Baudrillard & marxism

I tend to read too little, and to have too many preconceptions about things. Baudrillard I've always thought of as Derrida-lite, somewhat populistic, the wishy-washy mainstream of the "postmodernists". Today, I sat down with an essay from his book The Mirror of Production (1973, translated in English in 1975). In his book, he advocates an argument showing why Marx' critique of the bourgeoise society is nothing but a variation of the same paradigm that is under attack. He criticizes Marx' theory of value (exchange value/use value), his conception(s) of labor, his taking for granted the role (concept) of production. His point is, essentially, that Marx is not radical enough, that he takes for granted several aspects of capitalist society and turns them into natural presuppositions of human life. He is not satisfied with Marx' attempt to rely on a theory of value in which labor and production are based on "something positively human" (labor as an expression of the essential "human nature"). Baudrillard's text - the bit I've read so far - is written in a composed, calm style and it struck me as a both serious and open-ended way of dealing with the works of Marx and, moreover, labor-as-production and labor-as-an-activity. He seems to get to the core of many ways of spelling out the relation between labor as a form of (economically situated) production and something that can be understood in terms of a world of human needs, choices and perspectives of meaning.

I don't agree with everything (I'm not sure what to do with his full-on rejection of the concept of labor as being immersed in political economy, nor do I have a clear picture of what he means by "symbolic exchange"), but I think he's right in pointing out that there is something fundamentally wrong in a specific conception of labor that universalizes it into "the nature of man" (a discussion I recognize from the book Ideology of work by PD Anthony, sociologist). The best thing about Baudrillard's text is that it inspires me to read Marx - systematically. It opens up for good questions, both philosophical and political, about how we are to understand the roles of labor in human life.