Symbolic exchange and the critique of productivism: is the move from political economy to symbolic exchange a nostalgic primitivism that abandons rigorous social analysis, or the radicalization of Marx's critique that exposes productivism as the Western metaphysics Marx shares with capitalism?

Jean Baudrillard, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

Production is the Western metaphysics that Marx and capitalism share. The productivist ontology — that labor, value, and use are the fundamental anthropological reality, that human beings are essentially producers, that history is the unfolding of the forces and relations of production — is not a description of the universal human condition but a projection of capital's own logic onto pre-capitalist societies and onto the human as such.¹

Symbolic exchange, in the precise sense developed from Mauss and Bataille, names what the production-paradigm represses: the gift and counter-gift that obligate without producing, reversibility without equivalence, ambivalence without the law of value, the symbolic dimension in which death is exchanged and the social bond is real. Use value is itself a myth — the naturalist alibi by which exchange value disguises its origin — and the Marxist critique that operates on use value as if it were the human ground of exchange does not reach the form of capital, only its content.

The 1972 break is not the abandonment of Marxism but the radicalization of Marx's own logic: the categories must be pushed past their limit until what they cannot reach becomes visible. Mauss and Bataille are not the nostalgic primitivism Kellner reads; they are the structural outside that the production-paradigm represses, the symbolic dimension whose absence in capital is what gives capital its formal character.²³

Sources

They are a new objective situation, governed by the same fundamental processes, but overdetermined by a new ideology (morale)—the whole corresponding to a new sphere of the productive forces on the way to a controlled reintegration in the same but enlarged system.
Baudrillard Live - Selected Interviews, p. 3
This formula goes well beyond political economy and its critique, since it literally signifies that it is a matter no longer of a production process, but of a process of exclusion and relegation. We must again draw out all the consequences of this. When production attains this circularity and turns in on itself, it loses every objective determination. It incants itself as myth while its own terms have become signs.
Symbolic Exchange and Death, p. 38
Here the same indeterminacy holds sway. And, of course, with the loss of determination of the economic, we also lose any possibility of conceiving it as the determinant agency. Since for two centuries historical determination has been built up around the economic (since Marx in any case), it is there that it is important to grasp the interruption of the code. The End of Production We are at the end of production.
Symbolic Exchange and Death, p. 31

Where the argument is made

The Mirror of Production (1973) — the systematic break with productivism, the critique of use value as myth, the analysis of the production-paradigm as Western anthropological projection
Symbolic Exchange and Death (1976) — the four orders of simulacra, the political economy of the body, the structural form of death, the operations of the code
For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (1972) — sign value joining use, exchange, and symbolic value
Forget Foucault (1977) — the productivism Foucault imported into the analysis of power
the early Utopie-period writings collected in Utopia Deferred (2006)

How the argument was received

The Frankfurt-School reception, Kellner's especially, reads the symbolic-exchange move as the catastrophic rupture in the authorship — the abandonment of the only analytic tools capable of understanding capital. Gane's defense (the 1972 break as repositioning, "shift of weight" rather than apostasy) is the canonical sympathetic counter-reading. The contested ground is whether symbolic exchange is modal (a dimension of culture that capitalism represses, available in any society including our own through the ritual residues, through ambivalence, through what cannot be made equivalent) or historical (a regime located only in pre-capitalist societies, the appeal to which is therefore primitivist). The position is the modal reading. The historical reading is the misreading.