We live in an age which, more and more, disclaims its religiosity, which with ever increasing zeal, distances itself from religion. This anti-religious geist, if we might call it that, is theoretically articulated in what is called secularization theory, according to which society has transitioned, or is in the process of transitioning, from one based on religious beliefs, practices, and institutions to one which is based instead on secular equivalents — a process carried swiftly along, so it is maintained, by modernization and rationalization. Today this theory has taken on a particular militancy by a group of intellectuals referred to as the ‘New Atheists,’ which includes such bright figures as Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Steven Pinker, A.C. Grayling, and the late Christopher Hitchens, who are perhaps more accurately described by the term “pop-secularists.” I should note that the terms I use in describing this group are not my own. They are self-ascribed. Dennett, for example, has been very generous in his admiration of a group (of which he is a member) called ‘The Brights,’ whose salutary purpose, according to its website, is to protest the marginalization of “[p]ersons who have a naturalistic worldview.”[2] (The Brights place Dennett first on their list of “Enthusiastic Brights.”[3]) And Dawkins, the most popular of these rationalists, very candidly identifies his position as “militant atheism.”[4] It goes quite without saying that the secularization theory to which these men militantly subscribe poses a great challenge to my project, for if society is religionless, then a project like this which criticizes actually-existing religion has nothing to criticize. According to the New Atheists, religion is a kind of disease which inhibits humanity from Enlightenment and it — humanity — can only be redeemed by Science and Reason, a service, to be sure, rendered munificently unto it by none other than themselves. The late Christopher Hitchens, for instance, has suggested that “thanks to the telescope and the microscope, [religion] no longer offers an explanation of anything important,” and has assured us that we can “consciously look forward to the further evolution of our poor brains, and to stupendous advances in medicine and life extension.”[5] This view, in perhaps more erudite jargon, is known as Victorian Rationalism,[6] which makes the ‘New’ in ‘New Atheism,’ seem rather a tenuous assertion. But to the point, if the New Atheists are correct, then my project is quite pointless. For if science indeed has displaced religion, then I have no subject matter with which to work. Fortunately, one has substantial reason to believe they are wrong. Religion thrives today. In fact, it is so pervasive that these very men unconsciously participate in it. As I shall argue, we are anything but secular, and we are hardly less religious than we were, say, one hundred and fifty years ago when Marx proclaimed, correctly, that “the criticism of religion is the premise of all criticism”[7] — correct because precisely the form which ideology takes today is the form of religion.
If society, contrary to the claims of the pop-secularists, is not secular, it may in part be because it cannot be secular. For someone like Emile Durkheim, this was a matter of definition. As Mark Cladis suggests, for Durkheim, “Religion reflects society’s collective aspects. Every society can be called religious, for any society lacking collective ways of thinking and acting is not in fact a society.”[8] The reason societies must be religious is that religion in some form or another is only thing capable of, the only social adhesive strong enough, to hold it together and reinforce its identity. “No society can exist,” Durkheim writes, “that does not feel the need at regular intervals to sustain and reaffirm the collective feelings and ideas that constitute its unity and its personality,” a task he felt only religion was capable of performing.[9] For Durkheim, the reason why religion is the only thing strong enough to hold society together is that religion was the original basis of society, a fact from which society could not escape. Beyond this, however, perhaps the reason that only religion is strong enough to unify a given community is that only religion has what Paul Tillich calls “the unconditional character of an ultimate concern,” a trait which indeed does not appear to characterize other forms of social life like politics or civil society or culture, or if it does, in a much more diminished extent than it characterizes religion.[10] Only an “ultimate concern” like religion can give “depth, direction and unity to all other concerns and, with them, to the whole personality,” which is perhaps what makes it such a powerful force for social cohesion.[11]
For whatever reason, there appears to be some truth to the claim that religion, understood broadly enough, is the only thing strong enough to cement society together. And because religion, for Durkheim, was the way in which society conceives itself symbolically, there is, by definition, simply no such thing as a society which is not religious. But Durkheim’s claims would go further and suggest that all of these societies, which are by definition religious, symbolize their collectivity in a god. In the earliest societies a which demonstrated what Durkheim felt to be the most primitive forms of religion, this god and the community it symbolized, was embodied and materialized in a totem, without which “the clan could not exist, because the totem provides members of the clan with their name, that is, their identity and hence unity.”[12] Durkheim writes, “if the totem is both the symbol of god and of society, are these not one and the same? How could the group’s emblem become the fact of this quasi-divinity if the group and the divinity were two distinct realities? The god of the clan, the totemic principle, must therefore be the clan itself, but transfigured and imagined in the physical form of the plant or animal species that serve as totems.”[13] Cladis suggests, for Durkheim, “divinity is society transformed and conceived symbolically … Divinity and society are one — or rather, god is a figurative expression of society.”[14] Every society, therefore, presupposes a divinity, a god which symbolizes its collective life. If Durkheim is correct, as I will attempt very shortly to show, then no society, including our own, can possibly be secular. This would also imply that our own contemporary society, so-called secular modernity, has its own gods.
The proposition may be surprising. After all, Friedrich Nietzsche proclaimed the death of god now more than a century ago. Nietzsche, to be sure, wasn’t wrong. It’s just that the god he proclaimed dead, the god of the philosophers, has nothing to do with the god of the scriptures, a point to which I will return somewhat later. Nietzsche was correct when he said that God is dead and we have killed him. It’s just that he was talking about the god of the philosophers, perhaps best epitomized by Plato’s or Aristotle’s Ultimate Form, or Descartes’ or Berkeley’s god.[15] And though Nietzsche is in a sense one of the most profoundly skeptical western philosophers, his ideas would suggest something beyond a kind of simple secularism, which, as it were, concludes the story at God’s funeral. To be sure, the death of God for him was a real historical event: this meant the end of metaphysics in the philosophy of the West. But for Nietzsche, it was hardly the end of the story, and this is because Nietzsche understood the human being to be a worshipful creature, a creature who cannot bear to exist in the absence of one or another construct of meaning, a basic and irreducible characteristic of human nature. If our gods died, we would have to create new ones, and for Nietzsche, the new gods would be none other than ourselves. We are creatures perpetually bound to seek after the meaning and value of our own lives. This may be because we are driven by what the existentialist psychoanalyst Viktor Frankl calls the “will to meaning,” which he suggests is a “primary motivational force in man,” what among other things distinguishes the human from other kinds of animals.[16] The view is not indefensible. Every society in the history of the world has been religious in one form or another, worshipping one god or another, without exception. To think ours is the only exception to this general historical universal would be a kind of historical arrogance. The theologian M. Douglas Meeks writes, “God concepts … may or not use the term God of the language of theology. To discover them we must uncover what is is that we worship, what we regard as having ultimacy. In this all people, including atheists and agnostics, hold God concepts. And whatever we hold to be divine or ultimate will determine our life interests, the shape of our lives, and the institutions of society.”[17] Because the will to meaning expresses itself in worship, the human is a worshipful creature. By their very nature human beings are not capable of enduring the absence of god, or some substitute construct of meaning which serves as its source and foundation. In the absence of one god-concept, the human will find another to worship.
In consequence, the death of god for Nietzsche only meant the birth of newer forces, substitutes for the old metaphysical center, that source of meaning. Georg Lukacs has said that “the desire for salvation lives on with undiminished force in a world without God, worshipping the voice created by God’s absence,”[18] and as Durkheim, similarly, suggested, “the ancient gods grow old or die, and others are not yet born,” recognizing that there would be others to take its place.[19] Michel Foucault has written, “It is not enough … to keep repeating (after Nietzsche) that God [is dead]. Instead, we must locate the space left empty by the [his] disappearance, follow the distribution of gaps and breaches, and watch for the openings that this disappearance uncovers.”[20] We must, in other words, identify the god of modern society. In this, we are not without any clues. If Durkheim was right in suggesting that the god of a society is an expression of that society itself, then it follows that the god of modern society is that which expresses modern society most fundamentally, and while there are a few strong candidates in this field, I think we have good reason to believe that one fits this description more closely than the others, one which is, in many senses, the condition of the others.
