We see, then, that everything our analysis of the value of commodities previously told us is repeated by the linen itself, as soon as it enters into association with another commodity, the coat; Only it reveals its thoughts in a language with which it alone is familiar, the language of commodities. In order to tell us that labour creates its own value in its abstract quality of being human labour, it says that the coat, in so far as it counts as its equal, i.e. is value, consists of the same labour as it does itself. In order to inform us that its sublime objectivity as a value difers from its stif and starchy existence as a body, it says that value has the appearance of a coat, and therefore that in so far as the linen itself is an object of value [Wertding], it and the coat are as like as two peas. Let us note, incidentally, that the language of commodities also has, apart from Hebrew, plenty of other more or less correct dialects. The German word ‘Wertsein’ (to be worth), for instance, brings out less strikingly than the Romance verb ‘valere’, ‘valer’, ‘valoir’ that the equating of commodity B with commodity A is the expression of value proper to commodity A. Paris vaut bien une messe! (Marx 1867, 143–144).
In Marx’s equation (20 yards of linen = 1 coat = 2 ounces of gold), money has the role that it makes commodities commensurable and comparable in the exchange process by communicating prices. Marx, other than Sohn-Rethel, saw money as a peculiar form of economic communication.
6.3. Cultural Reductionism: Jean Baudrillard
6.3.1. Baudrillard against Marx
Jean Baudrillard4 (1929–2007) was a postmodern French philosopher. He specialised in theorising the world of signs and consumer culture. Whereas there is some positive influence of Marx visible in Baudrillard’s early works, he later became profoundly anti-Marxist. Jean Baudrillard (1975) developed a fundamental criticism of Marx and Marxism. ‘All the fundamental concepts of Marxist analysis must be questioned’ (Baudrillard 1975, 21). ‘Marx ofers only a critical theory of exchange value. The critical theory of use value, signifier, and signified remains to be developed’ (Baudrillard 1981, 129)
Baudrillard claims that Marxist concepts such as labour, production, productive forces, class relations of production, capitalism, mode of production, base/ superstructure cannot explain the radical novel logic of the sign, the symbolic realm, culture, and language. Marxism ‘never challenges human capacity of production’ (Baudrillard 1975, 31) and would celebrate labour. It would disregard ‘non-work or play’ (Baudrillard 1975, 38). The Marxist understanding of social wealth as material ‘has nothing to do with symbolic wealth’ (Baudrillard 1975, 42–43). Whereas labour would put something into value, the symbol would put something into play (Baudrillard 1975, 44). The ‘real rupture’ is ‘between symbolic exchange and work (production, economics)’ (Baudrillard 1975, 45).
Beyond Habermas: Rethinking Critical Theories of Communication
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