A Preliminary Exploration Of Baudrillard's Critical Thoughts On Political Classics Of Signs

Critique of political economy is the axis of Marx's philosophical thought,as the German scholar Iring Fetscher puts it:"Marx's goal has always been 'critique of political economy ',this means both a critique of the capitalist mode of production and a critique of its theoretical reflection in the theory of bourgeois national economics." The post-Marxist Baudrillard,who inherited the true essence of Marx in the second half of the 20th century,also pursued profound political and philosophical deep questioning of economic issues.Baudrillard's critique of political economy is constrained by his historical background,which is mainly reflected in three areas:Firstly,Western society faced huge consumer shocks in the economic field in 20th century.Driven by Fordism,post-Fordism,science and technology,capitalism shifted from a production-oriented society to a consumption-oriented society.Secondly,B audrillard considered political philosophy influence of changes in the economic interface.His recognition of the new political characteristics of capitalist society was mainly influenced by Lefevre,Foucault,Marcuse,and so on:First of all,Baudrillard expressed the dominant consumption phenomenon that Lefebvre and Guy Debord had been conscious of morality in today's social life in a popular and exaggerated method.Next,B audrillard was deeply influenced by Foucault's micro-politics.He examined the subject's experi-ences of being disciplined,monitored,and ruled in the "super-real" sequence.Next,the technical politics of the left thinker Marcuse also played an important role in pro-moting the development of Baudrillard's thought.Thirdly is the perspective of philo-sophy.Baudrillard is in the era of the rise of western postmodernist philosophy.His inquiry into formal instrumentalism has a philosophical orientation from substan-tive ontology to subjective and imaged ontology.B audrillard proposed his unique theory of critical political economy based on these premises.He saw that capitalism changed from a productive society to a consumer society in the economic field,the traditional rigid demand was replaced by the "desire"consumption brought about by the dressing of symbolic logic by capital logic,and consumption was an economic behavior transformed into a world outlook that affects the masses' mode of production,social relations,and value orientation,then a new form of capital surplus production and possession has emerged.Then B audrillard's analysis of economic relations has risen to the interpretation of a new type of political domination in the current capitalist society.What he saw in the field of politics was that the illusion of power was superimposed with the illusion of ideology.Politics realized the "rational cunning" subtly through the illusion of ideology.The traditional demonstration of national rationality and legitimacy was obscured by political interpretation texts such as new-type,abstract,recursive symbols,simulation,media,and image.It has risen to philosophical speculative ontological inquiry on the basis of economic and political inquiry:after the productive society is replaced by the consumer society,the system of things is being dissolved and reconstructed,all regulations are disappearing,and the world of meanings is being re-understood,the effect of which is that question about the existence of all objectivity is melted in the formalized logical symbols.Baudrillard's critical of symbolic political economy has both rationality and limitation.Its rationality is manifested in two aspects.First of all,he criticized the cultural industry critique,technical rationality critique and psychological Marxism prevailing in the western academic circles based on the premise of perceptual certa-inty in the industrial consumer society of the 20th century.Secondly,he adapted to the tide of modern western philosophy and shifted the focus of philosophical resear-ch from rationality to real life.The irrationality is that he declared the end of produ-ctive labor,its critique of Marx's labor theory of value is based on Baudrillard's misunderstanding of Marx,therefore has its abstractness and one-sidedness.