"Trashing Georges Bataille, 'Accursed' Stalinist"

Not Bored!

Born in France in 1897, Georges Bataille was a very
creative, controversial and strange person. A
librarian by profession, he wrote a great many poems,
essays and books during his life (he died in 1962).
Some of these writings were novels; most were works of
critical theory (non-fiction writings on society and
politics). Bataille's name is often closely associated
with Freudian psychoanalysis, Surrealism, Marxism and
the occult.

Because of the very strong and mostly acknowledged
influence of Bataille's various concepts and
methodological approaches on the writings of such
younger and sometimes better known critical theorists
as Guy Debord ("potlatch"), Jean Baudrillard ("gift
exchange"), Michel Foucault ("the order of things"),
and Jacques Derrida ("nonlogical difference"), almost
all of Bataille's many books have been published in
English translations by university presses in America.
No doubt many of these books are required reading in
courses in literary theory, the history of modern art,
sociology, political economy, psychology, and
ethnology.Originally written in French and privately published
in 1949, the first part of Bataille's massive trilogy
La Part Maudite was re-printed by Les Editions de
Minuit in 1967. It was re-printed again in the 1970s,
when Gallimard began publishing Bataille's Oeuvres
Completes (nine volumes so far). In 1989, Zone Books
in New York City published a hardcover translation
under the title The Accursed Share, Volume I:
Consumption (the trilogy as a whole is subtitled "An
Essay on General Economy"). In 1998, Zone published a
paperback edition of the book, as well as both
hardcover and paperback editions of translations of
Volumes II and III.

Though we have only commented upon them once before,
Bataille's books, especially the ones on art and
politics, have long been of interest to us here at NOT
BORED! We were excited by the prospect of reading
Volume I (hereafter referred to as The Accursed Share)
because it clearly marked a return to the subject
matter — unproductive ("wasteful") expenditures,
human sacrifices, potlatch, and the critique of
classical utility — Bataille first explored in one of
our favorite essays, "The Notion of Expenditure"
(written in 1933 and published in English translation
in Visions of Excess, a collection of essays Bataille
wrote between 1927 and 1939).

It's pretty damn strange that Bataille's "Theoretical
Introduction" to The Accursed Share mentions neither
"The Notion of Expenditure" nor any of his previous
writings. It's as if (Bataille wants us to believe
that) this is the very first time that he is pointing
out that 1) classical political economy is built on
the unquestioned and yet demonstrably false premises
that scarcity is the defining aspect of the economy,
that individuals will always act according to their
self-interest, and that self-interest always involves
growth, the accumulation of wealth, and a reduction of
waste; but that 2) a study of non-European,
non-Christian cultures shows that surplus is actually
the defining aspect of the economy, that growth can
never be an end in itself, that wealth can indeed be
accumulated but precisely for the purposes of
deliberately wasting it in spectacular displays of
power (human sacrifices, wars, religious monuments,
festivals and mass entertainments); and that, in any
case, 3) waste is unavoidable. And Bataille (almost)
gets away with it, too: he introduces so much new
material, material not covered in "The Notion of
Expenditure" — Islam, Buddhism and the 13th Dalai
Lama, and the connections between Calvinism and
Marxism — that his 1933 essay is apparently outmoded,
superceded, discarded and forgotten. Bataille has
discretely tried to place "The Notion of Expenditure"
into the proverbial "Trashcan of History," hoping that
no one would notice or care.

Bataille also wants to pretend (wants us to believe)
that the entire book, all of The Accursed Share, might
also have ended up in the trash. In his preface, he
writes:

Writing this book in which I was saying that energy
finally can only be wasted, I myself was using my
energy, my time, working; my research answered in a
fundamental way the desire to add to the amount of
wealth acquired for mankind. Should I say that under
these conditions I sometimes could only respond to the
truth of my book and could not go on writing it? A
book that no one awaits, that answers no formulated
question, that the author would not have written if he
had followed its lesson to the letter — such is the
oddity that today I offer the reader. This invites
distrust at the outset [...]

It's a fitting conceit, a pretty good joke, and it's
irony certainly brings a smile; but it does indeed
invite distrust at the outset. Note the (intentional?)
ambiguity of "Should I say that under these conditions
I sometimes could only respond to the truth of my book
and could not go on writing it?" The only response to
this evasively rhetorical question is: "Look, Georges:
You should say that you stopped writing it, but only
if it's true. If it isn't true, then you shouldn't say
it."

