Capitalism - the Ultimate Religion

[Tiberius]

I want that as a poster on my wall.

[Welsh cake]

I want that as a poster on my wall.

Pink Floyd is all you need. I just wish I knew who the original artist was so I could reference them. >.<

[fr0d0]

The artist isn't credited - it was a cover for Industrial Worker

Poster available here:
http://www.store.iww.org/product_info.ph...aad5289b51

[Existentialist]

A misquote is a quote that is inaccurate; in other words, it is attributed to someone, yet that person didn't actually say it. If Zen Badger had attributed the quote to Churchill, it would be a misquote. He didn't. He said he was paraphrasing, which automatically puts the attribution onto the person saying the quote, not the quote's originator.

Now we've all had a lesson in using the dictionary (which isn't infallible; it's just agreed upon by rational people), you can stop with the trolling. The next time you do it, it won't be a verbal warning you get.

I totally support Zen Badger's right to misquote Churchill, it is a pity Adrian that you don't support my right to express my opinion that he did. I deny "trolling": an absurd allegation, I reject it completely.

Interestingly this debate goes far beyond what's been said historically about capitalism by Churchill. I was searching around for other sources on what I felt sure cannot be an original idea (as if!) and I came across a write up on a short fragment by Walter Benjamin, who was closely associated with Max Weber, entitled "Capitalism as Religion" from 1921 and not published until 1985. It makes for a fascinating read ‘One must see capitalism as a religion’ says Benjamin, who characterises capitalism as a having developed in the West as a parasite of Christianity.

Ultimately I think we could see that a parasite might eventually kill its host - certainly in the case of christianity, the parasite has essentially developed an independent life of its own such that it no longer needs the host to survive. Benjamin's work essentially supports my long-held view that all the organisational structures of capitalism - the government, companies, political parties, unions - are modelled on the patriarchy of the Roman Catholic church, such that the viability of any organisation from an army to a knitting club would have a short lifespan if it does not mimic this patriarchal model. Weber references Bruno Archibald Fuchs, who in 1914 "tried (in vain) to prove, in a polemic against Weber, that the origins of the capitalist world can already be found in the asceticism of the monastic orders and in the Pope’s centralisation of power in the medieval Church."

There are a couple of things about Benjamin's work that I'm not entirely convinced of. Benjamin seems to suggest that capitalism is a religion without a deity. Personally I am not convinced that a religion needs a deity to be defined as a religion, but as I said earlier the deity in capitalism is capital itself, the force that must be obeyed, and is frequently unfathomable, indecipherable and nobody understands it. There were very few if any convincing expressions of understanding during the recent banking crisis. An objection from the traditional atheist sources may that the deity must be claimed to be a supernatural entity; I would say Capital is treated as a supernatural entity even if it isn't explicitly claimed to be one. And since god doesn't exist anyway, it's a bit of a moot point whether the deity needs to be claimed to be supernatural or not - if its treated like a supernatural deity then for me it fits the criterion.

The other really interesting point about Benjamin's writing is his third point about guilt, basically he says that capitalism is the only religion that uses universal guilt with no expiation. If you're poor, it's your fault that you haven't manipulated the doctrines and teachings of capitalism to your advantage. There's a lot to explore here as welfare reforms are in the offing.

In summary it's a shame that Benjamin's work was published so late and that there isn't more of it to read - just a few pages, by all accounts. For me, it doesn't so much turn atheism on its head, it turns it the right way up - no longer confined to obsessing about the relatively insignificant actions of christianity, islam and judaism, it is an opportunity for atheists to turn their attention to a bigger and far more oppressive religion, capitalism.

[TheDarkestOfAngels]

I know exactly what religion is. Capitalism fits the definition perfectly.

I provided the definition of a religion. Unless you want to clarify how capitalism is a religion point-by-point and actually make a case for yourself instead of just forcing me take your word for it because your rhetoric and the actual definition of religion do not match up.
You have no case in making capitalism (or any economic system) being a full-blown religion in any sense of the term.

Read my posts through properly. You say yourself "Religion is the belief in and worship of a god". Capital has all the characterics of a god, capitalism has all the characteristics of a religion. Of course you want to do the denial thing - keep the debate nice and small, nice and controlled, limited to the pointless backwater of attacking abrahamic organisations and belief systems which are dying out anyway. Capitalism - the dominant religion - doesn't need them any more.

You're the one making the case for capitalism being a religion but you're not making an actual case for it except through your word and connections that aren't. I'm fully aware of what you're talking about and the only thing you seem to be actually saying is that you either don't know what religion is, you don't know what capitalism is, or you are simply completely ignorant of how things in the world work.

