If the long disastrous cycle of neoliberalism is approaching its end as violently as it began, as Bifo & Vitrina Distópica Santiago tell us, this is because present conditions under which the supposedly definitive form society must take at the End-of-History are indistinguishable from a collective experience of madness, war & death. By now everyone should have learned the lesson that the logic of Power is the logic of sacrifice. Regimes of austerity are never regimes against expenditure, but of a heightened sacrificial mode of expenditure, which is why they attract to themselves the appointments of religiosity & of the sacred mission. For all the talk of building walls & closing orders, exclusion is never really the question: it is all a matter of enlarging the price ‘society’ is willing to pay. The logic of expenditure is ambivalent about all else but its capacity for increase: whether current the spread of insurrectionary violence (Exarchia, Hong Kong, Santiago, Quito, Barcelona, Beirut, Paris, Port-au-Prince, Baghdad) indicates putative ‘revolutionary conditions’ in a revolt AGAINST neoliberalism, or whether neoliberalism itself is entering a new phase catalysed by global catastrophism.

The aim of insurrection must not only be the seizing of the means-of-production, but of the means-of-expenditure, by which social POSSIBILITY is both accumulated & dissipated in increasingly vertiginous cycles. The logic of expenditure is not the INVERSE of production, but its raison d’être. Contrary to a received wisdom mindlessly circulated in mass media, ‘rioting’ & ‘looting’ are therefore not a NEGATION of those ‘social values’ upheld by consumer capitalism, but are the intimate attendants of conspicuous consumption itself; just as conspicuous consumption by capital – aped by the consumer classes – is but an hysterical sublimation of a recurring fantasy in which Power eroticises its own evisceration & laying waste at the hands of a spectral lumpenproletariat. Yet the potlatch of expenditure never exceeds the bounds of this sadomasochistic fantasy. The means-of-production/expenditure oscillate around the axis of Power’s symbolic negation & convulsive reconstitution in a movement that is in no respect contingent (even if it produces contingencies) but is entirely determined by the logic of Power itself. Moreover, it is by means of expenditure that Power defers for itself the pleasure of its own overcoming & determines in advance the recuperation of this fantastic insurrectionary force. The means-of-production of reality is thus, in a seemingly paradoxical tableau, indentured to the means-of-expenditure of reality. And it is here that the vulnerability of Power must be sought.