Capital and the Inversion of the Moral Law
The billionaires’ donations will turn Notre Dame into a monument to hypocrisy by Aditya Chakrabortty
This grotesque fiscal indulgence is NOT what I mean by rebuilding; it is its very antithesis. I take religious ideals seriously, not as apologetics for rich and powerful folk, but as the voice of those who thirst for righteousness. The sigh of the oppressed creature and so much more than that.
I am reading a lot of comment along these lines. What I do want to know is how many making these criticisms would join with me in defining capital as the wealth of labour in alien form, proceeding to demand the practical restitution of this power and its reorganisation as a social power. Have we got what it takes to build and sustain an alternate economy beyond exploitative relations? That requires the fundamental transformation of capitalist socialist relations, putting an end to the existence of this class of billionaires with the power of decision over vast financial and social resources.
To put it simply, the problem is not which good causes billionaires should donate their money too, but that there are billionaires with such command of resources and power of decision in the first place. That is a problem of our social system: the iniquity is built into its foundations. The perverse choices being made with respect to what is deemed valuable - within the austerian straightjacket that has been imposed in the aftermath of an economic crash caused by the anarchy of the rich and powerful - needs to be located within the prevailing social relations. In exposing hypocrisy, we need to go much further and dig deeper into the structural roots of such extreme wealth and change them. The super-rich see themselves as wealth creators. I see capital as a social form that is parasitic on the two sources of wealth: labour and nature. I'm much less interested in controversies over the distribution of wealth and much more interested in the reshaping of production relations so that we no longer generate division and inequality at such extremes. I support Rousseau's vision of a society in which no one is rich enough to buy another and none are so poor as to have to sell themselves. That entails recovering a healthy growth from within the clutches of capital's cancerous accumulative imperatives so that we longer have to demand that governments and the rich do our bidding and spending on social purposes. With practical restitution and reorganisation restructuring power and resources, we become self-determining beings in a self-governing socialist society. To institute a society devoted to the common good we need to reclaim the common ground, and that means uprooting the capital system, putting back together all that capital separates - human beings from their various steering media and means of social existence and governance, human beings from each other, humanity from the sources of life, love, belonging, meaning and sustenance (God and Nature). I hope that all of those making these points on the money raised for the cathedral and prepared to join together in an effective politics of social restitution along these lines.
There's no point asking billionaires to spend their money on the things we value. There's no point telling them. They disagree. They don't value those things; they will not act on our behalf. The same with governments, which function not as agents of the universal interest but as capital's political command centre. I just want an explicit commitment to the creation and maintenance of a viable and functioning alternative economic system to make good the wealth of criticisms I am reading along these lines.
I've argued the case at length many times for many years. To be is to build. I want to see a rebuilding that houses the human ontology, including the spiritual dimension, something that achieves interdependence with the other beings and bodies of the more-than-human world. Capital is a false god, the self-expansion of its values coming at the expense of use values.
When I demand more than a physical restoration, but a restoration that proceeds from the spirit that pours through the hearts of men, women and children, I mean precisely that. I do NOT mean the idolatry of an iniquitous and exploitative economic system. The large fortunes possessed by some at a time when the politics of austerity is cutting into the bone is an abomination.
We have been living with this hypocrisy for a long time now.
We have learned that the capital system – something much more than the mere institutions of capitalism – is not a public domain, amenable to legal regulation, moral persuasion, and democratic control, but a regime of private accumulation and totalizing alien control imposing inexorable economic imperatives. “Accumulate! Accumulate!,” Marx wrote, is “Moses and all the prophets.” That is the new Law, the new religion. It's “Maundy Thursday” today. It's worth looking at what this means. The word "Maundy" is derived from the Latin word mandatum, or "mandate."
This word is used in the Latin text for John 13:34:
"Mandatum novum do vobis ut diligatis invicem sicut dilexi vos."
In English:
"A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you."
The only commandment that the capital system recognizes is that of accumulation. That is the sine qua non of the capital system, a non-negotiable. Moral laws have been replaced by economic imperatives. John Maynard Keynes wrote: “‘Modern capitalism is absolutely irreligious, without internal union, without much public spirit, often, though not always, a mere congeries of possessors and pursuers.’ Keynes, J.M., ‘A Short View of Russia’ in Essays in Persuasion (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1932).
R.H. Tawney, a Christian Socialist rather than a Marxist, writes on this passage:
'It [capitalism] is that whole system of appetites and values, with its deification of the life of snatching to hoard, and hoarding to snatch, which now, in the hour of its triumph, while the plaudits of the crowd still ring in the ears of the gladiators and the laurels are still unfaded on their brows, seems sometimes to leave a taste as of ashes on the lips of a civilization which has brought to the conquest of its material environment resources unknown in earlier ages, but which has not yet learned to master itself. It was against that system, while still in its supple and insinuating youth, before success had caused it to throw aside the mask of innocence, and while its true nature was unknown even to itself, that the saints and sages of earlier ages launched their warnings and their denunciations. The language in which theologians and preachers expressed their horror of the sin of covetousness may appear to the modern reader too murkily sulphurous; their precepts on the contracts of business and the disposition of property may seem an impracticable pedantry. But rashness is a more agreeable failing than cowardice, and, when to speak is unpopular, it is less pardonable to be silent than to say too much. Posterity has, perhaps, as much to learn from the whirlwind eloquence with which Latimer scourged injustice and oppression, as from the sober respectability of the judicious Paley - who himself, since there are depths below depths, was regarded as a dangerous revolutionary by George III.’ (R. H. Tawney ‘Religion and the Rise of Capitalism’ 1926 ch 5).
