  On the whole, in his mid-1970s work, Baudrillard was extricating himself from the familiar Marxian universe of production and class struggle into a quite different neo-aristocratic and metaphysical world-view. Baudrillard seems to assume at this point that pre-capitalist societies were governed by forms of symbolic exchange similar to Bataille’s notion of a general economy. Influenced by Mauss’ theory of the gift and countergift, Baudrillard claimed that pre-capitalist societies were governed by laws of symbolic exchange rather than production and utility. Developing these ideas, Baudrillard sketched a fundamental dividing line in history between symbolic societies — i.e., societies fundamentally organized around premodern exchange — and productivist societies (i.e., societies organized around production and commodity exchange). He thus rejects the Marxian philosophy of history which posits the primacy of production in all societies and rejects the Marxian concept of socialism, arguing that it does not break radically enough with capitalist productivism, offering itself merely as a more efficient and equitable organization of production rather than as a completely different sort of society with a different values and forms of culture and life.