#capitalism as religion: walter benjamin and max weber

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Löwy, Michael. “Capitalism as Religion: Walter Benjamin and Max Weber.” Historical Materialism, vol. 17, no. 1, 2009, pp. 60–73, www.urbanlab.org/articles/moneyspeak/Lowy%202009%20-%20capitalism%20as%20religion.pdf, 10.1163/156920609x399218. Accessed 28th November 2020.

This article attempts to interpret one of the socialist critic Walter Benjamin’s reflections on capitalism as a societal framework, and how it had at the time of writing (1920s) come to resemble something closer to a religious cult. The unpublished paper makes allusions to Max Weber’s book The Protestant Work Ethic and The “Spirit” of Capitalism and Ernst Bloch’s (then unpublished) Thomas Münzer as Theologian of the Revolution.

Currently I believe this critique of capitalism has only become more relevant. He couldn’t have predicted the ravenous cultlike behaviours of Apple fanatics but that’s nothing more than the end point of the behaviours he was critiquing a hundred years ago come to roost. It’s important for people involved in games to understand this and take it to heart if we don’t want the industry to be more overrun with triple A yearly sports releases and the latest instalment of “grizzled white guy with gun and traumatic backstory”. 

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Hyperallergic: Walter Benjamin on How to Stop Worrying and Love Late Capitalism

Passage Choiseul, Paris, France (ca. 1910) (© LL / Roger-Viollet / The Image Works)

Around 1925, the Passage de l’Opéra in Paris, a glass-roofed structure housing shops, known as magasin de nouveautés, was slated for demolition. This particular arcade contained a bathhouse, itinerant lodgings, a brothel or two, small restaurants, and Café Certa, a gathering spot for Dadaist and Surrealist writers and artists. Like many an outraged French writer before and since, the poet Louis Aragon blamed the demolition on the United States, complaining that France’s Boulevard Haussman Building Society had caved to “the great American penchant for city planning.”

In response, Aragon wrote Paris Peasant (1926), immortalizing the soon-to-be obliterated Passage de l’Opéra. The novel inventories the arcade’s “glaucous gleam” and “outlaw principle,” the shops’ exotic merchandise and accessories, the tempting menus, posters, magazines and advertisements, and the sly expressions of passersby — the “fauna of human fantasies,” and “unrecognized sphinxes” embodying Paris’ “contempt for prohibitions” and “irrepressible sense of delinquency.”

Walter Benjamin, a German-born intellectual temporarily living in Paris, was an immediate admirer of this new book. In a letter to Theodor W. Adorno, his friend and eventual executor, Benjamin recalled being galvanized by Paris Peasant. “I could never read more than two or three pages in bed at night,” he admits, “before my heart started to beat so strongly that I had to lay the book aside.”

Germaine Krull, “Walter Benjamin” (c. 1925) (© Estate of Germaine Krull, Museum Folkwang, Essen, image provided by IMAGNO / Austrian Archives, Vienna)

Benjamin captured his own urban wanderlust in One Way Street (Belknap/Harvard 2016). This book-length essay about aimless walks in Weimar-era Berlin, like Paris Peasant, replicates the arbitrariness of a city, describing encountered shops and objects, and mapping connections among simultaneous activities — walking, looking, thinking, joking, free associating, daydreaming and composing. Reflecting on how the “bloodbath” of World War I had been facilitated by industrialization, Benjamin closes out One Way Street on a rousingly positive note. He proposes that technology, epitomized by the modern city, can be emancipated from the grasp of “the ruling class” and “the imperialists” with their “lust for profit.” The essay rethinks technology as reconciliatory rather than destructive, not a means for conquering nature but an instrument for mastering “the relation between nature and man.”

Of course, that was 1928. How feasible, today, is Benjamin’s hopefulness about humanity and technology? Earlier this year the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists moved its doomsday clock closer to midnight, meaning that the risks of a human wipeout via nuclear weapons has become much more likely. And, if that were not dire enough, as a result of human industry and its toxic waste, the habitability of our planet has deteriorated at a faster rate than climate scientists had previously predicted.