If, taking Foucault’s suggestion, we trace out the spectres of this god who died, investigate what gods or idols or powers come to fill the void, the vacuum, the vast emptiness left by the death of the old, now extinct, metaphysical center. We search out in supreme darkness. We listen in supernal silence. And in our searching, and in our listening, we see the faint shadows of other gods, lurking about the margins of the old center like ghosts haunting the sites they formerly attended, we hear their silent holy incantations, these gods of men and women who have come to replace that old extinct center. And among this great pantheon of modern Gods, which includes, among others, Science, Power, Sex, Reason, there is one who stands out prominently among them, whose gloom is cast most widely, who is worshipped most pervasively, but who, at the very same time, is also the subtlest, the hardest to discern, the one who is, as Flaubert said of the author, “present everywhere and visible nowhere.”[21] Karl Marx, ever the prophet, is one of the few who not only named and identified this god, Capital, but also devoted entire volumes — Capital, The Communist Manifesto, The German Ideology, The Grundrisse, etc. — to describing its nature. In Capital, for instance, Marx writes that “in its blind, unrestrainable passion, its werewolf hunger for surplus labour, [C]apital oversteps not only the moral, but even the merely physical maximum bounds of the working day. It usurps time for growth, development, and the healthy maintenance of the body. It steals the time required for the consumption of fresh air and sunlight.”[22] And he goes on to say that “Capital cares nothing for the length of life of labour power. All that concerns it is simply and solely the maximum of labour power that can be rendered fluent in a working day.”[23] Notice that Marx, for good reasons, doesn’t say that capitalists do any of these things, but ‘Capital,’ which, for our purposes, I have capitalized — because Capital is the telos of the modern world, Capital, as I hope to demonstrate, is its more or less unchallenged and all-powerful god. That is why what Marx and Engels say about the bourgeoisie, they might well have said about Capital — that it, like the God of Creation, “creates a world after its own image.”[24]
The Death of God and the ascension of Capital may be conceptualized as a kind of usurpation or dethronement, observable not least in the theology of Capital known as political economy. Meeks writes, “If we differentiate between the period of classical political economy, beginning with the the publication of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations in 1776 and the period of the ‘science of economic analysis’ beginning roughly in the 1880s, we can say that political economy had almost completely removed God as a concern of its work and that economics as a mathematical and mechanistic science, arriving rather late in the Enlightenment collegium, was from the beginning determined to exclude the ‘disturbing presence’ of God from its bailiwick.”[25] It is almost as if the classical God is being crowded out by Capital.
Why is Capital, we might ask, rather than Sex, Science, Power, Reason, or some other candidate, the god of modern society? The answer is that it is only Capital which is characterized what Tillich calls “the unconditional character of an ultimate concern,” which I will attempt to argue in what follows, first generally, focusing on its nature as an ultimate concern, then more specifically, focusing on its unconditional character. Later in this exposition, we will see how the unconditional character of Capital, its autotelic nature, manifests itself in production for production’s sake in the capitalist market economies, but that discussion requires a level of detail which we are not yet ready to go into. For now, we may simply concern ourselves with a more general sense in which capital may be compared to god, at least in the sense in which Durkheim describes.
In the more general sense, the manner in which Capital is characterized by an ultimate concern is observable in the way Capital effectively functions as the source of more or less all value in capitalist market economies. In determining value in this way, Capital has the function of what Durkheim earlier called a “totemic principle,” a kind of metaphysical center, what Derrida has called a “transcendental signified,” the origin of meaning and rationality (the consequences of which which we will see in a later discussion on how economic discourse is structured), the telos of capitalist market economies.
The value-assigning nature of Capital is especially evident in its money form, from which Marx himself discerned a religious homology. Setting aside the anti-semitic character of these remarks, it becomes clear that Marx perceived something of the religious nature of Capital here, even though the notion remains relatively undeveloped in Marx’s own work: “Money is the jealous God of Israel, before which no other God can legitimately stand … Money is the general value of all things, constituted in itself … It has deprived everything else of all value, both in the world of nature and in the world of man. Money is the essence of work and of the existence of man alienated from himself and this estranged essence dominates him and is worshipped by him. The God of the Jews has been secularised, he has become a universal God.”[26] Stripping away the anti-semitic elements in this brings us closer to a general description of modern society and its Capitalist religion. Money is not the jealous God of Israel, but of contemporary society, of capitalist market economies. A crucial footnote must be added: as we will see in much more detail later, money is only one of the many forms of Capital, and must therefore not be conflated with Capital itself. Making the necessary modifications, we find that Marx, in these passages, comes very close to our own working hypothesis: not money, but Capital, is the jealous god of contemporary society.
It is also perhaps worth pointing out that Capitalism has always been more than a secular phenomenon. From its very inception, it has demonstrated a religious quality, and is divine in its origins. As David Noble writes, “the ideological source of the modern concept of ‘the economy’ was … the theological notion of divine order … instead of a movement away from the religious, as typically portrayed, the emergence of the core concept of capitalism entailed a shift in the opposite direction: from a secular notion of a social order imperfectly fashioned by human beings to a religious notion of a social order rendered more perfect through its surrender to the sublime logic of a divine order.”[27]
Capital too is a god who has in the past assumed different names: Baal, Moloch, Mammon (or Money, as Marx says), whom, not incidentally, we are enjoined by Christ not to worship: “You cannot serve God and money” (Matthew 6:24), notable as it is in fact Christ’s only condemnation of idolatry in the Gospels, perhaps, not unlikely, because it is the most basic and most pervasive of all idolatries. Our worship of Mammon, of money, of Capital, is the most widespread religion in the world. In this I am hardly original. The Marxist critic Walter Benjamin has suggested that “capitalism is a religious cult, perhaps the most extreme there ever was” and goes on to suggest that it even has a “religious structure.” But we may question Benjamin in his further assertion that capitalism is a “purely cultic religion, without dogma.”[28] For Capital, too, has its symbols, rituals, practices, people, institutions, its dogma — all not only on par with the other established religions, but far and away beyond them. And it is precisely as a religious phenomenon that we must understand capitalism; indeed it is only as a religious phenomenon that we may sufficiently, in its totality, reckon capitalism as a phenomenon.
Before delving into a more detailed description of religion, some preliminary remarks on our methodological assumptions is in order. First, it must be acknowledged that definitions which are necessary and sufficient accounts of a given phenomenon rarely exist in a world which abounds with complexity and irreducible variety. The notions that what defines a certain species of phenomena consists in what is necessary and sufficient to describe them proceeds from a faulty assumption about the nature of language, which presupposes an exact correspondence between language and reality that does not exist. For a definition, we can at best hope to find what the philosopher Wittgenstein called ‘family resemblances.’ In any attempt to define a given species of phenomena a posteriori by the essential characteristics they share, there will be few characteristics which are common to all members of the species, and often there will be none. Instead, there will be many characteristics which are held in common by many members of the species but not all of them, allowing at best for imperfect correspondence. These characteristics are the ‘family resemblances.’ As far as religion goes, for example, it is difficult to think of any single characteristic which is shared by all of those phenomena which are commonly understood to be a religion — Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, etc. — but is not shared by anything outside of this group. Instead, it is possible to think of certain characteristics which are shared by a many, if not a majority of them. One obvious family trait which suggests itself is the belief in a divinity or divinities, which describes all of those religions listed except for Buddhism, and even some schools of Buddhism would fit under this characterization. There are many such characteristics, and we normally regard a given object as fitting under a given definition according as it shares the characteristics common to most members of the species. The more of these family characteristic displayed by a given object, the more definitely it falls within the category of a religion. The point which I seek to make here about capitalism, then, is that it shares at least as many of the family traits of religion as do other members of the species which are normally and generally understood to be a part of it. For the purposes of this disquisition, these family resemblances will include the implied justification of and belief in a transcendental telos, a deity who is ascribed some form of extra-rational providence and in whom one must have an extra-rational faith, a doctrine of miracles to justify this faith, notions of conversion and salvation through faith, an explication of the deity’s moral demands, a special reverence for sacred and foundational texts and figures, a clearly defined set of orthodox beliefs, institutions which determine these, and institutional practices which maintain these through the suppression of heterodox beliefs, among other categories which we will explore.[29]
THE CRITICAL RELATION OF OUR INQUIRY TO PRECEDENTS: TILLICH, COX, BELLAH.
