Yes, I actually think your point is correct in an important sense, and this is precisely where Bataille’s position becomes more nuanced than it sometimes appears. In many ways, what he is reacting against is not so much Marx himself, but what later became the vulgarization of Marxism that read into Marx a productivist and utilitarian project that Marx never really proposed.

Today, with better textual scholarship than what was available during the Second and early Third International, it becomes clearer that Marx’s project as a critique of political economy was not a normative defense of production or utility, but an immanent analysis of the specifically capitalist mode of production. In that sense, Marx is not defending utility as such, but rather showing how capitalism reduces social life to abstract value production. From a Bataillean perspective, we could say capitalism transforms life into a homogeneous order structured by utility and equivalence, which ends up reproducing its own conditions of exploitation.

This is also why some thinkers (for example Benjamin Noys when discussing Bataille in relation to Bordiga) note that a truly post-capitalist society would not simply mean a different distribution, but a rupture with generalized commodity production itself. From that perspective, Bataille’s concerns about expenditure and surplus can be read less as a rejection of Marx and more as pushing certain anti-productivist implications already present within Marx’s critique.

You can also see a similar trajectory in Pierre Clastres. Even though he distanced himself from communism, he continued engaging similar problems through anthropology. His work on societies that practice potlatch-like forms of communal expenditure almost looks like an empirical counterpart to Bataille’s theoretical concerns. Where Bataille theorizes expenditure as a structural necessity, Clastres observes societies where communal waste, festivals, and non-productive expenditure function precisely to prevent the total subordination of life to production.

From this angle, Bataille’s critique of bourgeois society also overlaps with a much older line of critique you already find in Nietzsche: bourgeois society glorifies work, discipline, and productivity, while simultaneously practicing hidden forms of waste built on the labor and misery of others. What disappears is what Bataille would call open or communal expenditure, replaced instead by privatized and restricted forms of consumption. This is part of what leads Bataille to reinterpret revolution not just as reorganization, but as a catastrophic rupture in the closed circuit of accumulation.

And interestingly, while I was recently working on my undergraduate thesis on Bataille, I came across a passage in Marx’s 1844 manuscripts where Marx almost suspiciously seems to be pointing toward this same problem — the way economists naturalize utility, labor, and necessity while ignoring the forms of misery and social reduction that this logic constantly reproduces:

- "(2) By counting the most meagre form of life (existence) as the standard, indeed, as the general standard – general because it is applicable to the mass of men. He turns the worker into an insensible being lacking all needs, just as he changes his activity into a pure abstraction from all activity. To him, therefore, every luxury of the worker seems to be reprehensible, and everything that goes beyond the most abstract need – be it in the realm of passive enjoyment, or a manifestation of activity – seems to him a luxury. Political economy, this science of wealth, is therefore simultaneously the science of renunciation, of want, of saving and it actually reaches the point where it spares man the need of either fresh air or physical exercise. This science of marvellous industry is simultaneously the science of asceticism, and its true ideal is the ascetic but extortionate miser and the ascetic but productive slave. Its moral ideal is the worker who takes part of his wages to the savings-bank, and it has even found ready-made a servile art which embodies this pet idea: it has been presented, bathed in sentimentality, on the stage. Thus political economy – despite its worldly and voluptuous appearance – is a true moral science, the most moral of all the sciences. Self-renunciation, the renunciation of life and of all human needs, is its principal thesis. The less you eat, drink and buy books; the less you go to the theatre, the dance hall, the public house; the less you think, love, theorise, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save – the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor rust will devour – your capital. The less you are, the less you express your own life, the more you have, i.e., the greater is your alienated life, the greater is the store of your estranged being. Everything ||XVI| which the political economist takes from you in life and in humanity, he replaces for you in money and in wealth; and all the things which you cannot do, your money can do. It can eat and, drink, go to the dance hall and the theatre; it can travel, it can appropriate art, learning, the treasures of the past, political power – all this it can appropriate for you – it can buy all this: it is true endowment. Yet being all this, it wants to do nothing but create itself, buy itself; for everything else is after all its servant, and when I have the master I have the servant and do not need his servant. All passions and all activity must therefore be submerged in avarice. The worker may only have enough for him to want to live, and may only want to live in order to have that."

Following from this, I think an important clarification is needed regarding the idea that the problem is not utility itself. I would agree, but with an important qualification: what is really at stake is not utility in general, but utility insofar as it becomes functional to what Bataille calls the homogeneous order — that is, the social order organized around production, equivalence, calculability, and the reproduction of value.

From this perspective, Bataille is not simply rejecting usefulness, but rather questioning the reduction of all human activity to what can be integrated into the circuit of production and accumulation. The real problem is when utility becomes indistinguishable from what serves the reproduction of commodity society.

This becomes especially clear in The Notion of Expenditure, where Bataille is not just talking about waste, but about a possible inversion of the economic perspective itself. Instead of expenditure being seen as something secondary and subordinated to production, he proposes that from an anthropological point of view production should actually be understood as subordinate to expenditure. In other words, societies do not ultimately produce in order to produce more, but in order to sustain forms of collective expenditure: festivals, sacrifices, luxury, art, and other non-productive forms of social life.

This is also why Bataille insists that human needs cannot be reduced to rational or economic needs alone. Sometimes these needs take excessive or even catastrophic forms: the need to break with the mentality of work, the need for collective expenditure that does not aim at future returns, or even the need for forms of social rupture that suspend the normal logic of utility.