ABSTRACT
Baudrillard’s problem towards the end of the 1960s was to establish a sociology of modern capitalist forms of consumption. His book Le Système des Objets (‘The Object System’) was published in 1968; he was later to call it phenomenological, and again, paradoxically, an exercise in critical structuralism.1 This project certainly follows, but at a distance, Marx’s own analysis of the commodity form and the subjection of social relations to the domination of this form. For Baudrillard, also, the analysis of new forms of wealth was to be a secondary question. What had to be analysed was not the emergence of new forms of proletarianization, nor the alienative effects of the labour process, nor of course new forms of immiseration or polarization. Baudrillard’s critical attention was directly focused on new forms of consumption, the neglected later phases of the process of capitalist circulation. But consumption in Baudrillard’s thought was not a passive end result of circuits of capital; rather it had become an active moment, possibly the crucial moment in the formation of new social relations, opening on to a new phase of capitalist development. Looked at in this light, Baudrillard’s writings of this period constitute one of the very few attempts by major Marxist thinkers to engage in new social analysis.
