We no longer ‘really believe’
religion but more of us follow its rituals than ever before because of
‘culture’. This obsession with culture and breaking of identities was foreseen
in Marx’s texts
There is
a delicious old Soviet joke about Radio
Yerevan: a listener asks: “Is it true that Rabinovitch won a new car in the
lottery?”, and the radio presenter answers: “In principle yes, it’s true, only
it wasn’t a new car but an old bicycle, and he didn’t win it but it was stolen
from him.”
Does exactly the same not hold
for Marx’s legacy today? Let’s ask Radio Yerevan: “Is Marx’s theory still
relevant today?” We can guess the answer: in principle yes, he describes
wonderfully the mad dance of capitalist dynamics which only reached its peak
today, more than a century and a half later, but… Gerald A Cohen enumerated the
four features of the classic Marxist notion of the working class:
(1) it constitutes the
majority of society;
(2) it produces the wealth of
society;
(3) it consists of the
exploited members of society; and
(4) its members are the needy
people in society. When these four features are combined, they generate two
further features:
(5) the working class has
nothing to lose from revolution; and
(6) it can and will engage in
a revolutionary transformation of society.
None of the first four
features applies to today’s working class, which is why features (5) and (6)
cannot be generated. Even if some of the features continue to apply to parts of
today’s society, they are no longer united in a single agent: the needy people
in society are no longer the workers, and so on.
But let’s dig into this question
of relevance and appropriateness further. Not only is Marx’s critique of
political economy and his outline of the capitalist dynamics still fully
relevant, but one could even take a step further and claim that it is only
today, with global capitalism, that it is fully relevant.
However, at the moment of
triumph is one of defeat. After overcoming external obstacles the new threat
comes from within. In other words, Marx was not simply wrong, he was often
right – but more literally than he himself expected to be.
For example, Marx couldn’t
have imagined that the capitalist dynamics of dissolving all particular
identities would translate into ethnic identities as well. Today’s celebration
of “minorities” and “marginals” is the predominant majority position –
alt-rightists who complain about the terror of “political correctness” take
advantage of this by presenting themselves as protectors of an endangered minority,
attempting to mirror campaigns on the other side.
And then there’s the case of
“commodity fetishism”. Recall the classic joke about a man who believes himself
to be a grain of seed and is taken to a mental institution where the doctors do
their best to finally convince him that he is not a grain but a man. When he is
cured (convinced that he is not a grain of seed but a man) and allowed to leave
the hospital, he immediately comes back trembling. There is a chicken outside
the door and he is afraid that it will eat him.
“Dear fellow,” says his
doctor, “you know very well that you are not a grain of seed but a man.”
“Of course I know that,”
replies the patient, “but does the chicken know it?”
So how does this apply to the
notion of commodity fetishism? Note the very beginning of the subchapter on
commodity fetishism in Marx’s Das Kapital: “A commodity appears at
first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out
that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and
theological niceties.”
Commodity fetishism (our
belief that commodities are magic objects, endowed with an inherent
metaphysical power) is not located in our mind, in the way we (mis)perceive
reality, but in our social reality itself. We may know the truth, but we act as
if we don’t know it – in our real life, we act like the chicken from the joke.
Niels Bohr, who already gave
the right answer to Einstein’s “God doesn’t play dice“(“Don’t tell God what to
do!”), also provided the perfect example of how a fetishist disavowal of belief
works. Seeing a horseshoe on his door, a surprised visitor commented that he
didn’t think Bohr believed superstitious ideas about horseshoes bringing good
luck to people. Bohr snapped back: “I also do not believe in it; I have it
there because I was told that it works whether one believes in it or not!”
This is how ideology works in
our cynical era: we don’t have to believe in it. Nobody takes democracy or
justice seriously, we are all aware of their corruption, but we practice them –
in other words, we display our belief in them – because we assume they work
even if we do not believe in them.
With regard to religion, we no
longer “really believe”, we just follow (some of the) religious rituals and
mores as part of the respect for the “lifestyle” of the community to which we
belong (non-believing Jews obeying kosher rules “out of respect for tradition”,
for example).
“I do not really believe in
it, it is just part of my culture” seems to be the predominant mode of the
displaced belief, characteristic of our times. “Culture” is the name for all
those things we practice without really believing in them, without taking them
quite seriously.
This is why we dismiss
fundamentalist believers as “barbarians” or “primitive”, as anti-cultural, as a
threat to culture – they dare to take seriously their beliefs. The cynical era
in which we live would have no surprises for Marx.
Marx’s theories are thus not
simply alive: Marx is a ghost who continues to haunt us – and the only way to
keep him alive is to focus on those of his insights which are today more true
than in his own time.
No comments:
Post a Comment