Expenditure as a strategy can't cope with the changing face of capitalism- it sanitizes neoliberalism

(JEAN-JOSEPH, Laurence H. Favrot Professor Emeritus of French Studies @ Rice Yale French Studies, No. 78, On Bataille (1990), pp. 206-224)

Everything suggests that Bataille was unable to articulate the my- stical tension toward sovereign self-consciousness "without form and mode," "pure expenditure" (224) with a utopia of social life that would make it possible, nor to explain in a developed capitalist soci- ety the consumption of the surplus beyond its reinvestment in pro- duction. Now it is quite clear that today's capitalism has come a long way from the Calvinist ethic that presided at its beginning. The val- ues of thrift, sobriety and asceticism no longer have the place that they held when Balzac could caricature the dominant bourgeois men- tality with the characters of pere Grandet or the usurer Gobseck. It is doubtful that the spirit of capitalism, which according to Weber is expressed with an almost classical purity in Benjamin Franklin's principles ("he who kills a five shilling coin assassinates all that it could have produced: entire stacks of sterling pounds") [cited by Bataille, 163], could today be considered the spirit of the times. Un- doubtedly, the pace at which all residual sacred elements inherited from feudalism are eliminated has quickened. But hasn't contempo- rary society undergone a transformation of the ethic of consumption, desire, and pleasure that renders the classical (Weberian) analyses of the spirit of capitalism (to which Bataille subscribes) inadequate? If the great opposition between the sacred and the profane no longer structures social life, if communal, sacrificial, and glorious expendi- ture has been replaced by private expenditure, it is no less true that advanced capitalism seems to exceed the principle of restricted econ- omy and utility that presided at its beginning. No society has "wasted" as much as contemporary capitalism. What is the form of this waste, of this excess? These questions strike directly at the historical situation and philosophical signification of Bataille's thought. Is it not clear that his passion for the "notion of expenditure,"-which, beginning in 1933, is the matrix of all his economic reflections to come-emerge precisely at a turning point in the history of capitalism, in the 1920s and 1930s, which also saw the appearance of Lukacs and Heidegger?2 Can we not perceive within the principles of secularization and re- stricted economics that were the strength of early capitalism an inter- nal conflict that undermines them, and puts capitalism in contradic- tion with itself ? (209-210)