Funnily enough when you talked about capitalism failing when dominated by one business monopolising the system I thought you were going to say Banking. To give the oil industry as an example is completely off the wall. Either way, I know what people are trying to say when they talk about "pure capitalism" - yes its the intellectual concept of unregulated laissez-faire markets. My point is, that is a bad definition of "pure capitalism". Capitalism co-opts the State into its strategy. That's why the State has been blackmailed into bailing out the banks. The bail-out is part of the system. We're living pure capitalism as we speak. My point was that the liberals need to conceptualise pure capitalism as unregulated laissez-faire market forces, so they can congratulate themselves when they have to step in with state regulation to mitigate the most damaging aspects of the system. But what I'm saying is, they've been duped. They are acting completely within the bounds of capitalism at its most cynical, most brutal and most self-sustaining. The liberals have been hypnotised into this position in the same way that a religious believer has been hypnotised by his clergy. That's why you, Ace, DeistPaladin and no doubt plenty of others keep coming out with this liberal stuff about needing to control pure capitalism. But people can only be hypnotised if they want to be. You judge your interests to be on the side of preserving the system, assuaging your consciences with the reassurance that the state is wisely regulating the worst excesses of capitalism. It's an act of faith on your part, but being bad faith it causes emotional tension which needs an outlet. The lesser religions therefore become your target instead. But scapegoating others is also a strategy of the great religion, capitalism. Which ever way you turn, you can't get away from its all-pervasive doctrines, propaganda and mechanisms of social control. That's all I meant.

Yes, yes, this tin-foil hat conpiracy thing is cute. Utterly wrong, but adorable.

[Existentialist]

You have no case in making capitalism (or any economic system) being a full-blown religion in any sense of the term.

But capitalism is only an economic system in the way that our daily meals are only a source of energy. There is a vast cultural and culinary infrastructure, and a vast range of emotional reactions to them - and without them, we could soon sink into chaos. The fact that capitalism is an economic system doesn't prevent it from being a social and political system, or a regulator of all our interactions. As Marx put it, "The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society."

Read my posts through properly. You say yourself "Religion is the belief in and worship of a god". Capital has all the characterics of a god, capitalism has all the characteristics of a religion. Of course you want to do the denial thing - keep the debate nice and small, nice and controlled, limited to the pointless backwater of attacking abrahamic organisations and belief systems which are dying out anyway. Capitalism - the dominant religion - doesn't need them any more.

You're the one making the case for capitalism being a religion but you're not making an actual case for it except through your word and connections that aren't. I'm fully aware of what you're talking about and the only thing you seem to be actually saying is that you either don't know what religion is, you don't know what capitalism is, or you are simply completely ignorant of how things in the world work.

I apologise if I gave the impression I did not know what capitalism is. I have since posted more on this but by all means come back to me if you think I need to provide better explanations. Capitalism clearly is the economic system (which, being so dominant, extends to all human relations) characterised by the formation and augmentation of capital. Religion is a theistic system of thought, activity and ideas. My argument is that because capital has assumed God-like status, capitalism has become a religion - the ultimate, all-embracing, dominant one.

Funnily enough when you talked about capitalism failing when dominated by one business monopolising the system I thought you were going to say Banking. To give the oil industry as an example is completely off the wall. Either way, I know what people are trying to say when they talk about "pure capitalism" - yes its the intellectual concept of unregulated laissez-faire markets. My point is, that is a bad definition of "pure capitalism". Capitalism co-opts the State into its strategy. That's why the State has been blackmailed into bailing out the banks. The bail-out is part of the system. We're living pure capitalism as we speak. My point was that the liberals need to conceptualise pure capitalism as unregulated laissez-faire market forces, so they can congratulate themselves when they have to step in with state regulation to mitigate the most damaging aspects of the system. But what I'm saying is, they've been duped. They are acting completely within the bounds of capitalism at its most cynical, most brutal and most self-sustaining. The liberals have been hypnotised into this position in the same way that a religious believer has been hypnotised by his clergy. That's why you, Ace, DeistPaladin and no doubt plenty of others keep coming out with this liberal stuff about needing to control pure capitalism. But people can only be hypnotised if they want to be. You judge your interests to be on the side of preserving the system, assuaging your consciences with the reassurance that the state is wisely regulating the worst excesses of capitalism. It's an act of faith on your part, but being bad faith it causes emotional tension which needs an outlet. The lesser religions therefore become your target instead. But scapegoating others is also a strategy of the great religion, capitalism. Which ever way you turn, you can't get away from its all-pervasive doctrines, propaganda and mechanisms of social control. That's all I meant.

Yes, yes, this tin-foil hat conpiracy thing is cute. Utterly wrong, but adorable.

Well I'm aware of the phrase tin-foil hat conspiracy. Could you elaborate on how you think it relates to my paragraph quoted here, I see no connection at all.

[Tiberius]

I totally support Zen Badger's right to misquote Churchill

He didn't. Point to the place where he attributed the quote to Churchill. I'll be waiting.

it is a pity Adrian that you don't support my right to express my opinion that he did. I deny "trolling": an absurd allegation, I reject it completely.