The analogues between Christian theology and Capitalist theology (economics) are indeed quite striking, and it is worth observing that in recognizing this, we are hardly original. Others before have conducted very similar theoretical projects, and if we are serious about our own, we will see what we can learn, both from their failures as well as their successes. In this effort, one has, I think, more to learn from Marx than from any other thinker, for it is Marx more than any other who, in my view, understands what it means to build a theoretical system on the attempts of others, and to do in a generous spirit.
“Reason has always existed,” Marx writes, “only not always in reasonable form.”[30] For Marx, human consciousness is always full of contradictions. He thinks that classical economy, for instance, does not come to a consciousness of its own logic. The logic of a given theoretical system does not always correspond to its particular conclusions. Reason, Marx writes, “everywhere comes into contradiction between its ideal mission and its real preconditions.”[31] Consciousness, in other words, is often expressed in mystified form. But this is not to invalidate the expression of this consciousness in toto. For Marx, it is not that mystified consciousness expresses nothing (indeed it expresses quite a bit, and quite a bit which needs to be taken very seriously) but that, because it is expressed in mystified form, it needs to be decoded, or criticized. The point of criticism, for Marx, is to cut through the phenomenal appearance of a given expression of consciousness, whether politics or religion or art, and to find within its depths its reality, what it is the mystified consciousness is really expressing. “The reform of consciousness,” he writes “consists only in enabling the world to clarify its consciousness, in waking it from its dream about itself, in explaining to it the meaning of its own” reason. “Our whole task can consist only in putting” its reason “into self-conscious human form.”[32] Because reason, or consciousness, does not always exist in reasonable form, it is the task of the critic to articulate this reasonable form hidden in its mystical expression, to tease out the “rational kernel within the mystical shell.”[33] As Marx writes, “The critic can therefore star out by taking any form of theoretical and practical consciousness and develop from the unique forms of existing reality the true reality as its norm and final goal.”[34]
One might of course object that such an approach arrogates to itself its own theoretical superiority, almost in effect saying, what the others have seen only partially, I am see in full. But there is no such conceit here, for I do not flatter myself that I grasp the total truth of what others have only partially seen, or that I shall have the last word on this. It is inevitable that my own thinking on these issues is as incomplete as that of any other who has given these issues some consideration. Rather the point is to suggest that, though one cannot of course arrogate to himself the conceit of fully seeing things as they really are, one can at the least suggest that certain logical connections suggest themselves in the theoretical constructs of other thinkers, that where logical lacunae appear, their solution is to be found, if only in germinal and undeveloped form, within the theoretical construct itself. It is not so much that one is making new discoveries, as it is allowing the unspoken discoveries to speak for themselves. As Marx puts it, “We develop new principles to the world out of its own principles.”[35] The point is to give expression to self-consciousness of the logic itself. Thus Marx, for instance, does not see himself as undoing the work of the classical political economists, but fulfilling it, completing the logic which was latently in it, but not expressed: “Classical economy never arrived at a consciousness of the results of its own analysis,” he writes, and it is, as he sees it, his own task to articulate this latent and implicit logic, to extend it to its logical conclusions.[36] Marx came not to abolish classical economy, but to fulfill it. Similarly, it is not our task to dismiss critical theology, but to extend, to the extent possible, its own logic, and, where necessary, to turn this logic against some of its own particular conclusions.
And this approach, from from being arrogant, is, I think, very generous. Commenting on Marx’s method of criticism, David Harvey writes, “He doesn’t say, ‘Everybody is stupid and I the great Marx, am going to criticize everybody out of existence.’ Instead he argues that there have been a lot of people who have thought about the world hard, and they have seen certain things about the world that have to be respected, no matter how one-sided or warped. The critical method takes what others have said and seen and works on it so as to transform thought — and the world it describes — into something new. For Marx, new knowledge arises out of taking radically different conceptual blocs, rubbing them together and making revolutionary fire.”[37]
Because so much of our criticism of these thinkers proceeds on the basis of a systematic framework which have not yet had occasion to expound, it may be difficult either to understand or to appreciate the criticism presented here. Yet because I find it will be helpful to situate our inquiry to others in a more systematic rather than occasional fashion, this is an unavoidable difficulty, and some forbearance on the part of the reader is demanded. In the course of our exposition we will return to these thinkers and others as the occasion demands, expounding their contributions in greater detail in the relevant context, but for now it will be helpful, in order to understand the relation of this work to theirs, to summarize their contribution as a group.
We might begin in this regard with the theologian Paul Tillich, who came quite close to articulating our own hypothesis. In The Dynamics of Faith, he writes, “Faith, for the men of the Old Testament, is the state of being ultimately concerned about Jahweh and about what he represents in demand, threat and promise. Another example — almost a counter-example, yet nevertheless equally revealing — is the ultimate concern with ‘success’ and with social standing and economic power. It is the god of many people in the highly competitive Western culture and it does what every ultimate concern must do: it is the god of many people in the highly competitive Western culture and it does what every ultimate concern must do: it demand unconditional surrender to its laws even if the price is the sacrifice of genuine human relations, personal conviction, and creative eros.”[38] In Tillich, we come there is a new consciousness of the possibility that something other than Christianity or Judaism or any of the traditional religions, indeed something very closely related to Capitalism, can be the basis of a faith, Tillich’s term for what we have simply referred to as religion. The misconception, it seems to me, is compositional, in mistaking a part for the whole, conflating Capitalism with one of its outward expressions — the concern with status, etc. — and its result is to misidentify the false god of modern society, which is not individual economic power, as Tillich suspects, but social economic power, Capital. This misconception, in turn, may owes in part to a discernable individualist conceit in Tillich’s work, at least here, which views the social problem from the point of view of an individual, and considers, correctly, the religious problem as it manifests at the level of the individual. What it thereby misses, however, is the social nature of this ersatz religion. It fails to grasp that the religious aspects of individual concern with success, status, and economic power are only a partial expression of a much broader religion. This individualist conceit, at least insofar as it is implied here, may be rather surprising. Tillich, after all, develops a very nuanced conception of structure, as well as the relation of the individual to this larger structure, not least in his theological concern with the demonic. Perhaps Tillich’s theology “never arrived at a consciousness of its own analysis,” as Marx says of classical economy.[39] This may well be because the historical conditions did not readily permit of such a consciousness. Just as Marx and Engels suggested the utopian socialists could only have a germinal conception of the class struggle because the class struggle in their time had not yet fully developed and the class antagonism had, as a result, not been pronounced enough, perhaps the religious nature of Capitalism, which is much more readily apparent in our own time, was not sufficiently pronounced for Tillich, or any thinker, to have theorized it in this way. Nevertheless, Tillich’s analysis remains prescient and relevant for our own, as we will see in the development of our own critique.
