[lbo-talk] Wall St and Religion

Wojtek S wsoko52 at gmail.com
Fri Feb 11 07:47:18 PST 2011


Oops, the closing paragraph did not save. Here it is:

In sum, modern capitalism is not about economics as commonly believed, but about faith in neo-liberal dogmas and maintenance of neo-liberal institutions. The lives of millions of people are sacrificed - like those of Aztec sacrificial victims - on the altar of this faith for no other reason than maintaining institutional order sanctioned by that faith.

Wojtek

On Fri, Feb 11, 2011 at 10:34 AM, Wojtek S <wsoko52 at gmail.com> wrote:


> [WS:] It must be, since it does not produce any use value.
>
> This statement should be taken for its face value. It reveals that
> capitalism is no longer about production of material goods (which can be
> produced more effectively under different arrangements.) It is a religion
> forced down everyone's throats by a handful of its high priests - a latter
> days Counter-Reformation if you will. Its goal is to maintain the "sacred"
> institutions that are not only outdated but detrimental to human progress -
> just as Mr. Whitehead divulged.
>
> I understand that materialism and systemic approach are the signatures of
> the left view of economy and society - but that analysis cannot explain the
> most fundamental yet unnoticed paradox of modern capitalism - why in the
> era of unprecedented levels of material production and plenty the
> fundamental drive is to improve efficiency and cut spending, which are
> measures of dealing with scarcity? In other words, capitalists can live
> more than one luxurious life off the wealth they already accumulated, yet
> they drive hard to accumulate even more. By their own economic theory - the
> marginal utility of this extra push is diminishing if not nil.
>
> So it seems that the assumption of utilitarianism i.e. belief that
> capitalism is about production of material goods does not do a very good job
> explaining capitalist behavior, which begs the question "what is the
> underlying principle of modern capitalism?" I suggest that it is religious
> faith - or more specifically - the maintenance of the institutional
> structure of organized religion and protecting this structure from rational
> and utilitarian challenges. From that point of view, neo-liberalism is in
> fact a modern version of Counter-Reformation whose main purpose was not the
> "maximization of religious utility" e.g. sending the greatest number of
> people to heaven, which was the church's stated mission, but to protect
> Catholic institutions from Protestant challenges even if these efforts
> produced religious disutility (i.e. condemning more and more people and
> sending them to hell instead of heaven.)
>
> Contrary to its detractors, Counter-Reformation was not a form of
> irrational obscurantism and philistinism, but rather an alternative form of
> rationality, utilitarianism, and aesthetics that countered the rationality,
> utilitarianism and aesthetics espoused by the Reformation. Both Catholics
> and Protestants believed in the same god and shared the same eschatological
> goals (guiding people to what they believed was a better future.) The bone
> of contention was not the religious fundamentals, so to speak, but the
> institutional division of religious labor i.e. whose institutions can better
> serve those fundamentals. To win this contest, the Catholic Church could not
> merely continue the production of religious services as it did in the past
> (i.e. administering baptisms and confessions, officiate weddings, and
> selling indulgences.) It had to create a new level of activity that can be
> described as meta-religious services, whose main purpose was the
> legitimation of its basic religious services and the institutional order
> that produced them. To this end, the Counter-Reformation created a whole
> network of outstanding educational institutions (cf. the Jesuit or Ursuline
> schools) whose purpose was to provide learning infused with the "spirit of
> Catholicism" i.e. a system of thought that justified and legitimated
> Catholic institutions. To this day, Catholic schools provide excellent
> education that acts like a Trojan horse for smuggling legitimation of
> Catholic institutions into the secular sphere of sciences, politics, and
> arts.
>
> Neo-liberalism functions in pretty much the same way. Its main purpose is
> not the production of economic "fundamentals" i.e. the production of
> material goods and surplus distribution, as the same goals are pursued by
> its competitors, the Keynesians, and the socialists. Its main purpose is
> the production of meta-economic activities whose main purpose is to
> legitimate the institutional division of labor espoused by neo-liberalism:
> the sanctity of private property rights, the infallibility of free markets,
> the belief in the superiority of the business enterprise over public
> institutions, and the hierarchical distribution of wealth, which have been
