Capitalism as Monstrous Religion

[struggle4progress]

Capitalism produces guilt, despair, and an iron cage, according to an unusual group of thinkers reading Weber during the Weimar period in Germany. Bloch, Benjamin, Lukacs, and Fromm are discussed.
By Michael Löwy

... The first star in this constellation is Ernst Bloch, who had taken part, in the years 1912-14, in Max Weber’s circle of friends which met every Sunday at his home in Heidelberg. It is Bloch that « invented », in his Thomas Münzer from 1921, the expression “capitalism as religion” (Kapitalismus als religion), a theological disaster whose moral responsibility he squarely places on the shoulders of Calvinism. The witness called for to sustain this accusation is none else than ...Max Weber: among Calvin’s followers, says Bloch, « thanks to the abstract duty to work, production unfolds in a harsh and systematic way, since the ideal of poverty, applied by Calvin only to consumption, contributes to the formation of capital. The obligation of saving is imposed on wealth, conceived as an abstract quantity which is an aim in itself requiring growth ...

Among Walter Benjamin unpublished papers which came out in 1985, edited by Ralph Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser in volume VI of the Gesammelte Schriften (Suhrkamp Verlag), the fragment “Capitalism as religion” is one of his most intriguing ... The title of the fragment is directly borrowed from Ernst Bloch’s above mentioned Thomas Münzer, theologian of revolution (1921). We know that Benjamin read this book ...

«One must see capitalism as a religion»: it is with this categorical statement that the fragment opens. It is followed by a reference, but at the same time a critical comment, to Max Weber’s thesis : « To demonstrate the religions structure of capitalism - i.e. to demonstrate that it is not only a formation conditioned by religion, as Weber thinks, but an essentially religious phenomena – would take us today into the meanders of a boundless universal polemic.» Further on, the same idea appears again, in a somewhat attenuated form, in fact nearer to the Weberian argument: “Christianity, at the time of the Reformation, did not favor the establishment of capitalism, it transformed itself into capitalism” ...

"In this way, capitalism is thrown into a monstrous movement. A monstrously guilty consciousness which does not know how to expiate, takes possession of the cult, not in order to atone for <expiate> this guilt, but in order to universalize it, to introduce it forcefully in consciousness, and above all, in order to involve God in this guilt, so that he himself has finally an interest in expiation”. Benjamin mentions, in this context, what he calls “the daemonic ambiguity of the word Schuld” - which means at the same time “debt” and “guilt” ...

http://www.pubtheo.com/page.asp?PID=1565

[jxnmsdemguy65]

1. Amen!

Capitalism is what Jesus / The Bible would call the worship of money, e.g. greed selfishness and deceit. It is an evil disorder which should be extirpated from the minds of men and women.

[LAGC]

2. Hallelujah!

Now if we could just convert more believers in the religion of Capitalism to economic atheism. ;)

[ironbark]

3. Monstrous Capitalist Religion?...Never heard of it.

[Silent3]

4. Even the article itself uses scare quotes around the word "religion"

Capitalism has taken over the function of a "religion" in previous epochs.

From the article in the OP, calling capitalism a religion seems to mostly stem from the perspective of a religious person viewing capitalism as a competitor for the attentions of the church's flock, with capitalism providing an alternate, incongruous set of values and goals to pursue.

One could also say that capitalism takes on a religious aura in the way some people attribute essentially magical power and inviolable sacredness to The Power of the Invisible Hand. This, however, is not an essential feature of capitalism, just an attitude of some of its most zealous proponents.

On the other hand, capitalism is unlike religion in that it requires no supernatural belief -- at least if you have a realistic view of limited and imperfect power of free markets and the common distortions that make most markets less than fully free. You also don't have to be a "devoted" capitalist, you don't even have to know what capitalism is or to have studied its tenants to participate in capitalism.

As for capitalism being "monstrous" -- well, "monstrous" compared to what? I wouldn't want to go back to life in something like life in a hunter/gatherer society where prosperity and wealth are so limited for everyone that capitalism is impossible as a consequence. Feudalism seems pretty "monstrous" to anyone who values freedom and social mobility. Communism, and socialism have shown ugly sides too.

[Jim__]

5. Just based on that article, I like Weber's take more than Benjamin's.

My understanding is that Weber believes Christianity "fathered" capitalism. That sounds plausible. But Benjamin:

... Capitalism does not require the acceptance of a creed, a doctrine or a theology, what counts are the actions, which take the form, by their social dynamics, of cult practices.

If what counts are actions rather than a creed or theology, doesn't that make capitalism more of an ethics than a religion.

And, again about Benjamin:

But what is that permits one to assimilate this economic capitalist practices to a religious “cult”? Benjamin does not explain it, but he uses, a few lines bellow, the word “adorator”; one can therefore suppose that, for him, the capitalist cult includes some divinities which are the object of adoration. For instance: “Comparison between the images of saints in different religions and the bank notes of different states”. Money, in the form of paper-notes, would therefore be the object of a cult similar to the one of saints in “ordinary” religions.

Bank notes of different states as saints? Sounds like a stretch.