Meanwhile, despite its undeniable efficiencies and freedoms, digital media proceeds apace with fracturing face-to-face solidarities while accelerating the fictionalization of crucial facts. Computer hackers threaten the legitimacy of democratic elections. The current American President is an Internet troll. Given such large-scale technological malpractice, even sympathetic contemporary critics question the ongoing relevance of Benjamin, the prophet who found glimmers of hope in the “mutual penetration of art and science” heralded by what he called our “age of mechanical reproduction.”

In an attempt to save Benjamin from being eclipsed by the very cultural theories and media studies he pioneered, The Arcades: Contemporary Art and Walter Benjamin at The Jewish Museum situates his thought in relation to current — and largely American — photography, painting, film, and sculpture, as well as appropriated texts collaged into bewildering typographic arrangements by Kenneth Goldsmith.

Each gallery room is devoted to a given section – what Benjamin called a “convolute” — in his thousand-plus page tome Das Passagen-Werk (1982), known in English translation as The Arcades Project (Belknap/Harvard 1999), a speculative dive into modernity through Paris’s 19th-century shopping arcades. Lobbing a history lesson into a multimedia funhouse, this uneven yet colorful and busy exhibition provides the prospective reader of the byzantine Arcades Project with timelines of the author’s life, as well as explicatory wall charts, print photographs, and reproductions of handwritten manuscripts, lists, journals and other keepsakes. It turns out that Benjamin’s road to The Arcades Project was a long and winding one.

Martín Ramírez, “Untitled (Trains and Tunnels) A, B” (1960-1963), gouache, graphite on pieced paper, 19 x 76.5 inches. Collection of John and Barbara Wilkerson (© Estate of Martín Ramírez, courtesy of Ricco Maresca Gallery)

Born in 1892 into an affluent and secular Jewish family whose father was a sometime art dealer, Benjamin was a devoted student, specializing in the volatility of Baroque and Romantic literature. He preserved traces of religious mysticism in his writing even as he turned into a practical philosopher, social commentator, and cultural journalist. Having left an early marriage and promising academic career behind in Germany, Benjamin’s personal relationships and fact-finding travels in Europe in the 1920s and ‘30s — especially excursions to Russia and to Italy — reinforced the revolutionary beliefs about mass industrialization and rapid urbanization that he had gleaned from his reading of Karl Marx, Max Weber, and George Simmel.

And he absorbed work by contemporaries like Siegfried Kracauer, a fellow member of the Frankfurt School, who ushered in the study of film and pop culture, and Austrian satirist Karl Kraus, who ridiculed the lies and boneheaded practices of exploitative journalism. Probably the most influential contemporary guiding Benjamin’s evolution was Hungarian philosopher György Lukács. As literary critic, Lukács examined how longings for a lost utopia shaped modern literature. After converting to Marxism, he theorized about the neutering of human self-awareness and initiative by consumer capitalism. This alienating psychosocial development, sometimes known as “reification,” conditions the members of a society to be docile and contemplative once they have conceptualized their existence in terms of a commodity, functioning passively and moving “automatically,” one more object in the capitalist sphere of everyday production and exchange.

In the streets of Paris, Benjamin earned a living as a journalist while hunting out concrete examples on which to field test and then synthesize cutting-edge social theories. Encouraged by fellow German expatriate author Franz Hessel, he learned how to wander Paris with a voyeuristic curiosity modeled on that of the flaneur — a detached, attentive spectator who believed in the “religious intoxication of great cities” — who passed through every line of Charles Baudelaire’s poetry, especially the groundbreaking volume Les Fleurs du Mal (1857).

Mary Reid Kelley, “Charles Baudelaire” (2013), pigment ink print, 22.4 x 16.1 inches (courtesy the artist and Kadist, San Francisco, © the artist and Fredericks & Freiser, New York)

Through voracious reading of French literature, Benjamin traced how Baudelaire’s flaneur, a nonconformist and “illuminati,” whom the poet himself found in Edgar Allen Poe’s story “The Man of the Crowd” (1854), was reinvented by Surrealist novels like Louis Aragon’s Paris Peasant, Andre Breton’s Nadja (1928), and in the sensory shocks registered by the meandering narrator in Marcel Proust’s introspective epic In Search of Lost Time (1913-1927).

More than a stereotype or poseur, this flaneur represented an alternative form of modern consciousness, a sort of double agent. As Benjamin had learned from firsthand experience, as well as from his reading of Marx and Simmel, urban capitalism had severed the workplace from home. In doing so, it instigated a never-ending psychic tug-of-war over which domain was the more authentic, or real, and this tension played out through the surreal stagecraft of the modern city.

