Religion

A set of beliefs, rites and ceremonies that, through the promotion of a series of values, asserts and maintains the morality characteristic of a given social organization.

Religions have historically been the great ideological containers that tried to give coherence and unity to the set of values and beliefs useful for sustaining a given mode of production and the social domination of its ruling class.

In themselves they need not include belief in supernatural beings, but common usage tends to limit the term to the churches and cults that are heirs, in one form or another, of feudality. This is not innocent.

Why does the bourgeoisie embrace "Reason" and claim to be a-religious?

The break between ancient religion and Christianity

Being the first class to carry out the extraction of the product of labor by fundamentally economic means, apparently spontaneous and "natural", it did not necessarily need to bind itself to a supernatural narrative, still less to choose one among them, in order to legitimize its power.

The Latin word "religio", from which "religion" derives, resembles the original only in its pronunciation: in the classical world the "religio" was not a set of beliefs or doctrines, but a set of public administrative rituals.

There were no dogmas or sacred texts such as the revealed religions have, and most of the "priests" were elected public officials. Taking part in the rituals was a public obligation, but there was no need whatsoever to "believe" in the gods. One could even be mocked for doing so; the work of several philosophical circles was to make sure that "superstitio" -irrational belief- did not get out of control and call social relations and the state into question, even while formally maintaining the religio.

When Christianity reaches Rome, it is denounced as atheism by the authorities. The "religio" uses in its representations the ancestral cults and rituals of groups within the Roman Empire, whereas the Christians are a new group with no history at all, which moreover refuses to follow the administrative rites.

For the Christians belief took precedence over rites, exactly the reverse of the rest of the world. In order to try to escape Roman persecution, Christianity will have to invent a past for itself. Since there is no ritual past before Christ, everything will have to center on doctrine.

This will lead the Church Fathers to announce that in reality all religions follow the same original Christian doctrine, but in corrupted form. They thus invent the Christian "universal history" with a common beginning, the coming of Christ to "settle the matter" and set off a historical march towards salvation. By the time Christianity triumphs over Rome, the meaning of "religion" will have been almost completely inverted with respect to the original. And so it remained for more than a thousand years.

The bourgeoisie and the reform of medieval religion

When the wars of religion return to Europe in the 16th-17th centuries, during the great crisis of the agrarian world that formed part of the decadence of feudalism, these questions are reopened. Is belief not more important than liturgy and ritual? Protestantism gives rise to religious groups that are ever less liturgical, with an ever more abstract god, returning to the concern with "natural religion". In the midst of the wave of rationalization of the 18th century, the switch between an abstract god and universal reason begins to be made.

From here it is only half a step to throwing Christ out of the window while keeping all the Christian presuppositions, now converted into "universal reason". "Religion" had been redefined several centuries earlier as belief, and therefore as irrational, so the moderns claim to have no religion at all.

For the Enlightenment, religion is superstitious belief; it will be enough to eliminate belief and sift the good from the bad through the filter of reason.

But the cult of reason will soon prove not to be an especially useful tool for governing the social masses. If state religion was the characteristic ideological form of the rule of the feudal classes, the combination of political ideology and nationalism will be that of the bourgeoisie.

Its effort of "secularization" was immense: it wrested education from the greedy hands of the churches, instituted national cults of the flag and of the fallen, temples to its own art and its science (the "museums", dedicated to the forgotten Greek muses), let the muezzin sing at his hours while it built communication networks -media- capable of carrying its message into every living room...

But in spite of everything, especially while it had -or where it still has- large peasant masses, it could not do without the old ecclesiastical tomes inherited from feudalism (Roman Catholicism and Orthodoxy, Anglicanism, Maliki Islam, Buddhism...) nor without its own first ideological affirmations (the "Protestant Reformation"). It did, however, "modernize" them, purged them of feudality with the necessarily watered-down castor oil of "church-state separation" and, after a good many clashes and battles, put them to work in its service.

The three levels of religion under capitalism

1. The ideological apparatuses inherited from previous modes of production

What the bourgeoisie calls religions, that is, the religions prior to the establishment of capitalism. Religions which the bourgeoisie, at first, could not but fight. In the first place, as part of its assault on the state. In the second place, because it needed a morality functional to the new order.

That battle was called "secularization", and if it was never complete it was not -as the "laicists" would have it- because feudal remnants were left to be destroyed. Churches and cults are today no more a feudal remnant than the university, another feudal institution converted a thousand times over according to the needs of the present ruling class.

2. The political religio: nationalism

Political religion, the bourgeois equivalent of the Roman "religio": the set of ceremonies, rituals and beliefs that make up "the political community".

