Capitalism as Religion & God
Since Marx and Weber the relationship between religion and capitalism has been a stimulating approach to social analysis and criticism. Indeed for some scholars, capitalism is not just comparable to religion, but is a religion itself. As Benjamin emphatically puts it ‘one must see capitalism as a religion’. Capitalism, for Benjamin, ‘is not only a formation conditioned by religion, as Weber thinks [that the Spirit of Capitalism evolved from the Protestant Ethic], but an essentially religious phenomenon’. It was this ‘religious structure of capitalism’ that Marx mocks, in the opening of The Communist Manifesto, as ‘a holy alliance to exorcise…the spectre of communism haunting Europe’. And that Weber poetically and pessimistically posits when characterising capitalism as the ‘most fateful power in our modern life’ and ‘an unalterable order of things in which [man] must live’.
To turn to notable contemporary theorists, Mcmurty has criticised ‘market theory and practice’ for holding the ‘unacknowledged religious metaphysic’ that capitalism is ‘a necessary and benevolent design’. As Mcmurty sees it, the idea of the invisible hand, of ‘an inevitabilist market mechanism producing the public interest independent of human plan’, is tantamount to a ‘machine-god idolatry’. Going further than Mcmurty, Wright, under the blog name ‘Dark Marxism’, has argued that there is a basis within Marx’s work for the view that ‘capital is a real god’: an independent, material thing — an actual entity…that has real causal powers. In other words, ‘that Marx [unlike Mcmurty] is not talking about the mere ideological worship of the idol of free enterprise or the markets, but actual material subordination to an actually existing entity’.
On this brief presentation alone, the writings of Marx, Weber, Benjamin, Mcmurty and Wright serve to demonstrate that seeing capitalism as a religion is a rich heterodox paradigm - a totalising conceptual, normative, aesthetic and rhetorical approach - for theorising and critiquing capitalism. So rich in fact that fully developing the symmetry between religion and capitalism would, in Benjamin's words, lead to ‘an endless universal polemic’. With this in mind, this dissertation aims to advance this critical intellectual tradition by exploring one particular parallel within the capitalism as religion paradigm: the functional-phenomenological symmetry between religious theodicy, the explanations for evil that allow for an omni-benevolent God, and capitalist ideology, the hegemonic myths that serve to legitimise capitalism.
The Capitalist Problem of Evil & Capitalist Theodicy
Within the philosophy of religion, ‘the problem of evil’, as a challenge to classical monotheism and orthodox Christianity, denotes the difficulty of reconciling the existence of suffering in the world with the belief in the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent God. As a response to this problem, theodicies attempt to provide moral justification for why an all-loving and all-powerful God would have created a world that contains suffering and chosen not to alleviate it (at least not directly and immediately).
In the modern secular world, capitalism, like theism, has a problem of evil: there is a difficulty in reconciling the existence of suffering under capitalism with the belief that capitalism is a moral system that should continue to exist. In response to this, capitalist ideology (capitalism’s legitimising myths) functions, as a secular theodicy, to justify the global dominance of capitalism by diverting moral responsibility away from capitalism or providing moral justification for the suffering that capitalism causes. The capitalist problem of evil is a theoretical and an experiential problem: it poses a problem to the capitalist worldview and to the capitalist subject.
❝ If the misery of the poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin. ❞
— Charles Darwin Voyage of the Beagle