In imaginative literature as in real life, the flaneur sauntered about manufactured spaces, neither a machinelike worker nor a sleepwalking consumer. As a detached outsider, he is able to rip off the optical blinders and sensory filters imposed by civic conformity and functional pragmatism. Instead of submitting to the fate of commoditized subject or capitalist tool, the flaneur just wanders the city, scoping out randomness, changeability and ephemerality at every turn and intersection, stockpiling time itself, as Benjamin puts it, the way batteries store energy for future untold uses.

In a newly published English edition of Franz Hessel’s Walking in Berlin: A Flaneur in the Capital (MIT Press, 2017), Benjamin’s foreword further refines this enigmatic mission of random strolling (known in French as flânerie). The wanderer crosses thresholds without purpose other than observing how fellow pedestrians and even inanimate objects seem to quicken with fresh life and return his gaze. As “a connoisseur of the liminal” and the “fleeting,” the flaneur is “a werewolf roaming restlessly in the social wilderness.”

Lee Friedlander, “New York City” (2011), gelatin silver print, 20 x 16 inches. Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco (© Lee Friedlander)

However wild it may seem at times, the cityscape is technologically determined. Still, its terrain is a magnetic field bristling with meaning. Following the collapse of religion and rituals, Benjamin believed that capitalism’s “commodity fetishism,” apparent in new technologies, had reawakened the human imagination and its progressive motivations. The paradoxical hunger for nonstop novelty and the compulsive re-creation of newness, propelled by modern capitalism, represent transcendent urges that could be tapped for subversive, collectivist action. This potential forms the thesis behind twin iterations of Benjamin’s essay, “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century” (1935 & 1937), his overview of the mountain range that known as The Arcades Project.

Begun in 1928, contracted as a book in 1930, and unfinished when he died in 1940, The Arcades Project is a hydra-headed “exploration of the soul of the commodity.” Benjamin burrows through archives chronicling the making and remaking of Paris, from the age of the Roman catacombs to periods of street-driven furor during the French Revolution, the 1848 “February Revolution” and the vanquished Paris Commune of 1871. The gargantuan yet well-ordered text brims with lucid annotations, extended quotations from rare source materials, fascinating paraphrases, provocative formulations and philosophical propositions, poetic digressions, lyrical aphorisms and experimental theses.

He researched any topic remotely relevant to the fabrication of fin de siècle Paris — iron construction, doll manufacturing, advertising trends, newspaper deadlines, city grids and barricades, street lighting, Jugenstil décor and kitsch, photography and film, the caricatures of Honoré Daumier and Gérard Grandville, and the architectural and engineering systems put forth by utopian industrialists like Henri de Saint-Simon and Charles Fourier. 

In particular, the text dissects particular urban enclosures invented by modern technology. These include mass-produced clothing, shopping arcades, railroad stations, train cars, automobiles, panoramas, bookstores, kiosks, stalls, movie houses, and large palaces constructed for world’s fairs. Taking these apart and examining their mechanisms, effects, and textures, Arcades notes how these technologies replicate, for any user, the time-suspending spatial configuration in dreams. Thus each urban innovation exemplifies an ever-more active responsiveness hardwired into human beings. For Benjamin, human ingenuity and sensory appetite exceeds the surface consumerism and somnambulism of daily city life.

Although The Arcades Project is unapproachable as a linear text, it abounds with insights and quotable gems. “Technology,” writes Benjamin, “is the spark that ignites the powder of nature.” Department stores are “temples.” Personal possessions — termed “phantasmagoria” for the imagined value that their owners project into such objects — are among his favorite topics. In the age of disposability, those who live by the rule of “chance,” such as the vagrant — known in Paris as “ragpickers” — along with addicts, gamblers, and collectors, are, to Benjamin, modernist anti-heroes in the transient city, as they “harken back to medieval times when a person did not dispose of possessions but bequeathed them [all] through a detailed will.”