It was left to one of Tillich’s students to develop the notion further, to give it a more precise determination and a more accurate articulation. The American theologian Harvey Cox, who was deeply influenced Tillich, developed his notion further, turning from Tillich’s identification of personal economic power as a false god to an identification of social economic power, embodied in ‘The Market,’ as a false god. We will give Cox’s account a more detailed treatment very shortly, but for the moment it is important to understand the basic relation of Cox’s conception to Tillich’s. As Cox writes, “Recently … The Market is becoming more like the Yahweh of the Old Testament — not just one superior deity contending with others but the Supreme Deity, the only true God, whose reign must now be universally accepted and who allows for no rivals,” a development which we have already seen was not available to Tillich’s generation. It may be, then, that by the time of Cox’s writing, the religious nature of Capitalism had disclosed itself more completely and had become more pronounced. Here, we no longer have the individualistic conceit which proved to be problematic for Tillich’s analysis. Cox has shifted focus from the individual to the society, more specifically, from the individual expressions of the religion to a social one, which he identifies as The Market. Cox’s conception therefore appears to be an advance on Tillich’s. But even this analysis, I think, errs in a similar misconception relating to composition. Though I think it is more accurate, it appears this analysis still mistakes the part for the whole, conflating Capitalism with one of its constituent elements, indeed a very significant one. For Capitalism, both as a social system and as a religion, does not seem to be exhausted by the market — which, for this reason, I do not capitalize. The market is one element of Capitalism, a particular configuration of social relations, codified in law, which includes, in addition to the market, private property and the state. To reduce the religion of contemporary society to the market is thus to leave a great part of it unaddressed, namely those elements of Capital which are religious indeed but not reducible to the market. Like the misconception in Tillich’s work, the misconception here is quite understandable. There is, it seems, a very good reason why one might mistake Capital with the market. As we will see later, the Market is one of the outward manifestations of Capital. Like God the Father of the Bible, Capital is not a tangible or locatable thing in the world. One cannot point out God or Capital in the same way one can point out, for instance, the local grocery store. Rather, Capital, like God, is a process which requires different forms for its expression. For God the Father, these forms, through which he manifests his presence in the world, include the Son, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit. Capital too can only manifest itself in the world by the mediation of particular forms, forms which, like the Son and the Spirit, are quite specific to the nature of the deity from which they proceed, and in the case of Capital, one of these forms happens to be the market. It is therefore quite understandable why the market might be confused for the whole, Capital, of which it is a part, just as it is quite understandable why one might confuse the Son or the Spirit with God as such — as so much of the history of Christianity and its theological discrepancies suggests.
To appreciate the significance of what might seem like a trifling distinction to make, it is well to recall that it was on account of a very similar error, at least from a Marxist point of view, that the classical political economists were not able to understand the source of surplus value, or profit. Having limited their analysis to the exchange relations of the market, they were unable to see the class relations which underlay the extraction of surplus value and which only became apparent at the level of production. “If equivalents are exchanged,” as they are on the market, Marx writes, “no surplus-value results, and if non-equivalents are exchanged, still no surplus-value. Circulation, or the exchange of commodities, begets no value.”[40] For Marx, precisely because equivalent is exchanged for equivalent here under the appearance of liberty and equality, the market masks the exploitative nature of capitalist production. With biting sarcasm Marx suggests that the realm of the market “is in fact a very Eden of the innate rights of man. There alone rule Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham. Freedom, because both buyer and seller of a commodity, say of labour-power, are constrained only by their own free will … Equality, because each enters into relation with the other, as with a simple owner of commodities, and they exchange equivalent for equivalent. Property, because each disposes only of what is his own. And Bentham, because each looks only to himself.”[41] Thus for Marx at least, the secret of the capitalist system (the extraction of surplus value) is to be discovered not in the relations of exchange, which is characterized by equality, individuality, and liberty, where like exchanges for like, but in the relations of production.
As David Harvey writes, “Only in production does the class character of social relations become clear.”[42] “The consumption of labour-power,” Marx writes, “is completed, as in the case of every other commodity, outside the limits of the market or of the sphere of circulation. Accompanied by Mr. Moneybags [the capitalist] and by the possessor of labour-power [the worker] we therefore take leave for a time of this noisy sphere, where everything takes place on the surface and in view of all men, and follow them both into the hidden abode of production, on whose threshold there stares us in the face ‘No admittance except on business.’ Here we shall see, not only how capital produces, but how capital is produced. We shall at last force the secret of profit making.”[43] But it was exactly this step which the classical political economists were not willing to make. They stood with holy reverence outside the doors of the factory, and dared not enter where the reality of class relations would give lie to their libations to freedom and liberty and equality in the harmonious world of the market under which lurks something far less pretty. To focus on the market, as Cox does, is therefore to repeat the errors of the classical economists, to overlook the realm in which exploitative class relations show themselves in their most lurid light.
If Cox’s analysis mistook Capital for one of its incarnate forms, the Market, then the analysis of Robert Bellah, whose work we also build upon, makes a very similar error, confusing Capital with another one of its incarnate forms, the state which is the basis of what he calls “American civil religion.”[44] Despite these limitations, with Bellah’s analysis, as with the others, we gain insight into the religious nature of Capitalism, here expressed in its political form, or its form as it relates to the state and to civil society. To begin with, the notion of a religion quite distinct from traditional ones, expressed in Tillich’s and Cox’s work, is here reaffirmed. Bellah writes, “there actually exists alongside of and rather clearly differentiated from the churches an elaborate and well-institutionalized civil religion in America.” This religion, he goes on, “has its own seriousness and integrity and requires the same care in understanding that any other religion does,” a stance which, with the crucial modifications, one might adopt with regard to Capitalism. If American civil religion warrants the same amount of seriousness, attention and analysis as does any other religion, then surely Capitalism, of which civil religion is, I argue, a constituent element, requires at least as much seriousness, attention, and analysis, if only because one might expect the results of such an analysis, by virtue of the enlarged scope of the subject under its consideration, to have more significant implications for society as well as our understanding of society. Bellah goes on to quote a perspicuous remark by President Eisenhower which also sheds some light on the subject of our analysis: “Our government,” Eisenhower says, “makes no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith — and I don’t care what it is.” This comes quite close to what Durkheim had suggested about the centrality, even necessity, of religion to the life of a community, and if it holds for the civil life of a society, then it is at least possible — and I will make the case — that it also holds, and perhaps holds more strongly, for the economic life of a society, of which the civil and the political, I offer, are in part reflexes.
In providing evidence in the beliefs, symbols, and rituals of American civil for the existence of a civil religion, Bellah quotes another famous military general-turned-President whose remarks similarly shed light on the topic. “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, Religion and Morality are indispensable supports,” Washington says, “Let it simply be asked where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, is the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths, which are the instruments in Courts of Justice? … reason and experience both forbid us to expect that National morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principles.” We might make a couple of observations here which, while their significance may not, at this point in our analysis, be very apparent, will prove to be significant later. First, notice how religion is supposed by Washington to be indispensable for the respect of property rights, which he lists even before the security life — a fact which already suggests to us that something more than the political is at stake in the social religion, specifically, perhaps something economic. Secondly, one might notice how security for property is listed even before security for life, a fact which will appear to be more than coincidental when we later explore the ways in which Capitalism implicitly, often explicitly, elevates property rights above human rights, including, in the most extreme instances, the right to life. Thirdly, we can already see in Washington’s perceptive remarks a certain relation implied between religion, private property, which is economic, and the Courts of Justice, which are legal — relations which have a definite character in the configuration of social relations in Capitalist societies and which will become gradually clearer as we proceed further into our analysis of Capitalism and the internal relations which constitute its dynamics. For now, we can simply appreciate that these remarks demonstrate, however vague and indeterminate, a certain germinal consciousness of the fact that these elements — religion, economics, and jurisprudence — have something to do with each other, as indeed they do. Lastly, because America was born as a capitalist society, perhaps we can view the presence of this “religious principle” in the infant republic as indicative of the social system of which it was, and is, a vast experiment. If, in other words, this religious principle expresses itself so clearly in the infant American republic, that may be because of its capitalist nature. If this is true, then we might posit a definite relation between this religious principle and capitalism itself, as it is the goal of this argument to exposit.
In another speech, Washington says, “No people can be bound to acknowledge and adore the Invisible Hand which conducts the affairs of man more than those of the United States,” worth noting because two of these notions, the Invisible Hand, and the special relation of Capital to the United States (like the special relation of Yahweh to Israel), appear in other instances which one would not expect were they not connected by some internal logic, if only tacitly.
One of the most remarkable aspects of Bellah’s analysis is his conception of the God of american civil religion, which he culls out of references in President Kennedy’s speeches. Here I quote Bellah at length:“Kennedy’s inaugural pointed to the religious aspect of the Declaration of Independence, and it might be well to look a that document a bit more closely. There are four references to God. The first speaks of the ‘Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God’ that entitle any people to be independent. The second is the famous statement that all men ‘are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights’ Here Jefferson is locating the fundamental legitimacy of the new nation in a conception of ‘higher law’ that is itself based on both classical natural law and biblical religion. The third is an appeal to ‘the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions,’ and the last indicates ‘a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence.’ In these last two references, a biblical God of history who stands in judgment over the world is indicated.”
