“A religion may be discerned in capitalism — that is to say, capitalism serves essentially to allay the same anxieties,…
“A religion may be discerned in capitalism — that is to say, capitalism serves essentially to allay the same anxieties, torments, and disturbances to which the so-called religions offered answers… In the first place, capitalism is a purely cultic religion, perhaps the most extreme that ever existed. In capitalism, things have a meaning only in their relationship to the cult; capitalism has no specific body of dogma, no theology. It is from this point of view that utilitarianism acquires its religious overtones. This concretization of cult is connected with a second feature of capitalism: the permanence of the cult. Capitalism is the celebration of a cult sans rêve et sans merci (without dream or mercy). There are no “weekdays.” There is no day that is not a feast day, in the terrible sense that all its sacred pomp is unfolded before us; each day commands the utter fealty of each worshipper. And third, the cult makes guilt pervasive. Capitalism is probably the first instance of a cult that creates guilt, not atonement. In this respect, this religious system is caught up in the headlong rush of a larger movement. A vast sense of guilt that is unable to find relief seizes on the cult, not to atone for this guilt but to make it universal, to hammer it into the conscious mind, so as once and for all to include God in the system of guilt and thereby awaken in him an interest in the process of atonement. This atonement cannot then be expected from the cult itself, or from the reformation of this religion (which would need to be able to have recourse to some stable element in it), or even from the complete renouncement of this religion. The nature of the religious movement which is capitalism entails endurance right to the end, to the point where God, too, finally takes on the entire burden of guilt, to the point where the universe has been taken over by that despair which is actually its secret hope. Capitalism is entirely without precedent, in that it is a religion which offers not the reform of existence but its complete destruction. It is the expansion of despair, until despair becomes a religious state of the world in the hope that this will lead to salvation… The cult is celebrated before an unmatured deity; every idea, every conception of it offends against the secret of this immaturity. Freud’s theory, too, belongs to the hegemony of the priests of this cult. Its conception is capitalist through and through. By virtue of a profound analogy, which has still to be illuminated, what has been repressed, the idea of sin, is capital itself, which pays interest on the hell of the unconscious. Capitalism has developed as a parasite of Christianity in the West (this must be shown not just in the case of Calvinism, but in the other orthodox Christian churches), until it reached the point where Christianity’s history is essentially that of its parasite — that is to say, of capitalism.”—
Walter Benjamin, “Capitalism as Religion” (1921)
I gathered some brilliant commentary on this neglected unfinished work of early Benjamin by traversing blogs, and really find the insight penetrating deeper into what was left behind here but feels extremely necessary and relevant for today. First:
In “Capitalism as Religion”, Walter Benjamin asserts that capitalism is the most utilitarian of beliefs. It is based on pure mechanism and accumulation without dogma or theology. A true cult. We don’t work for God, God works for us. We are blessed when we consume. God wants you to be rich. Every day is feast day for it is always the place and time for worship at the altar of greed. We atone for nothing. Rather, everything (even God) suffers the Schuld (debt/guilt) generated by the cult. The individual reigns with banknotes as his holy iconography.
Certainly, if we look back to capitalism’s early form in mercantilism (the birthplace of the corporation), and proceed up to our present time with mixed economies and state capitalism, we have five hundred years of capitalist religion applied to bloody effect. We often speak of the Abrahamic religions, particularly Christianity and Islam, unleashing thousands of years of bloody conflict through warfare and religious genocide; but, we forget that nearly half a millennia of capitalism has wrought an equivalent level of blood and destruction, from colonialism to world wars and other lesser conflicts. Then, of course, there is the capitalism’s most extreme variant, fascism, as embodied by the Nazis, which was a response to communism—but capitalism at complete service to the might and glory of the nation.
Benjamin, however, might be wrong in suggesting that capitalism does not have dogma—private property would seem to be the exception here. Property, land or product, allows for all manner of acts to defend it and expand its reach. We might also say that the idea of exponentially growing economies, with GDP as the scale, is particular to capitalism. But Benjamin is right in saying that nothing has meaning except within the cult—all alternative theories, all complaints, all flaws, everything that does not serve and glorify capitalism, is rendered irrelevant and destructive to the religion of capitalism.
And Benjamin did not live long enough to see how evangelic Christians and their political candidates have sought to convince the masses—not that they need much convincing anyway—that Jesus Christ wantsyou to have abundance: wants you to have abundant money, property, possessions, etc. At the very least, it would have proven to Benjamin that capitalism had not truly discarded religion, but instead absorbedit and regurgitated it for its own ends. However, he did suggest that Christianity, during the reformation, had transformed itself into capitalism, using many of its symbols, such as on currency.
Benjamin writes, “This concretization of the cult connects with a second characteristic of capitalism: the permanent duration of the cult.”
This is critical—anyone living within a capitalist system and convinced of its greatness cannot imagine an ending. Then, of course, there is Francis Fukuyama and all his acolytes who argue that the capitalist republic (I will not call it a democracy) is the endpoint of civilization; that is, there will be no further evolution. We have reached the most perfect form of civilization possible, even with its flaws. The battle for systems of living, of economies, is over: capitalism is endless and eternal.
