The accursed share

Over the weekend, I read Georges Bataille's 'the accursed share'. Bataille is always fun to read. There is nothing obscure or difficult about his prose. He has a nice style. He's bright and lucid and interesting. This particular book has fun discussions of human sacrifice among the aztecs, the thirteenth Dalai lama, potlatch in North American native American tribes, etc. etc. All the same, it was a bit of a disappointment. It wasn't as revelatory as 'literature and evil'. I already knew the basic argument, and i expected his development of the argument to take me unexpected places, but no, it was mostly what I thought it was. Other people seem to have gone further with it, and Bataille himself adds interesting stuff to it in later writing.
He starts with the premise that economics errs by trying to isolate economic activity from everything else in life, and he sets out to create a 'general economics'. Wealth is similar to energy in natural organisms or organic systems... I realize I'm going to end up presenting a lot of this kind of short hand, because it's familiar enough to me that it often doesn't feel like it needs to be spelled out. You'll remember, maybe, that when I was talking about 'literature and evil', I already talked about the opposition between spending and accumulating... according to Bataille, in some societies spending is a positive good in opposition to bourgeois society since the reformation and particularly since the industrial revolution. So in feudal society, nobles were expected to ostentatiously waste wealth and working was a base activity. According to Bataille, the creation of wealth always leads to a certain excess that needs to be destroyed. Wealth can be invested and put toward the creation of more wealth, but expansion always has its limits (and he puts this in parallel with the balance of creation and destruction in nature, the eventual satiety of ecosystems, the inability of organisms to grow indefinitely or make use of everything they consume - thus the need for excretion). There's a definite Malthusian element in the whole argument as people are considered as a resource, and he uses this dynamic to discuss human sacrifices, and the world wars that destroyed so much of what was created and accumulated through the industrial revolution. Drinking, wasting time, anything that doesn't produce is an expenditure. For Bataille, Cathedrals and all of the adornment of Catholicism is sacred precisely because it is pure expenditure, because it is ostentatiously not for a pragmatic purpose (and wastefulness contributes to the sacred nature of sacrifices as well).
Before continuing with his argument, I will make an aside and point out that there is a sick and irrational belief in western society (and not just in Western society) that growth is always necessary and good. Even if the increase of population isn't always seen as a positive good (balancing the recognition that the world is getting overpopulated and the desire to have a large enough younger population to support the aging population), it is always seen as a tragedy if we do not continue to grow quickly enough. As labor can be made more efficient, it is not thought that this should necessarily lead to everybody working less and enjoying more leisure time with the same amount of goods, instead it is believed that we should produce more goods as the only possible way to keep employment at a reasonable level, and we should make sure that we get people to consume those goods. We need ever larger markets so we can keep people working... and why? We're increasing the strain on the environment, not making ourselves happier (people are more stressed out - women are working as well as men, and they are both working long hours. who needs it?).
Anyway, that's related to Bataille, but not something he is saying. He takes it more or less for granted that all things tend to try to expand until they are confronted with an excess that needs to be released. An example he doesn't bring up, at least not on an individual level is the ultra-successful business men who become philanthropists, and start devoting a large amount of there energy to spreading largesse, to unburdening themselves of what they had initially worked so hard to accumulate - sometimes at the expense of some of the people they later try to help. (I'm not claiming that all successful philanthropists did something shady to acquire their fortunes, that many aren't inspired by pure altruistic motives, or that when they start devoting time to spending they aren't continuing to accumulate - this last part generally goes without saying - but it does seem to be true that for many, spending becomes as important as earning... and the spending often seems more of a sacred task than the earning ever was).
Anyway, I'm not going to go through all the societies and examples Bataille gives to show how this works. I just want to jump ahead to the ending which is sort of the strangest part of the book - because it was written at the height of the cold war, and it deals with the U.S. and the Soviet Union. It would be possible to read part of the section dealing specifically with the Soviets as apologetic, since he to some extent rationalizes things like collectivization (all the while admitting that the process was brutal and inhuman, just not incomprehensible - incomprehensible not being the same thing as 'right' or 'good' of course). He goes to some length to point out the success of the soviets in developing a backward economy that in no way conformed to the sort of society that Marx thought could become communist - he points out that the Russians won Stalingrad before the Americans had made their presence felt in Europe. He also points out the logic of denying the individual in the name of the collective - opposing freedom with justice... in other societies excess was not systematically channeled toward the members of society who were in want (internally or externally). After a passage talking about war again, Bataille shifts to talk about the Marshall plan, and he more or less comes out with a very European view of the Soviet Union as having a healthy influence on the U.S. For the purposes of winning the loyalties of the rest of the world away from the Soviets, the U.S. ends up making the most positive, productive use of its excess of any society ever. Bataille clearly does favor the U.S., but doesn't desire a victory for either side (not that he says this quite so bluntly), For me it is kind of inevitable that in reading something like that I do think of the fact that there was no marshall plan for eastern europe after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, a lot of the checks on the worst excesses of capitalism fell away completely in the nineties (not that it hadn't started with Reagan), and there was no more need for America to show a moral rather than just a material superiority of capitalism - not that the eighties and even earlier hadn't been filled with channeling money to brutal regimes in South America and shamelessly destroying the environment - I'm not really sure that things changed all that much, but still...
I could add all sorts of speculation, but for some reason these sorts of theories always start to seem less compelling to me once they are turned toward world politics. The connections between pure expenditure and the sacred were interesting, as were the more ethnographic or focussed discussions of various societies, countries and religions - and, of course, it was interesting to take the basic idea and use it to shed new light on Weber and the protestant ethic - the sudden moral imperative to accumulate and not to waste that went along with the iconoclasm of the early protestants, etc.