Capitalism - the Ultimate Religion

[Existentialist]

...while it's adorable...

If your latest post is an example of how you reply to someone when you're adoring them, what do you do when you don't like them?

On this basis I do suspect a smidgen of insincerity in your post there, but that's just in my judgement which is fallible. However, you've said you're refusing to read any posts I wrote earlier in this thread, and it's quite obvious you haven't read them even though I've provide plenty of links. As I don't like being repetitive, I rather say new things.

Obviously people don't have to read all my previous posts, but if anyone does feel like indulging me, then I would recommend replying to Post #1 which hasn't actually attracted any counter-arguments yet. Obviously it's your choice, I'm hardly in a position to force anybody to reply!

However there are other dimensions to this, and as ever I'm interested in opening the debate out, rather than having the debate funnelled down to a mutual contradiction session. The question I've been pondering all day is that if capitalism is a religion as I think it is (you are still free to disagree!) then why would there be resistance to recognising it as such? What's so dangerous about the idea?

I think we all identify with capitalism. It is the system that feeds, houses and clothes us so it wouldn't be surprising if we all felt at least some loyalty to it. But not only that, we are all dependent on capitalism. Whether we work in the private sector or the public sector, we must at least pay some attention to the principles of division of labour and be aware of our own productivity. In fact, if we don't show some loyalty on both these issues, we'd all be out of a job. Some of us are.

But there comes a point at which it becomes impossible for anyone to dare to disagree. The work-ethic conservatives are coming down on us all like a ton of bricks nowadays. If you have more children you can't expect the state to pay child benefit for them because it was your own fault for having them. If you don't go out to work you can't expect to receive more in State benefits than you would get in a full-time job. The assumptions about what the welfare system is meant to achieve are changing, and the victims of the change deserve it because they are guilty and sinful - as Walter Benjamin whom I quoted earlier said, guilt is a part of the religion and, unlike in the Roman Catholic Church, there is no possibility of expiation.

Yes, you could get on your bike and look for a job. Perhaps even find one. But even then there's no expiation; you may work in a call centre whose products you disagree with, you may work for a government whose policies you don't want to implement. Is there really a job for everybody?

And where does this compulsory guilt come from? Who says we must be profitable, productive and efficient? The answer is simple. God. Or rather, in this religion, capital. But even to say so in the workplace or in politics is to blaspheme.

Isn't that where the resistance to identifying capitalism as a religion really comes from? We assess our position in the capitalist system and we seek to minimise our guilt - ie ignore as many as possible of the methods of punishment that the religious patriarchs could heap upon us the more we step out of line. The more we identify with them, the less we are likely to suffer. So there is massive economic welfare associated with buying in to the ideologies and beliefs of this particular system - it's a religion that has bought our compliance, on the basis that we cannot sell it to anybody else. Indeed, there is nobody else! Just capitalism and its one true, unquestionable god, Capital.