> repeatedly challenged. To this end, neo-liberals, like their Jesuit
> predecessors, created a network of educational institutions and think tanks
> whose main goal is the production of these meta-economic services that fuse
> rationality with the "spirit of capitalism." That explains the existence of
> seemingly useless and idiotic papers like the NBER "contribution" to the
> study of religious saints posted by Doug to this list, or equally useless
> and idiotic papers by eminent scholars attempting to explain every
> imaginable social behavior by neo-liberal economic theories. These efforts
> seem useless and idiotic only if taken and their base level - i.e. serving
> ordinary scientific goals of describing or explaining some segment of
> economic activity. But they make perfect sense if they are taken at the
> meta-economic level whose main goal is the inculcation of public discourse
> with the ideas legitimating the neo-liberal discourse.
>
> This seems quite obvious when applied to pseudo-sciences like economics,
> business management or political 'science' and other organic intellectuals
> of capital whose output has little scientific utility in the conventional
> sense (i.e. predicting, discovering, and explaining novel facts.) Their
> main purpose is manufacturing legitimacy for the use of managerial and
> business classed (cf. A. Huczynski, _Management Gurus_, Routledge, 1993).
> However, I would extend this argument even further - to the neo-liberal
> institutional framework - especially the financial capital. An important,
> and I would go as far as saying dominant, function of these institutions is
> meta-economic - that is the maintenance and legitimation of the neo-liberal
> institutional order itself. This is, of course, not to say that these
> institutions do not perform base-level economic functions, just like the
> Catholic Church still performs the base-level religious functions (baptisms,
> weddings, confessions etc. - sans selling indulgences, perhaps.) What it
> means to say is that in the era of challenges to the neo-liberal order,
> these institutions acquired new meta-economic functions whose importance is
> far more critical to neo-liberalism than their performance of base-level
> functions.
>
> In other words, everyone can flip and sell burgers, but not everybody can
> put golden arches around them. Every official (including a boat captain in
> the state of MD) can officiate marriages, but not everyone can do it in a
> manner approved by the Catholic Church. Not every food is kosher - only
> that which a rabbi declares as such. Likewise, everyone can produce and
> distribute stuff, but not everyone can do it in a manner that is sanctioned
> by the neo-liberal creed. The efforts required to obtain the blessing of
> the golden arches, a priest, or a rabbi may be unnecessary if not wasteful
> from an economic point of view, and those required to obtain the neo-liberal
> sanction are plain disastrous to entire national economies. But the
> production of economic utility is not the goal here - the goal is the
> maintenance and legitimation of certain institutional frameworks.
>
> Institutions are not mere means of organizing social and economic life.
> They are also dispensaries of myths and ceremonies (Meyer & Rowan,
> Institutionalized Organizations: Formal Structure as Myth and Ceremony, AJS,
> 1977, 83(2):340-363) that perpetuate their own maintenance and reproduction,
> regardless of their economic utility, if any. In my rarely read book "Civil
> Society and the Professions in Eastern Europe"
> http://books.google.com/books?id=-UcT6EIFG6wC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Civil+Society+and+the+Professions+in+Eastern+Europe&source=bl&ots=dVftXIq0ex&sig=3U68vrGzO7TXGwlrFk2KLN8yIfE&hl=en&ei=zU9VTZDtFIX7lwfa4cCqBw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CBYQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false
> (a more succinct version available in a journal article available here
> https://www.box.net/shared/kta42o4not) I show how Eastern European
> professional service providers use certain organizational forms to
> legitimate the services they produce, their own professional status, or
> both. The question of effectiveness (let alone efficiency) of these
> services or institutional forms of their delivery is not their primary
> consideration (although it is a consideration.) Their primary consideration
> is the legitimation of a certain institutional order of delivery of these
> services, independent of the state and shielding their providers from
> competition. I would extend this argument to key neo-liberal institutions,
> especially the financial sector, although at this time I do not have the
> empirical material at hand to support this claim.
>
> In sum, modern capitalism is not about economics as commonly believed, but
> about faith in neo-liberal dogmas and maintenance of neo-liberal
> institutions.
>
>
>
> Wojtek
>
>
>
>



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