Collier Schorr, “Jennifer (Head)” (2002-14), pigment print, 56 x 40.6 inches. Private collection (© Collier Schorr, all rights reserved unless subject to written agreement)

The predicaments of boredom and anticipation are, Benjamin notes, modern, urbanized constructs. “We are bored,” he writes, “when we don’t know what we are waiting for.” Greed is a byproduct of capitalism that then becomes a state of mind. “The advertisement is the ruse by which the dream forces itself on industry.” The phony positivity mandated by employers in factories and offices reveals how conventional jobs resemble prostitution. “‘Keep smiling’ maintains, on the job market, the practice of the prostitute who, on the love market, flashes a smile at the customer.” And all forms of modern clothing are kinky. “Every fashion,” Benjamin writes, “is to some extent a bitter satire on love.” And every fashion is a fetishism that shows how “sex does away with the boundaries separating the organic world from the inorganic.”

For all its stirring speculations and ruminations, The Arcades Project never quite explains how all that electric human vitality and untamable city energy can be repurposed into political outcomes. Clues about possible transformations, however, lurk in Benjamin’s more famous writings on the history of photography and what he named the “optical unconscious.”

Just as psychoanalysis encourages patients to study memory and dreams in order to acknowledge and then parry the unconscious drives causing unfortunate mental states, Benjamin believed that the modern metropolis contains a corresponding public optical unconscious made visible by technologies that can sharpen and awaken untapped human sensory and expressive capacities. In this vein, the apparatuses within the modern city can be thought of as a hall of mirrors into which the individual can be surprised by the reflection of a multifaceted self, one far more dynamic and creative than had been assumed in the age before photographs and films.

By studying the revelations within, say, the haunted street photographs of Eugène Atget, or the facial tics of Charlie Chaplin on the silver screen, or the montage-style collages of Raoul Hausmann, Benjamin believed the masses could mobilize into new modes of being, creating an effective politics through these hitherto unknown aptitudes. In his essay, “Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia” (1929), Benjamin foresees such transformation, “only when in technology body and image so interpenetrate that all revolutionary discharge becomes bodily collective innervation, and all the bodily innervations of the collective become revolutionary discharge.”

Laboring away in the stacks and archives of the Bibliothèque Nationale well into the 1930s, Benjamin saw the news getting worse by the day. Surely he knew his days in France were numbered. In 1940, stalled in his flight from the Nazis, Benjamin killed himself in Portbou, Spain.

In hindsight, his perseverance and patience are as superhuman as the unrivaled scope of The Arcades Project. As he laid out in his epilogue to “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1935), fascism “introduced aesthetics into politics” and commandeered new technologies in order to shepherd the masses “to express” themselves homogeneously — ruses that forced the populace “to their knees” and unleashed “imperialistic warfare,” solidifying what had been the precarious dominance of the moneyed class over political life.

Benjamin insisted that spectacle-driven fascism involved an “unnatural utilization” of technology against organic life rather than on its behalf. The cataclysms of World War II were not the fault of innovation in itself. That confidence about technical progress is pictorially rendered in Benjamin’s beloved painting, Paul Klee’s “Angelus Novus,” (1920) which he purchased from his friend Gershom Scholem. Klee’s image, as described by Benjamin in “A Concept of History” (1940), resonate as intensely today as they did then:

“Angelus Novus” shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe that keeps piling ruin upon ruin and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them.The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward.

This storm is what we call progress.

Paul Klee, “Angelus Novus” (1920), oil and watercolor on paper, 12.5 x 9.5 inches (via Wikipedia)

 The Arcades: Contemporary Art and Walter Benjamin continues at The Jewish Museum (109 5th Avenue at 92nd Street) through August 6.

The post Walter Benjamin on How to Stop Worrying and Love Late Capitalism appeared first on Hyperallergic.

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ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cuddy, Luke. BioShock and Philosophy : Irrational Game, Rational Book. Chichester, West Sussex, Uk ; Malden, Ma, John Wiley And Sons, Inc, 2015.

This book is one of my favorites for discussing the inherent political and philosophical issues in games. The Bioshock franchise has a lot to say about rejecting control and programming, be it the programming of polite society (“would you kindly”) or the more metaphorical rejection of a tyrannical parent’s expectations (Elizabeth Comstock’s entire character arc), and these myriad messages are parsed and considered through numerous philosophical and sociological frameworks. It constantly questions the ethical and moral implications of the many decisions a player can make in these games and pushes many varying views on the arcs of the different characters. It is a fascinating look at how games can help develop a critical mind towards structures in power through consistent diegetic writing and references to prominent (and wrong, in Ayn Rand’s case) thinkers in its scant dialogue.