Its fundamental expression, the political religion of the bourgeoisie par excellence, is nationalism. Why? Because the wage and capital are capitalist social relations, but capitalism is a complex, scale-dependent system. There can be no "capitalism in a single enterprise" nor "in a single district".

Shoots of the wage-capital relation appear from Roman times onwards, and the Florence of the 14th and 15th centuries will have foreshadowings of the capitalist utopia and program with Savonarola, and even a proletarian insurrection, that of the Ciompi; but until the bourgeoisie manages to articulate a sufficiently broad national market, turning land into a commodity, subjugating the peasantry and raising agricultural productivity, it will not be able to establish the "double circuit" -circulation of commodities and circulation of capital- that allows the systematic and relatively "automatic" accumulation of capital, which is what we call capitalism.

That is why the history of the struggle of the bourgeoisie for the establishment of capitalism is the history of the nation, which in turn is nothing other than the effective leadership of the bourgeoisie over the social whole it is creating. If nationalism sprouts again and again, it is because it is the ideological glue that reflects that social whole and that leadership.

The rituals, the ceremonies, the anthems, the "irrational belief" in the peculiarity of the national culture, in the originality of its institutions, in the uniqueness of everything national... reveal the immediate mold in which the patriotic religio was formed.

"Secularization" was also the absorption and transposition by the state of a good many celebrations of feudal religion. The Basque "Aberri Eguna" superimposed on Catholic Easter Sunday, the Mexican Guadalupe, the Spanish Covadonga and Santiago -only half laicized with October 12- among many others, from Poland to Argentina, bear witness to the extent to which secularization, from a certain point on, was not so much a battle as the negotiation of a symbiosis.

A symbiosis that is not always complete. Especially when the "political religio" blurs into the local. The old "confraternities" are still converting themselves to provide social services complementary to those of the state; and football, which reproduces feelings of belonging towards the state in a way equivalent to that of the guild structure with the Catholic Church, has not managed -although it tried in its origins- to tie itself to the workplace.

On a smaller scale, social and family ceremonies such as Christmas or Halloween also form part of the capitalist political religio: conversions, sometimes slightly problematic, of old pre-capitalist traditions into messages characteristic of commodity society.

3. The religion of the commodity

The religion of the commodity is the deepest and most abstract level of capitalist religion. When Marx speaks of "commodity fetishism" he is not playing an obscure semiotic game or making a metaphor: he is exposing the fetish character of money, its character as a "magical object" in the religio that serves as the ideological basis of the whole system.

What other name can be given to money in a society in which its mere circulation seems to be what creates value?

The mysterious character of the commodity-form consists therefore simply in the fact that it reflects back to men the social characteristics of their own labor as objective characteristics inherent in the products of labor themselves, as the socio-natural properties of these things, and hence that it also reflects the social relation of the producers to the sum total of labor as a social relation between objects, existing apart from the producers. (...)

The commodity-form, and the value-relation of the products of labor within which it appears, have absolutely nothing to do with the physical nature of the commodity and the material relations arising out of this. It is nothing but the definite social relation between men themselves which assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things.

In order, therefore, to find an analogy we must take flight into the misty realm of religion. There the products of the human brain appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own, which enter into relations both with each other and with men. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men's hands. I call this the fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labor as soon as they are produced as commodities, and is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities.

Karl Marx. Capital, 1867

Like all fetishes, the "magic" is nothing but a way of concealing relations of exploitation and subjugation. Obviously, it is not money that creates value as the exchanges between equals multiply; it is the exploitation of the labor of one class by another. A class, the bourgeoisie, which keeps part of what is produced and attributes it to the magic of exchange.

This fetishistic character of money, generally invisible to us, was nevertheless obvious to the pre-capitalist societies that ran headlong into the European imperialisms in Asia and Africa.

It was said of the Bakweri of Cameroon that they were apathetic, squandered the land and had no interest whatsoever in increasing their profits. If they accumulated some property, it was only to destroy it in potlatch ceremonies. The few who associated themselves with the colonial plantations and improved their economic status had the reputation of belonging to a new association devoted to witchcraft. They supposedly killed their relatives and even their children, turning them into zombies to put them to work on a distant mountain, driving trucks, where the witches supposedly had a modern city.

The word "sombi" means pledge/pawn; it was thus believed that under the new colonial plantation economy relatives were turned into serfs so that a few could gain wealth. […] The elders warned that no coins or money should be picked up from the ground, because it was being scattered to lure the men to the riverbank, where the "French" would use them as zombies to build the new port.

