The Capitalistic Religion: Old Questions, New Insights

Abstract

We cannot understand today the extraordinary success that the capitalist market has had over the past three decades unless we pay close attention to its primary mechanism: the destruction of free non-market goods. These goods are increasingly replaced by merchandise, which try to compensate for the famine of free non-market goods – and, in their own way, they succeed.

But this very success simultaneously fuels the sense of isolation. The share of income that families today spend on smart phones and internet fees has exceeded the portion spent on food. The consequences of this new form of “creative destruction” are seriously undervalued. The likely and gloomy scenario on the horizon of our civilization is a rapid growth of this new idolatry, which is gradually shifting from the economic sphere towards civil society, schools and health. There is no opposition in its path of expansion because it draws on those religious symbols that our culture no longer has the categories to understand. Those who want to understand and maybe control the economy and the world today must study less business and more philosophy and anthropology.

Capitalism is a pure religious cult, perhaps the most extreme there ever was. Within it, everything only has meaning in direct relation to the cult: it knows no special dogma, no theology. (Walter Benjamin, Capitalism as Religion, 1922).