Dyer-Witheford, Nick, and Greig De Peuter. Games of Empire : Global Capitalism and Video Games. Minneapolis, University Of Minnesota Press, 2009.

Yet another book to feature leftist views on the history of gaming (this entry was written like third to last chronologically), this one is more concerned about how technology that was once used to code subversive counter-culture gaming experiments in the 1970’s has since been expropriated to further capitalist and neocolonial interests and goals. As visual mass media like films and video games and TV has since supplanted print media (posters and print ads), all sorts of insidious agendas and troubling trends can and have been implanted subtly into what we normally consume, such as the glorification of warmongering and conquest games that then link through to the literal army website for enlistment.

The book itself is a critique of late stage capitalism and neoliberal interests that have made up the backbone of real-life simulation games like Second Life and America’s Army, and a galling look at the slimy ways we are fed ideology through games. 

Guillaume De Laubier, and Jacques Bosser. Sacred Spaces : The Awe-Inspiring Architecture of Churches and Cathedrals. New York, Abrams, 2018.

Growing up in a majority Catholic country with a highly devout grandmother and many aunts and uncles subscribing to that grift masquerading as a religion meant getting dragged to upwards of 40 church ceremonies and a lot of subtle proselytizing and covert conversions. All it did for me was make me fall in love with the gaudy excesses of its aesthetic sensibility. This book feeds my irrepressible need to look at Gothic architecture and stained glass and informs a lot of my aesthetic choices. The photography of church interiors and descriptive passages of the historical significance of Gothic architecture in relation to churches constantly informs my many aesthetic choices as both a goth and an agnostic/Jewish designer fascinated with the aesthetics of high Catholic camp and excess.  

Hernandez, Patricia. “The Cyberpunk 2077 Crunch Backlash.” Polygon, 7 Oct. 2020, www.polygon.com/2020/10/7/21505804/cyberpunk-2077-cd-projekt-red-crunch-youtube-jason-schreier-labor-the-witcher-3.

DISCLAIMER: While I am aware of the opinions surrounding Polygon and its purported corporate agenda, I have elected to source this article regardless, as it is reporting on an important aspect of the industry and the future we as designers have to look forward to as crunch becomes more and more normalised.

This article details the ways that CDPR (CD Projekt Red) treats its designers and developers, with six day work weeks and broken promises of ending crunch. It also shines a light on how netizens and players respond to negative reporting of this trend and how worryingly apathetic and downright disdainful the responses are. Exploitation isn’t new in any industry, but it scares me that someone could die of overwork and the people they’re slaving away on a game for wouldn’t care because “that’s just the way the industry is”.

Kakutani, Michiko. The Death of Truth. London, William Collins, 2018.

This text is invaluable for anyone who cares about how biases in the media they consume changes and warps news based on what they care about, while also addressing the trend of fully fabricated news to scare less informed (and often conservative) constituents further into their holes of prejudice and uneducated opinions. As a media student it’s fascinating to consider, but as a person living in the world it’s downright necessary. The sooner a person is aware of the biases in the media they consume, the faster they can learn the importance of diversifying the voices they listen to and address the blind spots in their information pipelines, and this book is really good at diving into the kind of language and rhetoric to be on the lookout for to parse out bias, which keeps me on my toes about the media I want to put out in the world.

Löwy, Michael. “Capitalism as Religion: Walter Benjamin and Max Weber.” Historical Materialism, vol. 17, no. 1, 2009, pp. 60–73, www.urbanlab.org/articles/moneyspeak/Lowy%202009%20-%20capitalism%20as%20religion.pdf, 10.1163/156920609x399218. Accessed 28th November 2020.

This article attempts to interpret one of the socialist critic Walter Benjamin’s reflections on capitalism as a societal framework, and how it had at the time of writing (1920s) come to resemble something closer to a religious cult. The unpublished paper makes allusions to Max Weber’s book The Protestant Work Ethic and The “Spirit” of Capitalism and Ernst Bloch’s (then unpublished) Thomas Münzer as Theologian of the Revolution.