Michael Taussig, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America

The religion of the commodity has its great fetish -money-, its rituals -collecting one's paycheck, paying for the shopping, etc.- and even its little icons -coins. Ceremonies and objects that dress up supposed "individual decisions" as relevant social facts, and the commodification of the satisfaction of our needs as sovereign economic acts.

But it also has its superstitious element: the idea that the exchange of equals (every commodity is exchanged for another of equal value) would, by mere repetitive magic, produce an increase in global wealth.

The religion of the commodity and capitalist morality

The morality of "free exchange"

The whole religion of the commodity is geared towards fostering the belief in the self-sovereignty of the isolated person (=individualism) and towards representing complex capitalist social relations as the "natural" product of the "spontaneous aggregation" of millions of sovereign individual decisions.

The result is the morality of commodity exchange, according to which "free" exchange would by definition be "fair" and "egalitarian".

By making the social structure invisible and letting us see only the isolated person (the individual), the individual expression of universal human needs turns, without explanation, into acts of freedom aimed at maximizing individual pleasure (utility).

In that abstract and alienated world, everything that is not the fruit of direct coercion is considered "free" and "egalitarian". The coercion of the ruling class through social conditions does not exist. Those who have been dispossessed of the means of production and can only sell their labor power sell it freely. Since in freedom only things of equal value are exchanged, every market wage becomes by definition "fair".

The social morality of the religion of the commodity

But make no mistake: it also has a social message. Adam Smith's famous "invisible hand" was only one of its primitive formulations, but the Salamanca scholastics had already arrived, a century earlier, at something resembling the quantity theory of money. Today, in its simplest form, it is part of economic and media discourse and is repeated to us continually: "the increase in the number of free and egalitarian commodity exchanges increases social wealth".

But can the mere repetition of an exchange between equals in value increase the total value of what is exchanged? Magic!

The trick is none other than this: the perspective of looking at social production and distribution exclusively through individual exchanges reduces the relations of production, and the social structure they produce, to a magma of equal consumers. Value, seen from the individual, becomes subjective, and the very concept of value dissolves as a social reality. This conceals the fact that value is nothing but social labor expropriated by the exploiting class.

So the magic of exchange creating value is not innocent. Every religion -and that of the commodity is a religion- has in the end a little "irrational" and incongruous heart, which is nothing but the shadow zone that allows the exploiting class to appropriate the results of social labor.

The result of this whole complex operation is to lead us to the idea that "the more free exchanges there are, the richer a society will be", which actually means that the greater and more widespread commodification and the exploitation of labor are, the better for society as a whole. No other moral message could be expected from an exploiting class: its aims are dressed up, contradictorily, as social aims.

This morality is multiplied through a thousand cultural expressions, from music to television programs, and in the end it always leads to the same place: the individuation of universal needs and the universalization of the commodity through the commodification of human relations.

Liberty, equality, fraternity: free exchange between equal values, and nation (=leadership of society as a whole by the bourgeoisie)

Restricting the idea of what religion is socially to the superstitious cults and ceremonies involving supernatural beings, souls, etc., is a serious error. They are a mere atavism. They are reborn and reappear now to cover the black holes of despair that the system itself creates, but they are no more than a superficial layer of the alienating moral edifice of capitalism.

Capitalist religion is much more convoluted and, above all, complete. Its mechanism, were it not so cynical, would even be beautiful in its sophistication, especially when we compare it with early feudality, when exploitation was not disguised as an economic mechanism but appeared openly as exaction, as an imposition by force normalized by custom.

At a first level, the morality of bourgeois society shapes how "individuals" are to be and what they are to expect from others and from society. Its core, the religion of the commodity, has nothing to do with norms and restrictions, with social prudishness and sexual repression. On the contrary, the religion of the commodity is a religion of liberty and equality whose main sacrament is exchange, buying and selling.

The religion of the commodity founds the individual as an abstract being in permanent conflict with its surroundings, makes exploitation invisible and, above all, educates in the "naturalness" of scarcity, in the necessity of property and in the acceptance of the reification of human relations and needs.

At a second level, this individual, permanently cornered and on the defensive against others, is then "socialized", that is, moralized by the state and the political religion. Layers of morality -always nationalist, sometimes democratic- will instruct him in a false "fraternity" with his exploiters, from the most abstract -the nation- to the closest: the confraternity or the club. The nation, in the end, is nothing but the effective leadership of society as a whole by the exploiting class, that is, the dictatorship of the needs of capital over human needs.

And only finally, at a third level, will the family, that pre-capitalist communal remnant, be given the opportunity to season all that with a bit of conveniently bourgeoisified feudal and ancient "superstitio".