Among the unpublished papers of Walter Benjamin [1892-1940] published in 1985 by Ralph TIEDEMANN and Hermann Schweppenhäuser in volume 6 of "Gesammelte Schriften" (Suhrkamp Verlag), there is a particularly obscure, but that seems a surprising today: "Capitalism as religion. " There are three or four pages containing notes and bibliographic references; dense, paradoxical, sometimes impenetrable, the text does not leave easily decipher. How was not intended for publication, the author had no need to make it readable and understandable ... The comments below are part of an attempt interpretation, based more on assumptions than on certainties, and leaving aside certain "areas of shadow."
The text of Benjamin is, with all evidence, inspired by "The Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of Capitalism" (Cia das Letras, 2004), by Max Weber [1864-1920]. However, as we shall see, the argument goes far beyond the Benjamin Weber and, especially, their approach replaces "axiological neutral" (Wertfrei) for a scathing indictment anticapitalista.
"We need to see capitalism in a religion." With this categorical assertion begins the fragment. The following is a reference, but also a distancing on Weber: "Being a religious structure of capitalism-that is, demonstrate that it is not only a training conditioned by religion, as does Weber, but an essentially religious phenomenon would lead us today by the vagaries of a controversy universal unreasonable. "
Benjamin continues: "We can now we already recognize this time in three dashes of religious structure of capitalism." Benjamin Weber does not cite more, but in fact the three points are sustained by ideas and arguments of the sociologist, giving them a new range, infinitely more critical, more radical, socially and politically, but also from a philosophical (theological?) - And perfectly antagonistic to the Weberian thesis of secularization.
The cult: "First, capitalism is a religion purely Culture, perhaps the most highly Culture that already existed. Nothing in it has meaning not in immediate relationship with the cult, he has no specific dogma or theology. The utilitarianism wins from this point of view , Its religious color. "
Therefore, the utilitarian practice of capitalism-investment of capital, speculation, financial transactions, stock moves, buying and selling of goods-are equivalent to a religious cult. Capitalism does not require adherence to a belief, a doctrine or a "theology", what counts are actions, which represent, on its social dynamics, worship practices. Benjamin, a little contradicting its argument on the Reformation and Christianity, compares this religion to paganism original capitalist, he also "immediately practical" and without worries "transcendental".
But what allows these practices resemble capitalist economy to a "cult"? Benjamin does not explain, but uses a few lines later, the term "worshiper", so we can consider that the capitalist worship includes certain deities that are the object of worship. For example: "Comparison between the images of saints of different religions and the notes of money from various countries." The money, in the form of banknotes, would be the object of a cult similar to that of the saints of religions "common".
However, the paper-money is only a manifestation of a deity in the most fundamental capitalist system Culture: the "money", the god Mammon, or, as Benjamin, "Pluto ... god of wealth." In the literature of the fragment is referred to a passage virulent against the religious power of money: it is in the book "Aufruf zum Sozialismus," the German-Jewish thinker anarchist Gustav Landauer, published in 1919, shortly before the assassination of its author by military counter-revolutionaries . On page note indicated by the literature of Benjamin, Landauer writes:
"Fritz Mauthner (" Wörterbuch der Philosophie ") shows that the word" God "(Gott) is originally identical to" idol "(Götz), and both mean" the cast "[or" the drained '] (Gegossene ). God is an artifact made by humans, who earns a living, attracts them to the lives of humans and finally becomes more powerful than humanity. The only drained (Gegossene), the only idol (Götz), the only God (Gott) that human life is given the money (Geld). The money is artificial and is alive, the money produces money and more money, the money has all the power in the world. Who does not see, who still does not see that the money, that God is not anything other than a spirit come from humans, a spirit that has become a thing (Ding) alive, a monster (Unding), and he is the sense (Sinn) who became insane (Unsinn) from our life? The money does not create wealth, it is the wealth, it is the wealth in itself, there is another rich beyond money. "
It is true that we can not know to what extent Benjamin shared the reasoning of Landauer, but we as a hypothesis, consider this excerpt, mentioned in the bibliography, as an example of what he meant by "worship practices" of capitalism.
Without truce: The second characteristic of capitalism "is closely linked to that concretion of worship: the duration of worship is permanent." "Capitalism is the conclusion of a worship" without exceptions and without mercy. "There is no" common day ", any day other than a party, the terrible sense of the use of sacred pomp, the extreme tension that inhabits the worshiper."