Here, as with Cox, we see developing, not only the notion of a social religion, but also of a social God. In fact, Capital itself, though unrecognized, shows up, makes an appearance, in Bellah’s analysis, though we must assume it implausible that Bellah recognized it as Capital, as indeed Bellah’s own remarks suggest. These remarkable comments nevertheless demonstrate incredible keenness on Bellah’s part, as he goes on to develop, however in my view limited, a more determinate notion of the God of the American civil religion. He recognizes this God is not the God of the Bible, quite different, and “this religion is clearly not itself Christianity.” He notes that the “God of the civil religion is not only rather ‘unitarian,’ he is also on the austere side, much more related to order, law, and right than to salvation and love,” all of which elements have something to do with Capitalism. Indeed, the entire statement perfectly describes the god Capital whom I believe is implicitly worshipped in modern society, and that it because, remarkably, Bellah is describing Capital, without realizing it. This is a tremendous advance. Though it is not conscious of itself, this advance goes beyond the theoretical contributions of Cox and Tillich, for although Bellah does not realize it, we have, for the first time, not just a notion of a unique social religion (as with Tillich) or even a unique social god, as with Cox, but a notion of Capital itself, which makes its first appearance, even if it is only implied.
CAPITALISM AS A FORM OF RELIGION
Having delineated some of the previous work we build on, we might proceed to review very briefly the religious nature of Capitalism. Because a full and detailed account of this requires a certain amount of antecedent theoretical determination, it will not be possible to review these things for the reader all at the same time, at least not intelligibly, and will therefore have to proceed in steps. In describing the religious nature of capitalism, it may be helpful to first give the reader a general overview to orient her with the general shape of the argument, even if some of the details may be vague or unclear for the moment.
Rather as Christianity is the religion of Christ, Capitalism is the religion of Capital, and it too has its scribes and pharisees, priests and acolytes; it too has its own surprisingly complex theology. And if capitalism is a kind of religion, economics is its theology, and serves the same function here as it does in other religious systems. Just as Christian theology, for example, attempts to understand and legitimize its god, Jesus Christ, so Capitalist theology seeks to understand and legitimize its god, Capital. The assertion is not only mine, and is even maintained by some within the profession. At a panel on economics and theology at Union Theological Seminary in 2012, the renowned economist Joseph Stiglitz said, “A very large part of the economics profession … should be here at the theological seminary … because they’re not [practicing] science. It’s a theology … which is faith-based.”[45]
Stiglitz is not alone. In 1999, Harvey Cox, then a Professor of Divinity at Harvard, was able to put his theological expertise to good use when he took up the suggestion of a friend to read the business press and, in this reading, was able to trace out a whole theology. In a provocative essay for The Atlantic entitled “The Market As God,” Cox explains how, reading through the business press, he was able to trace out a “business theology.” He discovered a profound homology between this theology and the traditional Christian theology with which he was more familiar. At the apex of this “theological system” was its doctrine of God. “This celestial pinnacle,” Cox writes, “is occupied by The Market,” which he says he capitalizes “to signify both the mystery that enshrouds it and the reverence it inspires in business folk.”[46] When Cox read through The Wall Street Journal and the business sections of Time and Newsweek, he was “surprised to discover that most of the concepts [he] ran across were quite familiar,” and that “there lies embedded in the business pages an entire theology, which is comparable in scope if not in profundity to that of Thomas Aquinas or Karl Barth. This theological system, constructed by “economist-theologians,” he said, “needed only to be systematized for a whole new Summa to take shape.”[47]
Some attempts at this systematic theology have indeed been undertaken. The great summas of capitalist theology take the form of economic treatises, among them Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom, Friedrich von Hayek’s Road to Serfdom, and Ayn Rand’s magisterial treatise, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. And like the popular theology of people like C.S. Lewis and G.K. Chesterton, capitalist theology is also available in more popular form in, for instance, Thomas Friedman’s The Lexus and the Olive Tree or The World is Flat, which preaches the Good News of Globalization. Milton, Hayek, and Friedman, who function effectively as the high priests of the capitalist religion make it their duty, rather as theologians have over the centuries, to spell out the moral demands of their deity. In the Old Testament, Yahweh spelled these out to Moses in the Ten Commandments. In the new New Testament, the Commandments are known as the ‘Washington Consensus’: Thou shalt liberalize trade and finance, thou shalt allow markets to set prices, thou shalt end inflation, and thou shalt privatize.
THE OLD TESTAMENT: ADAM SMITH AND CLASSICAL LIBERALISM
If, in Christian theology, a fundamental distinction is maintained between the Old and New Testaments, both contiguous with and notably different from each other, then in Capitalist theology, a distinction of essentially the same structure is maintained: the Old Testament of Capital is called ‘Classical Liberalism,’ its New Testament, ‘Neoliberalism.’ And if Moses is undoubtedly the central figure of the Old Testament, the figure who delivered the Law of god to the people and established his covenant with them, then the central figure of Classical Liberalism, the Old Testament of Capital, who fulfills essentially the same function, is without a doubt Adam Smith, the author of what passes as the economic equivalent of the Torah traditionally attributed to Moses, The Wealth of Nations.
Moreover, rather as the scribes and pharisees reified the spirit of Mosaic Law into rigid and inviolable doctrine, so too the followers of Adam Smith misunderstand and misuse him, turning his circumstantial observations into the holy writ of inviolable doctrine. The notion of an Invisible Hand is a good example of precisely this kind of abuse, which, more than Smith ever attempted to do, imbues Capital with the providence of God. There is, one can observe, but a single mention of the Invisible Hand in The Wealth of Nations:
“As every individual, therefore, endeavours as much as he can both to employ his capital in the support of domestic industry, and so to direct that industry that its produce may be of the greatest value; every individual necessarily labours to render the annual revenue of the society as great as he can. He generally, indeed, neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry, he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.”[48]
Smith here is making the rather limited claim that in the specific case of deciding whether to deploy his capital abroad or domestically, the capitalist will, “upon equal or nearly equal profits” prefer “the home-trade to the foreign trade of consumption” for a number of self-interested reasons. So in this specific case, Smith is indeed saying that the self-interest supports the public good (of the domestic market). Therefore, the economist Paul Samuelson paraphrased Smith as follows: “every individual …neither intends to promote the general interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. He intends only his own security, his own gain; and he is in this, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. By pursuing his own interest, he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it.”[49] In rather curiously leaving out anything that refers to foreign trade (which is what Smith, uncontroversially, was talking about), Samuelson thereby omits any reference to what would make Smith’s claim limited and circumstantial. This allows him to go on to summarize Smith as follows: “Smith proclaimed the principle of the ‘invisible hand’. It says that every individual, in selfishly pursuing only his or her personal good, is led, as if by an invisible hand, to achieve the best good for all. In this best of all possible worlds, any interference with free competition is certain to be injurious.”[50]
Now the Inviolable Doctrine of the Invisible Hand means, in the most generally applicable terms — and this is indeed how it is used, frequently — that selfishness and greed lead to the good of all. Consequently, government “intervention” in the market — that is to say, social spending on health, education, infrastructure and insurance — violates against the divine law. Instead, everything is to be privatized, everything from education and health to military spending, elections (effectively), and water.