Currently I believe this critique of capitalism has only become more relevant. He couldn’t have predicted the ravenous cultlike behaviours of Apple fanatics but that’s nothing more than the end point of the behaviours he was critiquing a hundred years ago come to roost. It’s important for people involved in games to understand this and take it to heart if we don’t want the industry to be more overrun with triple A yearly sports releases and the latest instalment of “grizzled white guy with gun and traumatic backstory”.

Skal, David J. The Monster Show : A Cultural History of Horror. New York, Faber And Faber, 2001.

This work is basically a historical look at the western media’s depictions of its greatest monsters, often discussing contextually as part of the cultural zeitgeist of any given time. It’s a fascinating look at the intersection of fear and semiotics in our current cultural landscape and additionally details the creation and eventual decline of the Hayes Code and normalisation of queer-coding villains, although my personal viewpoint on the matter is that it would have benefited the text to have delved into monsters and their depictions across nonwestern cultures, because fears (outside the unknown and darkness) aren’t really universal, and it would have made an interesting contrast to see the differences between a traditional western vampire and a manananggal, but I digress.

Unrelated to its cultural discussions, it also serves as a pretty scathing report of theatre writer pettiness and old Hollywood drama.

Weber, Max, et al. The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism and Other Writings. New York, Penguin Books, 2002.

This seminal work by turn of the century German theorist Max Weber proposes that a line exists between the puritanical beliefs that heavily relied on working oneself to the bone to be considered a moral person in the eyes of the lord and the eventual rise of industry and capitalism in western Europe. He juxtaposes the Protestant beliefs in productivity for its own sake to wash oneself clean of sin with the way that work under capitalism is presented as a way to contribute to society and, in some instances, repent and atone for transgressions and wrongdoings, arguing that one indelibly led to the other.

As a socialist (and non-Christian) myself, I believe I should be able to critically analyse the ethics of working myself (and others) to the bone, and why we’re taught it’s good and moral to push ourselves to physical and mental exhaustion. I don’t want my work to be created under conditions that are both spiritually and physically crushing, and this text is paramount to the analysis of so-called worker-oriented games companies and their policies towards worker welfare.

Woodcock, Jamie. Marx at the Arcade. Haymarket Books, 2019.

As a socialist myself I found this book to be a great insight into gaming as transgression from the systems of hierarchy around us. In a world where all anyone cares about is money, capital and the almighty bottom line, the idea that taking time for yourself is a revolutionary act fighting capitalism is definitely an interesting one. Yes, there are systems to serve within the game, but it’s a fascinating look at what we can consider transgression from the oppression of real life. Gaming is, according to the writer, an inherently unproductive activity where capital is not served (unless you work for a warcraft gold farming operation), and therefore a revolutionary action where you put yourself first. It can be an outlet for passion, and in some cases a coping mechanism for mental issues. It really made me hopeful in the industry I want to work in. (Disclaimer: I realise this barely scratches the surface of the book but it’s what stood out to me the most and what resonated with me the most.)

Wright, Alexa. Monstrosity : The Human Monster in Visual Culture. London, I.B. Tauris, 2013.

Another look at monsterhood, this time analysing our fears through personhood and how we as a culture project our fears on those who are different from us. I did a lot of research on monsterhood and how we see the other as inherently frightening for my final paper for university (which I will eventually upload as a reflective post because I still stand by a lot of it), and I think it’s valuable to know why we’re afraid of things so we can begin to unlearn harmful misconceptions of people who aren’t like us. As someone who wants to work in games art (focusing mainly on character art), I personally want to challenge the fear of the other through my work, and I want to use signifiers that are traditionally thought of as fearful to create more thoughtful art and hopefully help humanise that which was once considered hateful and gross.  

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Critical Analysis

Löwy, Michael. “Capitalism as Religion: Walter Benjamin and Max Weber.” Historical Materialism, vol. 17, no. 1, 2009, pp. 60–73, www.urbanlab.org/articles/moneyspeak/Lowy%202009%20-%20capitalism%20as%20religion.pdf, 10.1163/156920609x399218. Accessed 23 November 2020

For this critical analysis I have chosen to reflect on a fragment from Brazilian Marxist sociologist Michael Lowy’s writings on socialist theorist and critic Walter Benjamin’s unpublished notes from 1921. The article in question aims to analyse and expand on Benjamin’s central comparison of capitalism as religious ideology and cult in his notes, which are unfinished and unpublished.