I don't support your right to troll, which you are doing by being deliberately argumentative and by making absurd suggestions like the atheists believing in the "infallibility" of the dictionary. All done to try and elicit an emotional response from me...which you won't be getting.

[Existentialist]

Adrian - once again, I categorically deny the accusation of trolling and I will do so every time I am falsely accused of it by a moderator in these forums. Secondly if somebody takes the words of somebody else and then inserts some different words, I do not think that it is a misdemeanor worthy of disciplinary action if a third party describes the resulting sentence as a misquote, even if your personal opinion is that it isn't a misquote.

The thread really needs opening up, not closing down. I'd be interested in your thoughts and anyone else's on the Walter Benjamin paper I mentioned earlier this afternoon, for me it really is quite a find.

[Tiberius]

Point to the place where he attributed the quote to Churchill. I'll be waiting.

[Existentialist]

Point to the place where he attributed the quote to Churchill. I'll be waiting.

Adrian - this is the sixth time you've said you have a different opinion from me about this rather pedantic matter - and you accuse me of being argumentative? Who's really trolling this thread? It's meant to be about whether or not capitalism is a religion. I've already invited you twice to return to the subject. Out of courtesy I'm happy to indulge you by expressing my opinion on the highly addictive misquote/paraphrase debate, but please don't accuse me a third time of trolling just because I have expressed a different opinion from you on invitation from yourself. After this, may I suggest you start your own thread on the distinction between a misquote and a paraphrase. I would be happy to indulge you further there in order to help clear the matter up. I don't want to stop you returning to the subject here if you really feel you must, I would however suggest that an alternative thread might be more appropriate, so why don't you start one?

Zen Badger quoted and attributed some parts of Churchill's sentence correctly. He inserted new words that were not Churchill's. The result was a partly correct quote and partly a new statement. But by no stretch of the imagination can the whole resulting sentence be described as a quote, I think we are agreed on that, so there is no way that I or anybody can point to a place where Zen Badger attributed a quote to Churchill. But the lack of attribution need not prevent Zen Badger's new sentence being defined as a misquote, because if a quote doesn't always need to be attributed, as the definition of a quote that I helpfully provided earlier indicates, then it is reasonable to infer that the same applies to a misquote - it does not need to be attributed. So in my opinion, Zen Badger misquoted Churchill. He was open and honest about it, it was a deliberate misquote to make a point about capitalism, and I can well understand him seeking to claim some impression of legitimacy for his new idea by associating Churchill with it, even if the association is somewhat tenuous.

The problem with calling it a paraphrase is that the word paraphrase could mean either a restatement of the original quote with new words resulting in the same meaning, or new words resulting in a different meaning. It is a personal preference on my part to avoid the use of the word 'paraphrase' when the original meaning is being changed, in case people who haven't read a dictionary right through lately mistakenly assume that it only means the more common usage, that the original meaning is being conveyed. I would rather clear up any potential misunderstanding at the outset, hence my personal preference for using the word misquote, which conveys the idea of inaccurate translation unambiguously. Add to this my personal view that Winston Churchill was such a master of the English language that his original words really need no amendment, and I think my use of the word misquote is entirely appropriate.

Thus at a public meeting, if a politician were to get up and say "If I may just misquote Churchill, 'Capitalism is the worst system apart from all the others'", and a clever person in the audience interjected, "I think you'll find that was a paraphrase, not a misquote," I rather suspect that the overwhelming audience reaction would not unreasonably be one of taking offence at the interruption. Whereas if a politician were to get up and say, "If I may just quote Churchill, 'And should the Royal Air Force drop two thousand, or three thousand, or four thousand kilograms of bombs, then we will now drop 150,000; 180,000; 230,000; 300,000; 400,000; yes, one million kilograms in a single night!' and somebody from the floor were to interject saying, "Actually that's a misquote, Hitler said it, not Churchill" I think they would be met rather more warmly.

As ever I would say these things are probably a matter of personal preference - people do use the same words differently, after all. Personal style, tone, emphasis and people's emotional reactions to particular words are important in their selection of words as well as their understanding of the dictionary definition of them. I wouldn't deny anyone the right to an opinion about the words they should use to convey their meaning. I may challenge them on it, I may suggest that their credibility or worse their sincerity is in doubt if they choose words I wouldn't (I do not think that is the case here), but ultimately I wouldn't take away somebody's right to choose words themselves - if we did that, we might as well stick a gag on their mouths and ban them from speaking or even writing, and that would be an appalling affront to human dignity, wouldn't it?

Anyway, I look forward to continuing this conversation in a new thread. Now can we please go back to Walter Benjamin and his writings in 'Capitalism as Religion' - what are your thoughts?