Jean Baudrillard developed his analysis of symbolic exchange from a
critical reading of Mauss, John K. Galbraith
and Thorstein Veblen. Symbolic exchange for
Baudrillard was a way to escape the consumer society
and the political economy of the sign.
He demonstrated in his early writings how the code of consumption and the system of needs had completed the
system of production. The use value of the commodity provided an ‘‘alibi’’ to exchange value.
Consumers
were even more alienated in their private lives than
they were at work. They were unconscious of the
process of semiosis that led through their acts of
consumption of commodities with their coded
differences to the reproduction of the capitalist
mode of production.
The only way out of this system
was a return to symbolic exchange where the accumulation of wealth and power was impossible and
where exchanges were reciprocal and reversible.
Baudrillard, J. (1988) Symbolic Exchange and Death.
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