While not of the utmost importance to my art in a practical sense, I do find it necessary to understand the systems in which I create. Capitalism is, in a very literal sense, what makes the world go round at the moment, and therefore as an agent of it (or someone working within it to create things made to be enjoyed by others), I should be capable of critiquing it, even as I sit inside it and create things made for the consumption of others. It is my aim with this critical analysis to better articulate my observations and findings, so that I can inform players of the games I help make that this system is flawed and fundamentally broken.

I have chosen in this instance to analyse pages 62 – 64, where Lowy discusses the reasoning for Benjamin’s analysis of capitalism as cult. While most examples in this article generally use greater systems of capital such as the stock market, I will instead be reflecting on how discussion affects consumer trends and art as commodities, because I have little to no understanding where stocks are concerned, and that aspect of capital impacts my place in the system very little if at all.

To begin with, the article cites the irrelevance of things not immediately related to the cult as Benjamin’s first doctrine of capitalism as cult. The article itself cites the accoutrements of capitalism as business (as mentioned above, stock market etc), from which can be extrapolated that the things not included in the bubble of relevance include the labour required to create products and their material costs. In short, the human component. The conclusion here can be reached that humans and their needs are irrelevant in the eyes of the cult.

Lowy then begins to dissect Benjamin’s idea of currency as religious idol, wherein he discusses the idea that we as a culture have deified the physical manifestation/s of wealth. He draws a line here between these notes and Benjamin’s eventual unfinished work The Arcades Project, which criticises the Parisian Arcades as temples of merchant capital.

The second trait of capitalism as cult is that the duration is permanent – it never ends, so to speak. All days are holy days in which the member of the cult does holy sacred rites in appeasement of the god, which we can here read to mean that all days are spent advancing capitalism to some extent or another. We as a public have holidays and weekends and days when we are not at work, but we still buy and consume regardless, advancing the cause in this respect. This borrows Max Weber’s “conception of capitalism as a dynamic system in global expansion” (Weber et al, 2002). No matter what anyone does, capitalism has designed it so that we must consume and continue to do so.

But the final (and I’m going to editorialise here and say most important) aspect is here defined as its “guilt-producing character”. Benjamin describes it to be “a monstrously guilty consciousness… takes possession of the cult, not in order to atone for this guilt, but to universalise it.” It is easy to come to this conclusion, given how people treat those who are jobless or homeless or live on benefit payments, or even just those who cannot afford things.

The idea that idleness is a form of sin has been extant since Catholicism started to editorialise its own history. Suddenly the idea of taking time for oneself away from production became something to punish (Woodcock, 2019), and since Catholicism is one of the oldest modern religions, it’s not a stretch to say that this mode of thinking was hammered from those with power to wield into those who did their will, so to speak. “God is always watching”, they say – so look busy or be condemned to hell.

It should not come as a surprise to anyone reading this work of analysis that I fully agree with the above theories put forth. I have seen first-hand the kind of society that capitalist expansion and conversion creates, from both the first world side and the third world. It is a world where human labour and material resource on one hemisphere of the world is exploited and cannibalised by those on the other.

It is a world where people work in vain to try to better circumstances preordained for them since their own birth, by right of class/race/sex/gender they were born into. It is a world that works for the few, with little to no regard for those working below them. (Thorn, 2020)

It is a world that creates fanatical consumers, rewarding their labour with designed obsolescence and shoddy workmanship by those same exploited and cannibalised classes mentioned above that live in the global south. It is a world that encourages that we discard any and everything we no longer care about, without a second thought to the massive landfills of goods in countries stripped bare of their resources in the name of progress.

This is of course but a fragment of a larger article (cited above), published in the journal Historical Materialism, a publication that studies society and economics through the lens of Marxism. A fair few papers and studies have been written on the concept of capitalism as religion, but I chose this one as it was a reading of one of the better-liked socialist thinkers of the time, and also works as an example of the same kind of critical analysis I was attempting, with far less editorialising, I will admit.

References:

Thorn, Oliver. “Work (or, the 5 Jobs I Had before YouTube) | Philosophy Tube.” YouTube, 18 Dec. 2020, www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_X-812q_Jc. Accessed 30 Dec. 2020.‌

Weber, Max, et al. The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism and Other Writings. New York, Penguin Books, 2002.

Woodcock, Jamie. Marx at the Arcade. Haymarket Books, 2019.