We are familiar with right wing calls to privatize education with vouchers and the like, such as when Milton Friedman, after Hurricane Katrina, suggested that we use this “opportunity” to privatize the schools,[51] and we are familiar with their calls to destroy public healthcare, so I will not review these here. As for privatizing the military, we can recall that during the Bush administration, Rumsfeld advocated privatizing much of the military, and that the war in Iraq is the most privatized war in modern history. In fact, by 2007, there were more private contractors than soldiers in Iraq.[52] Huge arms dealers like Halliburton, of which Vice President Dick Cheney was the former CEO, made billions in profits. Others, like Bechtel, made a more modest $680 million to develop electricity and water infrastructures.[53]
THE NEW TESTAMENT AND THE NEW ORTHODOXY:
NEOLIBERALISM AND GLOBALIZATION
As if history were not ripe enough with irony, this grotesque version of the Invisible Hand, which Smith, in his single mention of it in The Wealth of Nations, used to harshly criticize what today is called ‘neoliberal globalization,’ is today used, along with Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantage, to justify neoliberal globalization, the reigning orthodoxy of current economic theology and the economic analog to the New Testament. It is also omitted that the condition upon which Smith predicates his theory is a condition of, as he writes, “equal or nearly equal profits,” which is clearly not the case in the nations (too many to name[54]) where the United States routinely overthrows democratic governments and installs brutal dictators who then crush unions, suppress wages, and slaughter dissidents. But this divorce of theory from reality, in practice, is precisely how the Capitalist religion functions, that is by faith.
Much as the Christian New Testament puts a greater emphasis on faith than does the Old Testament, so too does Neoliberalism, the Capitalist New Testament, and one of the ways in which capitalists today manifest this faith is through their faith in the markets. As one commentator has observed, “even in the financial markets, where participants worship Mammon rather than God, faith plays a larger role than its hard-headed participants would like to admit.”[55] In fact, I am quoting from the free-market journal The Economist, which goes on to suggest: “Finance even has its own high priests in the form of the analysts and fund managers who promise their clients heavenly rewards if only they listen to their advice. They preach regular sermons in the form of brokers’ notes and quarterly reports, and they house themselves in vast cathedral-like buildings that dominate the skyline. Each day also has its canonical hours as traders pray for profitable opportunities at the European, American and Asian market openings. Finance has its annual calendar, too, marked with festivals known as results seasons in which the lucky participants receive their temporal (rather than spiritual) dividends.”[56] Similarly, Meeks, from a theological point of view, has suggested, if “we consider fides (faith) and its derivatives, we shall discover that biblical religion and economics share the words fidelity, fiduciary, and confidence as the foundational words of everything that concerns them. That so many savings and loan organizations are named with ‘fidelity’ and ‘trust’ is a tribute to the fact that no economy can exist without a basic faith, which its constituents express in the relationships and structures of the economy.[57]
But not all of the capitalist’s faith is totally blind. To a certain degree, the faith of the capitalist is edified, like the faith of a believer, by miracles, and to be sure, the religion of Capital has its own doctrine of miracles to support its Neoliberal theology. We might consider in this regard a few examples of what are commonly referred to as “economic miracles” by economists. The analysis is not overwhelmingly difficult, if only because the results are remarkably consistent. For instance, in Brazil, which was a petri dish for free market capitalism, corporate profits soared spectacularly while wages fell and two-thirds of the population didn’t have enough food for normal physical activity — or Mexico, where wages collapsed and “poverty increased almost as fast as the number of billionaires” under neoliberalism.[58] Of all the “economic miracles,” perhaps the favorite example is Chile, where, after the United States helped to topple the democratically elected government of Allende and installed a brutal dictator who went on to murder and torture thousands of people, Milton Friedman and the “Chicago Boys” re-engineered the economy along free-market Neoliberal doctrine. As a result of this, poverty increased dramatically (from 20% to 40% toward the end of the Pinochet regime) and the shock of the economic program led to an economic crash in 1982 which required the Pinochet government to take over more of the economy than even the socialist Allende did.
In many of the cases where “economic miracles” are hailed (by economists at least), such miracles were preceded by what is called “structural adjustment,” a concept which is economic theology’s closest analog to the Christian notion of conversion. “Structural adjustment” means, in theological terms, the conversion of the economy from any of its various forms to one which conforms to the Washington Consensus, or what is elsewhere called the “Gold Straightjacket”: it includes the privatization of state-owned enterprises, the attenuation of inflation, balancing the budget (often by cutting social spending), liberalizing trade, and de-regulating capital markets.[59] The effects of Neoliberal structural adjustment programs are uniform and by now well understood: universally, it has meant an increase in inequality, increasing wealth for a select few, increasing poverty for the majority of the population, and a decline in labor’s share of the economy.[60] In A Brief History of Neoliberalism, the Marxist geographer David Harvey argues that neoliberal policies have consistently delivered slowed growth, increasing wealth inequalities, declining wages, and increasing unemployment.[61] To recognize this only requires a little doubt. But that is precisely the problem when the only thing miraculous about these “economic miracles” is that one must have faith to believe in them — faith being, as St. Paul defines it, the evidence of things unseen.
There is a further sense in which a different class of “economic miracles,” namely the Asian “Tiger Economies,” are like miracles in the theological sense, violating what are taken to be economic laws and tendencies. Unlike the other “economic miracles” which were regressive for most of the population, the Asian economic miracles (Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore) were real developmental successes for most of their populations, but they achieved that by totally violating the economic “laws” of Neoliberal doctrine, with large amounts of industry protectionism, massive public subsidies, an active state sector, big social spending in health and education, import restrictions, state-owned industries, and the like.[62] As Alice Amsden writes in “East Asia’s Challenge — to Standard Economics,” “extraordinarily rapid growth in East Asia” was produced by large amounts of “state intervention.”[63] In South Korea, to just give the most striking example, the punishment for export is the death penalty. In fact, this is true not just of the “Tiger economies” but also how every country in the world, contrary to myth, has developed. Ha-Joon Chang, an economist at Cambridge University, writes: “practically all of today’s developed countries, including Britain and the US, the supposed homes of the free market and free trade, have become rich on the basis of policy recipes that go against neo-liberal economics.”[64] The economic historian Paul Bairoch writes, “It is difficult to find another case where the facts so contradict a dominant theory … ”[65] Like miracles in the theological sense, this class of actually-successful economic miracles also violate what are taken to be economic laws (Neoliberal doctrine).
In the early Christian movements, the new faith was spread by zealous apostles. The practice continues today. Take for example Larry Summers, University Professor at Harvard, who, in his job as chief economist for the world bank, regularly travelled around the world preaching the Good News of Globalization, proclaiming to all who had ears to hear the evangelion, prophesying salvation by faith alone — faith in markets, and in all this, taking to heart the word of the Lord: “Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature” (Mark 16:15, KJV). This edict also seems to have been taken very seriously by President Clinton, who, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman reports, attended an Asia-Pacific summit in Seattle “to preach the gospel of open markets and to secure America’s foothold in the world’s fastest growing economic community”[66] — lending perahps some credibility to Bellah’s alternative appellation for the President, what he calls the “chief magistrate” of the American civil religion.[67]
If we can say that Saint Paul prefers discursive “deconstruction,” (to use a fashionable term) in theology, deconstructing, for instance, the dividing wall between faith and works, then we might say that Summers prefers a rather more straightforward theological approach. Simple destruction rather than deconstruction is the principal mode of his theology — destroying, for example, the dividing wall between commercial and investment banking, collapsing the distinction into that higher synthesis known as ‘casino capitalism’ (Robert Reich). However, unlike Saint Paul, who, according to tradition, was put to death by empire, Summers has a rather cozier relation to it, serving not only World Bank, but also in the administrations of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.
Summers’ home institution, the Harvard Economics Department, also comes straight out of the theology textbook. Such institutions, properly recognized, are called ‘seminaries.’ In the Capitalist religion, seminaries and churches, the doctrinal bodies of the faith, appear as institutions of economic doctrine like academic departments, professional societies like the American Academy of Economics, and other institutions like the World Bank, the Federal Reserve Board, and the International Monetary Fund, all playing their proper role with respect to the religion of which they are constituent elements. Despite the strong analogy, it is perhaps worth pointing out that one of the principal differences between economics departments and religion department is that while the latter critiques religion, the former practices it.
