Rufo's Ideas on beaudrillard

I find Ken Rufo’s ideas on Beaudrillard to be quite an insightful thought piece on the work of Beaudrillard as well as the postmodern critique in general. First of all I think that to state this outright would be the most important thing that I could do. I consider the post to basically be a postmodern critique of postmodernism. The idea that Ken is critiquing a postmodernist on the terms of something like Marxist criticism makes the post very entertaining to read and one that kept my attention. I did take some time and as I was reading the post I highlighted and put notes into the text with some of the ideas that I would like to express in this post and which I will do throughout this post at various points. Overall I found Ken Rufo’s ideas on Beaudrillard and his post modern critique to be quite interesting and engaging.
The first area of Professor Rufo’s post that I would like to address is that beaudrillard was a post modernist who as ken puts it “disavowed” being called a post modernist. I am not exactly sure what beaudrillard was trying to accomplish through his critique if he wants to talk about postmodernism without being a postmodernist because, I really do not see how it is possible for this to be done. That is, I do not think that would be possible for a postmodern critique to be done by someone who is not a postmodernist just as a Marxist critique cannot be done by someone who is not a Marxist. I think that some of the ideas that beaudrillard touched on in his critique could only be accomplished by a post modernist critic. That is one of the main problems that I have with beaudrillard’s critiques of postmodern theory.
I want to for this post focus exclusively on Professor Rufo’s ideas on Karl Marx and the ideas of communism versus capitalism. I think that Professor Rufo makes some interesting assertions in regards to Marxist theory (some of which I do not entirely agree with). I think that the idea of viewing something in terms of a sign (i.e. commodity) can be deceiving in a sense. I think that by viewing the commodity and who controls the means of production and consumption can cause the viewer to lose sight of the reason for the commodity being produced in the first place. We should constantly keep asking ourselves why are we producing what we produce? What does it do for us? I think that once we are able to understand the commodity and its purpose we can better begin to figure out and make an educated decision on who controls it. I think and this has ultimately been proven that by having one party control a commodity leads to power and abuse of power.
The next thing that struck me as I read this was the idea that beaudrillard discusses issues that would and probably should be though of more by a Marxist thinker rather than a postmodernist. The Marxist capitalist idea of “What an object represents or signifies is more important than how much it costs or how high quality is its construction”. This fundamental ideal of communism that I think would be best observed through a Marxist critique for the simple fact that a postmodernist is not really thought of to be a political thinker but rather a thinker of the arts. I find that having a postmodernist try to examine this topic really underscores what postmodernism as I have understood it since persuasive strategies is really all about.
I find Rufo’s ideas on how “focusing on sign value means that you have to focus on patterns of consumption rather than the modes of production”. Again, I believe this to be more along the lines of a Marxist thinker and probably better explained by a Marxist critic rather than someone who considers themselves to be a postmodernist thinker. To put it bluntly I think that the idea of Marxism may be a self fulfilling prophecy as has been stated by other critics.
These are some of my views on Professor Rufo’s post and his ideas on Marxist. I am wondering though how does the idea of Marxism and beaudrillard’s thoughts on it change the way that we view the non political text or is all text inherently political?

Thanks,
Brett