It’s interesting to consider that God’s endlessness, his eternal state of being, is transmuted into a theoretically eternal economic system. We should at least give credit to the authors of the Bible who had the imagination to describe God as the alpha and the omega. To create a boundlessness to the narrative. Capitalism, on the other hand, can never claim alpha and omega status—like God, it was a creation of man, and a rather recent one at that.
And finally, some real rewarding insight (though may substantially depress you):
If in Capitalism transcendence is replaced with immanence, Benjamin continues, salvation is replaced by guilt. If the potential to achieve absolution exists in the actuality, if one can be saved in the here and now, then any failure to do so, any disappointment or unhappiness in the present immediately manifests itself as guilt: “Capitalism is probably the first instance of a cult that creates guilt, not atonement”. In this formulation, the substitution of salvation for guilt correlates to the fulfillment of desire and the production of guilt in Freudian psychoanalysis, as well as to the consumerist cycle that ties self-actualization to debt. As a consequence, “Capitalism… is a religion which offers not the reform of existence but its complete destruction”: the fulfillment of its prophecies can only come true in a complete eradication of its most basic assertions. This is why the counter-cultural absolute rejection of reformist and participatory politics and its flipside, the ethos of uncompromising political purity against a more benign realpolitik are essentially the greatest expressions of belief in the system laid out by Capitalism, a system in which one is forever complicit in one’s own passive collaboration. “God”, writes Benjamin “may be addressed only when [man’s] guilt is at its zenith”.
But the implications of Benjamin’s hypothesis, that Capitalism isn’t merely a counterpart to protestant values but actually forms its own religion, go beyond an individual subject constituted by this creed. According to Emile Durkheim, a religious practice (whether organized or cultish) is defined by its social nature and its function in defining and organizing societies: “A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things […] beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them.” Religious rituals, far from being secondary expressions of faith, are where society creates and recreates its own ideal every time it repeats them communally.
In light of this, the implication of Benjamin’s assertion that Capitalism is the dominant religion of our time is that the guilt at its centre (which is also debt, as neatly encapsulated in the German Schuld) is also the thing that bonds the community together. Not only are we a community because we are all indebted to each other, in an ironic fulfillment of the solidarity whose absence Marcel Mauss bemoaned in early Capitalism, but even those who choose not to practice Capitalism, the laymen in Durkheim’s account, still belong to the church. Benjamin writes: “religion… regarded individual who were irreligious or had other beliefs as members of its community, in the same way that the modern bourgeoisie now regards those of its members who are not gainfully employed”. As we can see, Benjamin does not leave any space outside the community encircled by Capitalism and his description acknowledges the incredible flexibility and elasticity of the practice of Capitalism, redefining itself again and again to include all under the auspices of guilt and debt. This is why art practices which seek to reject the ethos of work and to withdraw completely from the cycle of consumption and production are tolerated or even encouraged by the art market, declining to participate does not deny you of membership.
The ultimate act of ‘dropping out’, of exodus from the Capitalist church is the suicide cult. It is also, paradoxically, the ultimate expression of the logic of Capitalism, and in it the accumulation of the guilt produced by Capitalism is finally given a generative act of resistance, of selfhood. This is the cultic potlatch, the destruction of the thing one holds dearest, of the very life of the community, as a ritualistic gift to the world. In Benjamin’s words: “it is the expansion of despair, until despair becomes a religious state of the world in the hope that this will lead to salvation”. The mass suicide of the Jim Jones’ ‘Communists’ as he called them should have been the last and final move in the dialectical relationship between religion and Capitalism. The birth of the new Capitalist subject is announced by Jones in the last sentence before sipping the cyanide-laced grape flavoured ‘Flavor Aid’: “We didn’t commit suicide, we committed an act of revolutionary suicide protesting the conditions of an inhumane world”. This is a very short distance from the Black Panthers’ transformation of the ‘slow suicide of the ghetto’ into a triumphant death (the elevation of economic despair into action) and a firm step in the direction of suicide bombers, edging on the territory of ‘bare life’ that Giorgio Agamben borrows from Benjamin, the sacrifice of life as a gesture caught in the cogs of the dialectics of political action.
Durkheim defines sacrifice as the linking together of two religious elements – the communion with the gods and the offering or oblation, “a gift and an act of renouncement”. Why else would the gods require food from the believers? He explains this interdependence as a consequence of the idea that without the faith of the community, the gods would literally die. In other words, the sacrificial rite is both a union of a society with its gods in a joint act of biological constitution (you are what you eat – if men and gods share food they become the same, and by extension, so does the entire community) and an offering to the gods who, according to Durkheim, depend on men as much as men depend on them. Hence, the sacrifice of the self in the suicide cult is twofold: it is a symbolic act of unification which implicates all under Capitalism. If in Capitalist society consumer relations dominate, this is an act of supreme consumption, in which modern man cannibalizes and deifies himself at once. We all drink from the fountain of Flavour Aid.
(via foucaultwasright)
Sorry for the length. But on revisiting this nine-year-ago post I find it even more fascinating than I did then.