Like other kinds of theological institutions, economics departments couch tacit (sometimes, like at tenure reviews, not-so-tacit) power relations which systematically distort discourse.[68] And, as a result of this distortion, these power relations determine the limits of acceptable discourse, within which there can be, and is, considerable difference, giving rise to different theological schools — call them Keynesian or neoclassical — but outside of which deviance is scarcely tolerated, which is, so far as I know, quite unlike any other kind of scientific discipline. Indeed, the concept of heresy applies as much to economics as it does to theology. Those economists, for instance, who do not conform to orthodoxy are called ‘heterodox economists,’ a group which includes a whole range of economic thought, from socialist, Marxian, and evolutionary schools to feminist and ecological schools, among others.
What is it that defines orthodoxy in these establishments? The heterodox economist Ha-Joon Chang, professor of economics at Cambridge University, suggests, “Belief in the virtue of free trade is so central to the neo-liberal orthodoxy that it is effectively what defines a neo-liberal economist. You may question (if not totally reject) any other element of the neo-liberal agenda … and still stay in the neo-liberal church. However, once you object to free trade, you are effectively inviting ex-communication,”[69] which, needless to say, often comes in academic form.
Richard Wolff is another prominent heterodox economist, working in the Marxian school, at the University of Massachusetts. Similar to Chang, who comes from a different heterodox school, Wolff suggests: “The job of economics, to be blunt but honest, is to rationalize, justify, and celebrate the system. To develop abstract theories of how economics works to make it all like it’s a stable, equilibrium that meets people’s needs in an optimal way.”[70] And on the question of ex-communication, he suggests, holding to heterodox views is, to use his own words “dangerous to your career. If you went in that direction, you would cut off your chances of getting a university position or being promoted and getting your works published in journals and books, the things that academics need to do for their jobs.” And for Wolff, a tenured economist at a prominent economics department, this is indicative of the general lack of substantive debate about the systematic problems of capitalism, where to raise such questions is understood by mainstream economists to be unacceptable: “For 50 years, when [the question of] capitalism is raised, you have two allowable responses: celebration, cheerleading. Okay, that’s very nice. But that means you have freed that system from all criticism, from all real debate.”[71] There is a very simple way to test their validity: simply compare the amount and kind of references to theorists who support capitalism (Adam Smith, David Ricardo, J.M. Keynes, Paul Samuelson, Milton Friedman, etc.) to those of its critics (Karl Marx, Oskar Lange, Friedrich List, Paul Sweezy, Robert Dahl, David Miller, Richard Wolff, etc.) in standard economics courses. Take for example the basic introductory economics course at Harvard, which, because it is taught by N. Gregory Mankiw, who wrote the standard introductory textbook (Principles of Economics) we can take to be more or less indicative of the field. In the course reading list, he includes a host of opinion, beginning with Alan Greenspan, working through Alan Roth, Arthur Okun, Julio Jorge Elias, and a whole range of others — exactly zero percent of whom are critics of capitalism. Or take a look at the economics department at Harvard: there is one critic of capitalism on its faculty.[72]
Chang has done very good work in dismantling the myths not only of neoliberal economic “miracles,” but of the whole neoliberal theology in its entirety. In Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism, Chang, who is actually a former student of Joseph Stiglitz’s, completely and compellingly, and with a kind of common sense which is rare among economists for reasons I have already delineated, dismantles the myriad myths of neoliberal globalization. As he writes, “practically all of today’s developed countries, including Britain and the US, the supposed homes of the free market and free trade, have become rich on the basis of policy recipes that go against neo-liberal economics.”[73] Particularly embarrassing for the “ideologues” (his term) of neoliberal economics are the slower growth rates achieved under neoliberal policies. To quote: “The poor growth record of neo-liberal globalization since the 1980s is particularly embarrassing. Accelerating growth—if necessary at the cost of increasing inequality and possible some increase in poverty—was the proclaimed goal of neo-liberal reform. We have repeatedly been told that we first have to ‘create more wealth’ before we can distribute it more widely and that neo-liberalism was the way to do that. As a result of neo-liberal policies, income inequality has increased in most countries as predicted, but growth has actually slowed down significantly.”[74] In his own summary, Chang suggests that the truth of globalization (post-1945) is “almost the polar opposite of the official history.”[75] During the period spanning the 1950s to the 1970s, the global economy grew significantly faster and also more equitably than in the 1980s and 1990s, the period of the highest level of globalization.[76]
But academic economists are of course, like academic theologians, hardly the only ones who contribute to the production of theological discourse. C.S. Lewis, for instance, though as an Oxford English professor was an academic in one sense, lacked theological credentials, and, to be honest, didn’t need them. His role was that of a popularizer of religious thought, a role which is, in its economic equivalent, fulfilled by Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, whose best-selling books on globalization popularize the dominant economic orthodoxy.
In the current economic theories of globalization are also latent a doctrine of the Holy Spirit. Like the Spirit which proceeds from the Godhead, there is an analogous spirit which proceeds from the Godhead of Capital. These are known as capital flows, the regulation of which neoliberal economists oppose on the grounds that freer capital flows improves economic efficiency, even if unregulated capital flows tend to be extremely volatile. The point, however, is that capital flows, like the Holy Spirit, are emanations of a deity, Capital.
Capital flows rarely exist independently of some form of state power, so it is natural that they should be complemented by a different but analogous kind of divine out-pouring: foreign aid. In fact, there have been a few rigorous empirical studies of US foreign aid, all of which are sobering and instructive because they trace the extremely high correlation between US foreign aid and human rights violations. In Chomsky’s summary:
“There is nothing particularly novel about the relation between atrocious human rights violations and US aid. On the contrary, it is a rather consistent correlation. The leading US academic specialist on human rights in Latin America, Lars Schoultz, found in a 1981 study that US aid ‘has tended to flow disproportionately to Latin American governments which torture their citizens,… to the hemisphere’s relatively egregious violators of fundamental human rights’ … In another academic study, Latin Americanist Martha Huggins reviewed data for Latin America suggesting that ‘the more foreign police aid given [by the US], the more brutal and less democratic the police institutions and their governments become.’ Economist Edward Herman found the same correlation between US military aid and state terror worldwide, but also carried out another study that gave a plausible explanation. US aid, he found, correlated closely with improvement in the climate for business operations, as one would expect. And in US dependencies it turns out with fair regularity, and for understandable reasons, that the climate for profitable investment and other business operations is improved by killing union activists, torture and murder of peasants, assassination of priests and human rights activists, and so on.”[77]
If capital flows and US foreign aid are, like the Holy Spirit, a kind of emanation or out-pouring of the Godhead of Capital, then this, naturally, should tell us something about the nature of Capital. Indeed it does, and long before Edward Herman concluded on the nature of capital to seek profit margins abroad, the very same conclusion was reached by Rosa Luxemburg in The Accumulation of Capital a century ago. But even more recent examples help to illuminate the nature of this selfsame god. In 1999, for example, when Indonesia escalated the atrocities on East Timor, which it invaded in 1975, Clinton, under strong popular pressure, reversed the United States’s 25-year policy of support for Indonesia’s crimes, cut military aid, and the atrocities, for the most part, ended.[78]
What we have given above will serve for the moment to give the reader a more or less general overview of the first part of the argument. Of course, at this point in the argument, it is all but inevitable that there should be many questions, perhaps more questions than answers, which have been raised by the overview, and we will explore all of the topics very briefly mentioned here in greater depth in what follows later, but for the moment, in order to orient ourselves with the general shape of this argument, a certain degree of forbearance is demanded of us by the nature of the exposition at hand.
Of the areas in which questions have been raised by the present discussion, there is perhaps none which has raised so many questions as economics, to which topic, because of its scope and complexity, we have most neglected in this section, and to which topic we now turn our attention.
Notes:
This essay is a chapter in God Contra Capital, a book-length criticism of the Capitalist religion which I am currently working on. This chapter address capitalism as a religious phenomenon.
[1] Some parts of this chapter, especially the sections on capitalism as religion, the Old Testament, the New Testament, and neoliberalism, are adapted from and significantly expand on my “God Contra Capital,” Harvard Ichthus, Fall 2014.
[2] “The Vision,” The Brights, accessed 23 November 2013, http://www.the-brights.net/vision/.
[3] “Enthusiastic Brights,” The Brights, accessed 23 November 2013, http://www.the-brights.net/people/enthusiastic/index.html.
