20 Ideology
Wright
A core belief of capitalist ideology is that we humans drive the system, that we are ultimately in control. The marginal turn in economic science, in the 19th Century, solidified around the vision of homo economicus, the rational individual that acts to optimise their self-interest. Neoclassical economics, in the 20th Century, proposed “representative agents”, which are single minds that aggregate the preferences of millions, with the power to steer national economies by maximising utility according to the axioms of rational choice theory. Yes, the state may need to intervene to uphold property rights. It may even need to break up a monopoly here and there. But in general we humans, when we self-organise through money and markets, control our own destiny and achieve optimal outcomes.
Humanity, in the enchanted worlds of classical antiquity and the middle ages, consorted with spiritual beings. Hence the long history of sacrificial exchanges between peoples and their gods. But capitalism has done away with the gods. In our disenchanted world the unmoved mover is our own human desires, not a hidden spirit. Economics envisions capitalism as a great secular exchange between humanity and itself. We face each other in the market, and nothing stands in between. We are sovereign individuals, free of feudal superstition, and free to buy and sell as we wish.
But free within constraints. We are all subject to the fundamental laws of economics that emerge from our collective behaviour. Resource scarcity cannot be abolished. We must therefore accept that almost everything we do is both enabled and constrained by the quantity of money at our disposal. Because the money in our pockets, we are told, is merely a local representation of this global scarcity. If you have very little, and your life is impoverished, that’s lamentable but not really preventable.
The secular vision of economics is consistent with many aspects of our everyday experience. But shadows loom on the edge of this vision that hint at other realities. The science of economics neglects that emergent laws must be enforced by emergent powers. Capitalism disenchanted the medieval world only by weaving its own new enchantment. But it is a dark enchantment that hides the existence of a great power of enforcement that lurks in the shadows. When we face each other in the market it stands between us, not as mediator of our desires, but as controller of them.
All modes of production need methods to organise labour and allocate resources. But Marx, in his 1844 comments on James Mill, points out that, in capitalism, this necessity takes an unnecessarily alienated form. And by alienated he means taken out of our hands and given over to something not under our conscious control.
Marx states that, in capitalist society, our economic activities are controlled by an actual entity, a “real God“, with real causal powers. And Marx laments that we have become slaves to this god and its cult has become an end in itself. In other words, the social relations of capitalism summon forth an egregore.
Each private capital manically scrambles for profit by reacting to profit-rate signals from every productive activity that can be owned, dispensing monetary rewards and punishments, injecting funds into profitable activities and withdrawing funds from those that are not. In consequence, the entirety of the world’s material resources, including the working time of billions of people, are repeatedly marshalled and re-marshalled away from low and towards high-profit activities.
Marx’s Real God, which he names “capital”, is an egregore summoned into being by every circuit of capital accumulation. The egregore is a semi-autonomous entity with its own primitive form of cognition: it wants profit, it senses the presence and absence of profit, and then it acts in its world to get more profit.
Our earliest theories of how the world works were animistic. The God of the Old Testament became angry and punished Israel with pestilence. Modern science rejects this anthropomorphism and instead explains empirical regularities, whether natural or social, in terms of laws. But laws, properly understood, are descriptions of the causal powers of things. The important truth of archaic animism is that our world is indeed populated with things with their own powers that exist independently of us.
Marx’s Real God is just such an entity. It is a real presence amongst us. Its imperatives possess our minds and dictate our actions. It is not made of flesh and bones. It has a purely social reality. Nonetheless, this bloodless animism has bloody consequences.
Capitalism neither celebrates or personifies its Real God. In fact, its egregore is so thoroughly occulted it still lacks a complete theoretical expression and therefore a proper name.
The Real God is hidden for two main reasons. First, what exists is not immediately disclosed by direct experience. We must perform scientific work to uncover the hidden social mechanisms that govern our lives. Capitalism’s egregore is a consequence of our social relations and therefore is objectively hidden. Its singular and enduring existence must be inferred from the plurality of its empirical effects. And it wasn’t until the Marxist heresy of the 19th Century that this inference first reached maturity.
The second reason is more magical, and therefore more a matter of imagination. The etymological root of the word religion is to bind, to create an obligation between humans and a god. All religions bind their communities. So we should expect structural similarities between religious and economic practices because they both organise and integrate communities.
Bourgeois economics suppresses the Marxist heresy. But widespread failures to deliver the goods still need to be accounted for. Economic science has developed an elaborate theodicy, with a range of theoretical options to suit different levels of tolerance for the incredible, which redirects the blame for social ills onto anything but the existence of the rule of capital. Austrians blame the fall from grace on the lack of hard money. The evil state corrupts by issuing currency by fiat. Neoclassicals trumpet welfare theorems that prove that capitalist competition is a perfect mechanism that delivers optimum outcomes, if only capital was given full reign to commodify everything under the sun. Keynesians, more credibly, admit that unfettered capitalism has problems of coordination and distribution, but less credibly propose that bourgeois politicians, possessed representatives of the Real God, will fix them.
Economists are unconscious magicians, for they authentically believe what they preach, and their words of power continually re-weave the dark enchantment by maintaining incredible beliefs in the intrinsic goodness of the rule of capital.
Capitalism does not transcend religion. It is merely its inverted opposite.
Capitalism is an occult mode of production with a hidden god and a Dark Eucharist. For any sufficiently advanced religion is indistinguishable from economics.
Perhaps the greatest bourgeois myth, the height of its hubris and the essence of its magical power, is the belief that capitalism is a secular and rational mode of production.
Capitalism is an occult mode of production controlled by a hidden God that manipulates its subjects to engage in great orgies of unnecessary sacrifice and ecstasies of blind accumulation. We may live in an Age of Reason but the Reasons are not our own.