Capitalism - the Ultimate Religion

[Existentialist]

First of all, if you had linked me to posts that had anything to do with the topic, I would have responded to them. I've been participating in the capitalism/religion discussion since page 2 (the first post up there on page 2, none the less) and I've ready read your posts. The only reason I've been posting more often recently is because I chose not to get involved with the whole churchhill/misquote/paraphrase debacle you had going on with Adrian and others.

Actually every single one of the posts I referred you to #1, #20, #36, #38, #54, #56, #66, and #67 was directly to do with the topic. I didn't link you to any of the Churchill posts. I agree you made some contemptuous comments about one or two of the middle ones apart from #1 and #20. I see no comments at all from you about my references to the work of Walter Benjamin, although when I referenced Marx you did make a dismissive remark telling me to have my own ideas and that I should not quote other writers.

Thank you for now partially replying to Post #1. I agree that I state a number of things which I believe to be true although it is particularly ungenerous to dismiss them all as "baseless assertions". Not only that, if you read the post, over three quarters of my remarks are posed in the form of questions, inviting others to comment on what I think are quite reasonable and interesting ideas. Your assertion that all the posts I've referred you to have "absolutely nothing to do with the discussion we're having" is bizarre, they're all central to it as relevant as they can be. Other than a couple of short paragraphs which I'll attend to later in this post, your "countering" of my arguments consists of nothing more than saying (I paraphrase you) "that's not true". And that's it! That's your counter-argument to my idea that capitalism is a religion! Thanks for demonstrating your debating skills so fully!

You ask why atheists would have a 'stance' as atheists about capitalism. My argument is that capitalism is a religion, so atheists, being at the very least sceptical of religious ideas, should be as vociferous and as rejecting of capitalism as they are about rejecting christianity, islam and judaism. But they tend not to be, and that makes me wonder why.

You assert that, "No one worships capital as a god." Really that simple sentence takes us back to the debate at the core of my argument, but no further forward in terms of examining its validity. I say people do worship capital as a god, because by worship I mean they regard it with ardent devotion: they do degrees in the study of it, build careers around it, businesses and industries, start wars over it and they cut public services on the basis of its needs, treating anyone who disagrees as blasphemous.

You keep asking for evidence. I know what I'm going to say will probably give you a pretext for another bout of dismissive remarks, but on the subject of evidence I'd better just make it clear that I see "evidence" as a relatively minor player when it comes to philosophical or political ideas, for a couple of reasons. I often say that if I were presented with a valid proof of the existence of God, it wouldn't stop me being an atheist. If it got to the stage of being presented with a valid proof of such a ridiculous idea, I would have to doubt my own sanity (really, don't feel the need to comment on that) so the validity of my interpretation of the evidence would be flawed. For this reason, evidence is generally kinda interesting but by no means conclusive in philosophy.

I am far more interested in the coherence of people's arguments than I am in evidence. I don't dismiss evidence, but equally I know that in philosophy, the presentation of evidence often leads to demands for more evidence. You end up with a mass of perplexing evidence, but at the end of the day you still have to make your own decision what to believe. The process is the same with people who insist that dictionary definitions of words are the only legitimate tool for interpreting the use of words in debates about philosophical concepts. The problem I see is that for every dictionary definition you then need to start looking up all the words containing the definition. This eventually gets you nowhere. Far better to discuss the internal coherence of the arguments people are putting forward, and to agree to disagree if you cannot reach agreement.

Therefore I think the arguments that I've put forward in the list of posts I've referenced above are self-supporting: they support each other, because they fit with each other and there are no internal contradictions. If you managed to point out any coherent internal contradictions then I'd have more respect for your position, but just repeating "That's not true" and "where's your evidence?" isn't what I'd call a coherent counter-argument to the ideas that I've presented.

Now I mentioned that you did say a couple of other things that I'd come back to. First you said that I've defined capitalism and religion both so broadly that anything popular or any form of governing or economic system can be a religion according to my own arguments. I'd disagree with that and here's why. You gave an argument that Superman fandom can be said to be a religion. Well - it's more a cult than a religion. I'd say a cult is just applicable to the limited number of people under its influence, whereas a religion is more fundamental to a bigger proportion of the population because it's about beliefs and values pervade the whole social structure.

I'd be inclined to agree that systems of government can be religions - Soviet communism, for example, I'd wouldn't deny anyone the right who lived under that system to define it as a religion, although personally I think it's a subset of capitalism. But I wouldn't say that the British system of government as compared to the French system are different religions. Their influence on each respective population is relatively small compared to the worldwide demands of capitalism, to which all governments must defer.

You also said that capitalism professes no beliefs about existence and the purpose of life, morality, so it can't be a religion. In response to that I'd say first that capitalism doesn't have to profess any beliefs about the existence and purpose of life in order to be a religion. As it happens, I think that most capitalist propaganda does suggest that the profit principle applies to everyone and there is a whole moral code around living within your means and not making others pay for your needs, for example through the welfare state. One capitalist teaching would therefore be that people must get through life while balancing the books, and not make a loss - don't allow your expenditure to exceed your income over your lifetime. A lot of thinking about welfare is influenced by this profoundly moral belief which ties into the capitalist work ethic among other things.

You say that there is no central figure or figures of worship or anything to worship, like Jesus, Bhudda, Zeus, Hercules, Anubis, and so on. I'd ask you, does a religion really have to have a central figure to worship in order to be a religion? I don't think so. However, despite this I am arguing that Capital is the central figure, and is personified in many forms: the accountant, the Treasury Minister, the Governor of the Bank. But there is no requirement that this central figure should be a person or even that there should be a central figure at all. Usually there is such a figure, but it is not compulsory, and in any event I think Capitalism has one.

You then said "there are no tenants of faith, rules, or codes in which a person is to live their life by" Well I think that one tenet of faith is that capitalism is an inevitable system, a "given" and that anyone who argues against it is mad or a troublemaker. Rules are elaborated around the profit principle and the guilt associated with failing to live up to it.

The closest arguement for capitalism in this respect is the social order aspect of an economic system but religion typically covers a person's code of behavior and not simply the method in which they maneuver in a social-economic way. In other words, capitalism doesn't tell you if murder is right or wrong or how you should live your life.

I have difficulty understanding the first sentence or how murder relates to it. I recognise that capitalism per se does not identify murder as a moral outrage - I wonder if that is why it has continued to allow the other religions their existence. There is no point in capitalism allowing christianity, islam etc to exist if they do not have a function that is beneficial to capitalism. Establishing the moral unacceptability of murder may well not be something that capitalism is very good at, infact in terms of the number of people who have been directly killed by forces defending capitalism attacking demonstrations and political meetings I would agree that capitalism is particularly bad on recognising the subject of murder. This is an issue on which it would seem prudent to delegate responsibility to the sub-religions to lend an air of respectability to a moral code.

You said that there are no "rituals of any kind that are similar to any religious connotation or similarities. In other words, there are no capitalist weddings, celebrations, or observations." Weddings tend to be an excuse for a party. Marriage is highly useful to capitalism as it establishes a productive unit of consumption. I agree that capitalism delegates the recognition of this legal arrangement to the sub-religions because they tend to be better at it. Capitalism must tread a careful path: if it is too blatent in its interference in everyday life then it exposes itself to the risk of being replaced by a more rational, less oppressive system. That's why the other religions are tolerated: to lend legitimacy to rituals and morals that are necessary to the survival of the capitalist system.