Without rest, without truce and without mercy: the idea is taken up by Benjamin Weber, almost literally, not without irony, incidentally, evoking the character of the ongoing "day of celebration": indeed, the capitalist puritanos abolished the majority of Catholics holidays , As an incentive for leisure. Therefore, religion capitalist, every day sees the mobilization of the "sacred pomp", ie the rituals on the stock exchange or in the factory, while the worshipers below, with anguish and an "extreme tension", the rise or fall in the prices of actions.
The capitalist practices know no pause, they dominate the lives of individuals from morning to night, from spring to winter, from cradle to grave. As Burkhardt says Lindner, the fragment lends to him the concept of capitalism as a dynamic system, on global expansion, impossible to hold and to which we can not escape.
Finally, the third characteristic of capitalism as religion is blamed his character: "Capitalism is probably the first example of a cult that is not atoning (entsühnenden), but blamed". Benjamin continues its indictment against the capitalist religion: "Surely, the religious system is precipitated in an unnatural motion. Grotesquely A guilty conscience that does not know if ransom apodera of worship, not in order to expiate that guilt, but to make it universal, so make it come to power in the consciousness and finally and most importantly, to involve God in guilt, so that the end of the day itself has an interest in atonement. "
Benjamin evokes, in this context, what he calls the "ambiguity of the word SCHULD" - that is, while "debt" and "guilt". According Burkhard Lindner, the historical perspective of the piece is based on the premise that we can not separate in the capitalist system of religion, the "guilt mythical" economic debt.
We found in Max Weber two similar reasoning, who also played with the two senses of "duty" to the bourgeois puritan, "which aims to give" personal "is" stolen "from the service to the glory of God, we become so at the same time guilty and "indebted" in relation to God. "The idea that the man has" duty "to the possessions it has been given and to whom he is subordinate as a manager devoted (...) weighs about his life with all its weight frosty. The more the increase possessions , Heavier becomes the feeling of responsibility (...) which forces, for the glory of God (...), the increasing them by a working tirelessly. " The words of Benjamin "to get the blame in the consciousness of force" corresponds well to the practice puritanical / capitalist analyzed by Weber.
Magnitude: But it seems that the argument of Benjamin is broader: it is not only the capitalist who is guilty and "debt" with its capital-to blame is universal. Thus, God himself is involved in that general fault: if the poor are guilty and disqualified from grace, and if, in capitalism, they are condemned to social exclusion is because "it is the will of God" or, what is your equivalent capitalist religion, the desire of markets.
Of course, if we consider the point of view of the poor and indebted, it is God who is to blame, and with it the capitalism. In any case, God is inextricably linked to the process of blaming universal.
So far we have seen and the starting point of Weberian fragment in his analysis of modern capitalism as a religion originated from a transformation of Calvinism, but there is a passage in which Benjamin seems to assign a size transhistórica that capitalism is no longer that of Weber-and Neither of Marx: "Capitalism has developed in the West as a parasite of Christianity, it must demonstrate not only the purpose of Calvinism, but also of other currents of Orthodox Christianity, in such a fate as the end of the day the history of Christianity is essentially that of its parasite, capitalism. "
The outcome of the case "monstrous" by blaming capitalist is a generalization of "despair": "He is linked to the essence of this religious movement, which is the capitalism-to persevere to the end, until the complete end of blaming God, to a state the world struck by a despair that even "hope" that is fair. What capitalism has historically unheard of is that religion is not more reform, but the ruin of being. The despair extends to the state's religious world of which should expect to salvation. "
We are not far away, here in the last pages of the "Protestant Ethics", in which Weber notes, with a resigned fatalism, that the modern capitalism "states, with an irresistible force, the lifestyle of all individuals born in this mechanism, and not just those that directly concerns the acquisition cost. "
He compares this sort of coercion to a prison in which the rational system of production of goods terminating individuals: "According to the views of Baxter, the concern for foreign goods should not weigh on the shoulders of his saints but as" a light that had any time you can withdraw. "But the inevitability mantle that turned into a steel cage."
Benjamin Weber of the find ourselves in the same semantic field, which describes the ruthless logic of the capitalist system. But why he is a producer of despair?
As the "guilt" of mankind, its debt to the capital, perpetual and growing, no hope of atonement is permitted. The capitalist must constantly improve and enlarge its capital, under threat of disappearing before their competitors, and the poor must borrow money to pay its debts.
According to the religion of the capital, the only salvation lies in the intensification of the system, the capitalist expansion, the accumulation of goods, but that only makes a aggravate despair. That is what seems to suggest Benjamin with the formula that makes a state of despair religious of the world "to which we should expect to salvation."
This text is an edited version of the conference by Michael Löwy at USP on September 29. Translation of Luiz Roberto Mendes Gonçalves e published in Folha de Sao Paulo, More Book, Sunday, Sept. 18, 2005
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