represent freedom, sover-
eignty, or individuality, but, as we are socialized and trained into the code (ibid.: 81),
only the process of our semiotic ‘personalization’ and production (ibid.: 87–98) as
part of the ‘total organisation of everyday life’ (ibid.: 29). This, for Baudrillard, is the
‘social logic’ and operation of consumption.
Baudrillard develops these ideas in For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign,
describing an expanded ‘general political economy’ whose ‘object’ (the commodity
and sign) is dominated equally by the logics of use-value, exchange-value, and sign-
value (1981: 123–9). Baudrillard now applies his critique of political economy, his
claim that it produces and employs a secondary content, use-value, to ground and
support, via ‘needs’, the operations of the entire system and its dominant form,
exchange-value, to the operation of the sign. The semiotic system similarly rests,
therefore, on producing and employing a secondary content, the signified and refer-
ent, which apparently refer to ‘an autonomous concrete reality’ (ibid.: 155), to
ground, naturalize and legitimate the abstractions and operation of the dominant
form, the sign-value of the signifier. The ‘reality principle’ and ‘reality effect’ of the
sign, which appear to us as undeniable and self-evident as the existence of human
needs for survival, are revealed again by Baudrillard to be the process of and cover for
the reduction and transformation of the symbolic and the establishment of an entire
semiotic system producing reality itself for our consumption (ibid.: 143–63). Only the
processes of the symbolic are truly outside of this expanded political economy and its
unifying and dominant system of value and its formalized exchange, Baudrillard
argues, representing a ‘radical rupture’ of value (ibid.: 125), transgressing and destroy-
ing its operation (ibid.: 123–9). Here, therefore, Baudrillard clearly arrives at the sym-
bolic as the only ‘beyond’ of semiology (ibid.: 159), being expelled in its very
institution (ibid.: 160) and unnameable within it (ibid.: 162), but remaining his radi-
cal hope for an active force against the sign and its totalitarian processes – its process
of the production of reality itself. Today, he says, ‘signs must burn’ (ibid.: 163).
Baudrillard completes this critique of the political economy of the sign in his next
book, The Mirror of Production (1975: 50) through a critique of Marxism and its
historical materialism. His argument here is simple and effective: in adopting the

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