Based on the profitability of the imaginary, hypercapitalism is a mode of destruction

[from Suicide et sacrifice]

This is the principle of hyperwork: she who imagines adds value to the thing, the value of the time that has passed in imagining its value, use and qualities. She thus sees no objection to paying the cost of her labor as a supplement, such that she accepts giving to the same person at once her work and her money.

 

Hyperwork is the most profitable mode of exploitation, for […] you accept paying for the work that you have effectuated by augmenting, in your imagination, the value of the commodity in your own eyes. The hyperexploitation of the consummer […] is hyperprofitable, for the work of the imagination is the first paying work in the history of humanity.

 

[…] Why does the consumer accept working for the vendor, and then paying him? Why does she give the value of the commodity twice in exchange for nothing? Simply because she pays precisely the price of her imaginary labor for the commodity. She sees well the supplementary value that she has herself put in the commodity, to the extent that she purchases it like a reality. It is because she is doubly exploited that she doesn’t have the impression of being so, for the simple fact that these two exploitations are exactly equal, and that this equality can be experienced as a justice.

 

Hyperwork is our last chance for existing, the only door that we have left open, for it is the only mode of access to the hyperreal, which we henceforth take as that which is more real. All the screens let us see, but only screens let us see. The consequence is that you can see everything, but have nothing; this is the hyperreal: the conviction that the images and the virtual are that which are more real, because they are what is most profitable, the most valorized and the most spectacular. The television, the computer, and the cell phone become the apparatuses of capture for the consumer’s work, hyperwork, the most profitable of all working time.

Hypercapitalism draws the consequences: everything else must disappear! It must dismantle capitalism and sales piece by piece, at the price of scrap metal and the unemployed. Profitable factories must close, productive workers will be laid off: all must be sacrificed to the new hyperprofitability.

trans. Gil Morejón, December 2013