Baudrillard is best known for his ideas on the simulacrum and hyperreality, but more radical and counterintuitive is his claim that labor is not (as both pro- and anti-capitalists think) an economic exchange, but an unconditional gift by which capital maintains its dominance./1

“The gift is the source and even the essence of power.” This is the model of the potlatch, in which the one who can give the most attains the dominant position. But in what sense is labor a gift? Capital, like the Hegelian master becomes master by giving labor instead of death./2

This idea is less counterintuitive than it seems. There is actually a popular right wing version of it: the “job creator.” The entrepreneur is framed as the worker’s benefactor, not as a self-interested exploiter of labor. For Baudrillard there’s a sense in which this is true./3

For him, the Marxist claim that the capitalist aims to extract surplus value is ultimately an alibi. Capital’s real “interest” here is pure domination, achieved through the gift of labor. “Wages are the mark of this poisonous gift. They sanction this unilateral gift of labor.”/4

The left-wing acknowledgement of labor as gift is the widely shared belief that the state should function as the “job creator,” in the form of Federal Jobs Guarantee, WPA-type programs, etc. The idea is that the state should offer the gift where capital does not or will not./5

Baudrillard’s critique (as I mentioned in a post about UBI the other day) would be that such proposals do not challenge capital’s dominance but support it by reinscribing the logic of the gift. The only thing that can challenge the system is to refuse the gift altogether./6

This, he argues, is why suicidal terrorism becomes a standard form of resistance: the refusal of life is the refusal of the master’s gift. It’s interesting, then, that in our time the figure of the NEET (who rejects the gift of labor) merges with the figure of the terrorist./7

In this reading, the NEET is already a terrorist by definition, which would explain why he is despised by everyone regardless of ideology. The rare (but mediatically representative NEET who kills people and himself is merely fulfilling a symbolic destiny./8