the deceptively attractive idea that finance is a simulacrum and that what is needed is a return to the true economy

The working class that had nothing to lose but its chains is now replaced by its simulacrum, the one that believes it has everything to lose along with those chains.

In conditions of third (and fourth-order) simulacra

Our age is characterized by the proliferation of ‘simulacra’: a ‘replacement of reality by signs of reality’.

This is now second-degree abstraction with a vengeance, in which only the simulacra of things can be called upon to take their place and offer their appearance

texts which were once thought to represent Truth or History increasingly came to be described as simulacra of representation