Bataille doesn't say why he decided to put aside his
reservations and complete all three volumes of The
Accursed Share. He certainly didn't finish Volume I
because of the uniqueness of the Marshall Plan, which
is the subject of its very last chapter, or because of
the unprecedented scale and extent of the devastation
during the Second World War. Bataille finished the
book because, like Breton, Aragon, Eluard and others
in the Surrealist movement, he'd become a Stalinist
(15 years after the others!), and because Stalin —
the whole Soviet Union, even — really needed people
like Georges to come to its defense.

Though many radical artists and intellectuals in
France and elsewhere in Europe were Trotskyists in
1949 (Cornelius Castoriadis, for example), very few
were open supporters of Stalinism. Andre Breton and
most of the others had distanced themselves from or
openly denounced Stalinism (if not the Communist
Party, as well) because of the Soviet Union's
murderous campaign to "collectivize" the kulaks in
1937 (an infamous example of what Karl Marx called
primitive accumulation) and because of the
Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939. The same may be said for
1967, when The Accursed Share was first re-printed:
though there (still) were Trotskyists in France, there
were very few Stalinists. Those who were Stalinists —
Jean Paul Sartre, among them — were denounced by the
Situationist International. But there is no
denunciation of Bataille in Internationale
Situationniste, Guy Debord's La Societe du Spectacle
or one of the books by his one-time colleague, Henri
Lefebvre. The only thing Allan Stoekl — the editor
and translator of the Visions of Excess collection —
can say on the subject of Batatille's post-War
writings is: "In his later writings (of the 1940s and
50s) Bataille is no longer overtly Marxist." While
this remark might be taken as indirect evidence that
Stalin himself wasn't much of a Marxist, it doesn't
even admit that Bataille was a Stalinist.

In the chapter called "Soviet Industrialization,"
Bataille writes:

The collectivization of lands is in theory the most
questionable part of the changes in economic
structure. There is no doubt that it cost dearly;
indeed, it is regarded as the cruelest moment of an
endeavour that was never mild. But if one judges this
development of Russian resources in a general way, one
risks forgetting the conditions in which it was begun
and the necessity that compelled it [...] These
considerations had all the more force since
industrialization always demands a large displacement
of the population to the cities [...] But a sudden
[industrial] development creates a call for manpower
to which the response cannot long be delayed. Only
agrarian "collectivism," coupled with mechanization,
could ensure the maintenance and growth of
agricultural production; without them, the
proliferation of factories would have only led to
disequilibrium [...] Situations arise in which,
wrongly or rightly, acts of cruelty, harming
individuals, seem negligible in view of the
misfortunes they are meant to avoid [...] Today it is
easy to see that the Soviets organizing production
were replying in advance to a question of life and
death. I do not mean to justify, but to understand;
given that purpose, it seems superficial to me to
dwell on horror [...] Apparently the Soviet Union,
and, even, speaking more generally, Russia — owing to
the czarist legacy — would not have been able to
survive without a massive allocation of its resources
to industrial equipment. Apparently, if this
allocation had been even a little less rigorous, even
a little less hard to bear than Stalin made it, Russia
could have foundered [...] And we would rather die
than establish a reign of terror; but a single man can
die, and an immense population is faced with no other
possibility than life. The Russian world had to make
up for the backwardness of czarist society and this
was necessarily so painful, it demanded an effort so
great, that the hard way — in every sense the most
costly way — became its only solution.

What's most striking about this chilling passage —
aside from its monstrous cynicism — is the fact that,
despite the passing reference to costliness in the
last sentence, it has nothing to do with the
discussions that introduced them. Forced social
displacement on a massive scale, systematic theft of
land by the State and mass murder ("terror") aren't
"understood" here in scientific or empirical terms,
that is, in terms of the structural unavoidability of
waste and the stark contrast between "primitive"
practices such as potlatch and the puritanical
maintenance of accounts in modern capitalist society.
Ironically, these terms only come (back) into play
when Bataille turns to the Marshal Plan, which he
asserts was a potlatch-like response — not to the
poverty created by the defeat of the Nazi regime —
but to the success of the Russian Army at Stalingrad.