[4] Richard Dawkins, ‘Militant Atheism,’ Lecture, TED 2002, April 2002, TED.com, http://www.ted.com/talks/richard_dawkins_on_militant_atheism.html.
[5] Christopher Hitchens, God is Not Great, qtd. in Terry Eagleton, Reason, Faith and Revolution, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009, p.7, 94.
[6] Cf. Terry Eagleton, Reason, Faith, and Revolution, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2009
[7] Karl Marx, A Contribution to Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker, New York: Norton, 1978, p.53
[8] Mark Cladis, Introduction to Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Carol Cosman, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001, p.xx.
[9] Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, p.322.
[10] Paul Tillich, The Dynamics of Faith, New York: Harper & Row, 1957, p.2.
[11] Ibid., p.105.
[12] Ibid., p.xviii.
[13] Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, p.154.
[14] Ibid., p.xx.
[15] One might also identify this god with the god of dualistic theism.
[16] Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, New York: Washington Square Press, 1984, p.121.
[17] M. Douglas Meeks, God the Economist: The Doctrine of God and Political Economy (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1989), p.26.
[18] Georg Lukacs, ‘The Ideology of Modernism,’ in The Critical Tradition, ed. David H. Richter, 2nd ed., Boston: Bedford Books, 1998, p.1140
[19] Durkheim, Op. cit., p.322.
[20] Ibid., p.105
[21] Gustave Flaubert, Letter to Louise Colet, 09 December 1852
[22] Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, excerpted in Marx and Engels: Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy, ed. Lewis S. Feuer, London: Fontana, 1971, p.188
[23] Ibid., p.189
[24] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, in Marx and Engels: Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy, ed. Lewis S. Feuer, London: Fontana, 1971, p.53
[25] Meeks, op. cit., p.48.
[26] Karl Marx, Werke, Berlin, 1956 ff., vol. 13/8 ff., qtd. in Jose Miguez Bonino, Christians and Marxists, Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1976, p.46; We may disclaim the anti-Jewish rhetoric here. The point is simply that Marx recognized a certain similarity between God and Capital.
[27] David Noble, Beyond the Promised Land (Ontario: Between the Lines, 2005), p.88.
[28] Walter Benjamin, ‘Capitalism as Religion,’ trans. Chad Kautzer.
[29] The economic analogues to Christian theology are so strikingly similar in every domain outlined above, that I can think of no other kind of theoretical account (say, physics or evolutionary theory or literary theory) which matches or even comes close to economics in its fundamentally theological character — and this, owing to the manifestly identical origins of both theological systems: the Christian and Capitalist theologians worship different manifestations of the same transcendental signified, which in my view has nothing to do with the god of the scriptures — this, at least, is my thesis, which I shall attempt to argue in what follows. I recognize that this definition is so precise that not only does it exclude other forms of theoretical accounts (physics, literary theory, etc.) but also excludes other kinds of theologies (Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim, etc.). This is a problem which is addressed at the end of the chapter, but for which it must suffice at present to concede.
[30] Karl Marx, “For a Ruthless Criticism of Everything Existing,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Tucker, p.14.
[31] Ibid.
[32] Ibid., p.15.
[33] Karl Marx, Capital, ed. Friedrich Engels, trans. Edward Aveling and Samuel Moore (New York: Modern Library, 1906), vol.I, p.25.
[34] Marx, “For a Ruthless Criticism,” p.14.
[35] Ibid.
[36] Marx, Capital, vol.I, p.590.
[37] David Harvey, A Companion to Marx’s Capital (London: Verso, 2010), p.4.
[38] Tillich, op. cit., p.3.
[39] Marx, Capital, vol.1, p.590.
[40] Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, ed. Friedrich Engels, trans. Edward Aveling and Samuel Moore, New York: Modern Library, 1903, vol.1, p.182.
[41] Ibid., p.195.
[42] David Harvey, The Limits to Capital, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982, p.34.
[43] Marx, Capital, p.195.
[44] Robert Bellah, “Civil Religion in America,” Daedalus 96, no.1 (1967), pp.1–21.
[45] Joseph Stiglitz, Serene Jones, Gary Dorrien, Rob Johnson, Betty Sue Flowers, “Economics & Theology” (panel, Union Theological Seminary, New York, NY, 19 September 2012), accessed on Youtube.com, 17 August 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q08rK1Wrucw.
[46] Harvey Cox, “The Market as God,” The Atlantic, 01 March 1999.
[47] Ibid.
[48] Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Book IV, Ch. 2, Section 9.
[49] Paul Samuelson, William Nordhaus, Economics, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1989, 13th ed, p.825. To be fair to Samuelson, though he does clearly misrepresent Smith, he does not himself subscribe to the infallibility of the Invisible Hand and is, in fact, rather critical of it.
[50] Paul Samuelson, William Nordhaus, Economics, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1988, 12th ed, p.41, quoted online: http://adamsmithslostlegacy.blogspot.com/2009/10/paul-samuelsons-nuanced-assessment-of.html
[51] Adam Sanchez, ‘The Education “Shock Doctrine,”’ International Socialist Review, No.71
[52] See, for example, Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine (New York: Picador, 2007).
[53] Andrew Gumbel, “Republican-Friendly Bechtel Wins $680m Iraq Contract,” 19 April 2003, The Independent, UK
[54] For a general overview of these numerous episodes, I recommend William Blum, Killing Hope, Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1995. He includes Iran 1953, Guatemala 1954, Chile 1973, Grenada 1984, Nicaragua 1990, and many, many other examples.
[55] ‘Faith and the Markets: The Religious Rituals of the Finance Sector,’ The Economist, 26 May 2011.
[56] Ibid.
[57] Meeks, op. cit., p.30.
[58] Noam Chomsky, Profit Over People: Neoliberalism and Global Order (New York: Seven Stories Press, 1998), p.27
[59] Cf. Ha-Joon Chang, Bad Samaritans (London: Random House, 2007), p.20
[60] See, for instance, Kevin Danaher, ed., 50 Years is Enough: The Case Against the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, Boston: South End Press, 1994, cited in Noam Chomsky, Understanding Power, New York: New Press, 2002, p.223, note 40
[61] David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005
[62] See, for example, Ha-Joon Chang, Bad Samaritans, London: Random House, 2007, in his discussion of Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore.
[63] Alice Amsden, “East Asia’s Challenge — to Standard Economics,” American Prospect, Summer 1990. She continues: “The East Asian countries have not grown faster because they have bowed more deeply at the altar of free markets. They have grown because they did not hesitate to distort prices from what they would have been if the forces of supply and demand operated freely,” and “Standard economics, of course, is splendidly indifferent to the influence of history and institutions. The supreme lesson of Asian capitalism is that a highly visible hand in one form or another is necessary to provide an exit from pre-industrial poverty.”
[64] Chang, op. cit., p.67
[65] Paul Bairoch, Economics and World History: Myths and Paradoxes, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993, p.53.
[66] Thomas Friedman, “The Pacific Summit; Leaders as Summit Seek Strong Pacific Community,” New York Times, 21 November 1993, http://www.nytimes.com/1993/11/21/world/the-pacific-summit-leaders-at-summit-seek-strong-pacific-community.html.
[67] Robert Bellah, “Civil Religion in America,” Daedalus 96, no.1 (1967), pp. 1–21.
[68] To use Habermasian terms.
[69] Chang, op. cit., p.67
[70] Richard Wolff, “Taming Capitalism Run Wild,” interview on Bill Moyers and Company, 09 August 2013, transcript available online: http://billmoyers.com/episode/encore-taming-capitalism-run-wild-2/
[71] Ibid.
[72] This is Stephen Marglin.
[73] Chang, op. cit., p.15
[74] Ibid., p.28
[75] Ibid., p.31
[76] Ibid.
[77] Noam Chomsky, ‘On Colombia,’ Introduction to Doug Stokes, America’s Other War: Terrorizing Colombia, Zed, December 2004, available online: http://www.chomsky.info/articles/200412—.htm
[78] Noam Chomsky, Hegemony or Survival, New York: Holt, 2004, p.54
Essays 