No, Bataille justifies Stalinist terror in the
calculating, moralizing, ideological terms of
political expediency. Despite the radicality of some
of Bataille's ideas, here he doesn't question anything
of real importance: neither the historical
inevitability of Bolshevism, the political legitimacy
of the so-called Soviet Union itself (the Soviets
themselves were forcibly suppressed in the early
1920s), the necessity of industrialization (both in
general and in the specific case of the Russian
economy), nor the desirability of Russia's survival.
As Bataille himself showed in a preceding chapter, the
Aztecs were conquered; Islam declined; Tibet was
undermined. The United States, Bataille says, is also
doomed. Why shouldn't Russia meet the same
(unavoidable) fate?

It's also striking that Bataille's argument includes
the following remark: "But if one judges this
development of Russian resources in a general way, one
risks forgetting the conditions in which it was begun
and the necessity that compelled it" (italics added).
In other words, one must concentrate on specific
circumstances, not the general situation. This plainly
contradicts two other remarks made by Bataille —
"Situations arise in which, wrongly or rightly, acts
of cruelty, harming individuals, seem negligible in
view of the misfortunes they are meant to avoid," and
"[B]ut a single man can die, and an immense population
is faced with no other possibility than life" — as
well as the central premise of general economy. "Are
there not causes and effects that will appear only
provided that the general data of the economy are
studied?" Bataille had asked, rhetorically, in his
introductory remarks concerning "the meaning" of
general economy. "Will we be able to make ourselves
the masters of such dangerous activity (and one that
we could not abandon in any case) without having
grasped its general consequences? Should we not, given
the constant development of economic forces, pose the
general problems that are linked to the movement of
energy on the globe?" Yes, Georges, we should, even
when looking at a "special case" such as Stalinist
Russia.

And so, it's regrettable that Bataille decided to
persevere and complete Volume I of The Accursed Share.
Even though this Stalinist's analyses of eroticism and
sovereignty are no doubt fascinating, we will
nevertheless refrain from reading Volumes II and III
of his trilogy. And we will also be quick to question
those who say they are avid readers of Bataille's
books to see if they know about his apologies for
Stalinism.

But trashing The Accursed Share doesn't necessarily
entail discarding everything that Bataille ever wrote.
We still value the essays contained in Visions of
Excess, especially "The Notion of Expenditure," which
speaks of "revolution" and "class struggle" against
bourgeois society as a whole in precisely those places
that The Accursed Share speaks of the "evolution" of
"socialism" in the Soviet Union and a "dynamic peace"
between the USSR and America.

One notes [Bataille wrote in 1933] that in primitive
societies, where the exploitation of man by man is
still fairly weak, the products of human activity not
only flow in great quantities to rich men because of
the protection or social leadership services these men
supposedly provide, but also because of the
spectacular collective expenditures for which they
must pay. In so-called civilized societies, the
fundamental obligation of wealth disappeared only in a
fairly recent period [...] Everything that was
generous, orgiastic, and excessive has disappeared;
the themes of rivalry upon which individual activity
still depends develop in obscurity, and are as
shameful as belching. The representatives of the
bourgeoisie have adopted an effaced manner; wealth is
now displayed behind closed doors, in accordance with
depressing and boring conventions [...] Such trickery
has become the principle reason for living, working,
and suffering for those who lack the courage to
condemn this moldy society to revolutionary
destruction [...] As the class that possesses the
wealth — having received with wealth the obligation
of functional expenditure — the modern bourgeoisie is
characterized by the refusal in principle of this
obligation. It has distinguished itself from the
aristocracy through the fact that it has consented
only to spend for itself, and within itself — in
other words, by hiding its expenditures as much as
possible from the other classes [...] In opposition,
the people's consciousness is reduced to maintaining
profoundly the principle of expenditure by
representing bourgeois existence as the shame of man
and as a sinister cancellation [...] As for the
masters and exploiters, whose function is to create
the contemptuous forms that exclude human nature —
causing this nature to exist at the limits of the
earth, in other words in mud — a simple law of
reciprocity requires that they be condemned to fear,
to the great night when their beautiful phrases will
be drowned out by death screams in riots.

[December 2002.]