If you want your religious ideals, then you are going to have to recover the light cloak of faith from within Max Weber's "steel-hard cage" of capitalist economic determinism:
"The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so. For when asceticism was carried out of monastic cells into everyday life, and began to dominate worldly morality, it did its part in building the tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order.. This order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which today determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force. Perhaps it will so determine them until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt. In Baxter's view the care for external goods should only lie on the shoulders of the 'saint like a light cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment'. But fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron cage. Since asceticism undertook to remodel the world and work out its ideals in the world, material goods have gained an increasing and finally an inexorable power over the lives of men as at no previous period in history. Today the spirit of religious asceticism - whether finally, who knows? - has escaped from the cage. But victorious capitalism, since it rests on mechanical foundations, needs its support no longer. The rosy blush of its laughing heir, the Enlightenment, seems also to be irretrievably fading, and the idea of duty in one's calling prowls about in our lives like the ghost of dead religious beliefs. Where the fulfilment of the calling cannot directly be related to the highest spiritual and cultural values, or when, on the other hand, it need not be felt simply as economic compulsion, the individual generally abandons the attempt to justify it at all. In the field of its highest development, in the United States, the pursuit of wealth, stripped of its religious and ethical meaning, tends to become associated with purely mundane passions, which often actually give it the character of sport. No one knows who will live in this cage in the future, or whether at the end of this tremendous development entirely new prophets will arise, or there will be a great rebirth of old ideas and ideals, or, if neither, mechanised petrification, embellished with a sort of convulsive self-importance. For of the last stage of this cultural development, it might well be truly said: ‘Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilisation never before achieved.’" (Max Weber, "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism" 1985 181/2).
And to those who are busy issuing edicts and commands as to what should and shouldn't be built, I'll say this:
If something should be done by somebody, and if you know what that something is, then remember that you are that somebody. Make common cause with other somebodies and go ahead and DO IT! Don't ask others to do it for you, least of all those with other interests: because they won't. The rich and powerful have other priorities, and government is bound up with facilitating the process of accumulation. There are layers of dependency within the capital economy. No government is going to dismantle the growth infrastructure: capital is a regime of private accumulation, not a public domain amenable to scientific, moral, and democratic persuasion. Not unless you have developed a politics and mobilized sufficient support to undertake governmental action in the context of widespread social transformation. Whatever it is that you value and wish to be treated as a cathedral to house the sacred, psyche, love and life, remember that capital is a system that is organised around the pursuit of exchange value, utterly divorced from the realm of use value - it is systematically deaf to your demands. You have no alternative but to constitute yourself as a public and, in the words of Kropotkin, to "act for yourselves" - in unison, practising mutual aid.
Messages like "rebuild this [whatever we are losing in nature, whatever social institution or public good you favour]" are just the lamentations of the hopeless. They may expose hypocrisy and iniquity, but they change nothing. YOU have to build the political will, the inner motives, the character that enables you and like minded others to take the action that is needed.
Bear in mind this:
"The only real revolution is in the enlightenment of the mind and the improvement of character, the only real emancipation is individual, and the only real revolutionists are philosophers and saints."
-- Will and Ariel Durant, The Complete Story of Civilization.
And that brings me to this:
“When I tell politicians to act now the most common answer is that they can't do anything drastic because that would be too unpopular among the voters. And they are right of course since most people are not even aware why those changes are required. That is why I keep telling you to unite behind the science..."
“Our house is falling apart. The future as well as what we have achieved in the past is literally in your hands now. But it's still not too late to act. It will take a far reaching vision. It will take courage. It will take fierce determination to act now to lay the foundations where we may not know all the details about how to shape the ceiling. In other words it will take cathedral thinking. I ask you to please wake up and make the changes required possible.”
- Greta Thunberg
I have criticised much of this thinking above (and I shall append a lengthy critical comment below*). It is institutionally illiterate, places a degree of faith in governmental initiative that is inadvisable given the embeddedness in the capital system, and pays no attention at all to the legitimate creative agency of citizens. I very much agree with the idea of cathedral thinking. Some environmentalists have been calling for cathedral projects for years. But such things require a cathedral ethos - a commitment and devotion to common ends and, more, to a transcendent source and hope. Such things are beyond the scope of an individual life in the here and now, and yet inspire individuals to act. Greta tells us to unite behind the science. There is more to cathedral thinking than facts. It is fact and value together we need, and recognition of and adherence to something much greater than we are - the Love that enfolds, nurtures, sustains and redeems us all. That is what the cathedrals were about. Split fact from value, make the former the preserve of all genuine knowledge and truth, and the latter the realm of value judgements, and you are disabled, cut off from the motivational economy within the field of practical reason (ethics and politics), the very things that inspire and obligate human beings in action, creating the will to change, and the responsiveness to calls for action. If ethics is merely the sphere of value judgements, irreducible subjective opinion, then it ceases to be a work of reason. Science alone, the world of fact, is rational. A couple of years ago we witnessed scientists having to march in support of the value of science. See the paradox? With the split between fact and value, the latter dismissed as mere value judgement, then rational has to be supported by a non-rational sphere. Unite behind the science, yes, but also behind the ethics. Think long and think deeply by what Nietzsche meant by the "death of God." That death pertained to the collapse of an authoritative moral framework, and in such a world there is no ethic to unite behind. And science won't do the job. You have to piece the common ground back together in order to make a (last?) stand in the last great cause - the biggest challenge that humanity has ever faced. It's no time for tinkering around
*I have to issue some critical remarks here with respect to David Attenborough and Greta Thunberg. I know they are inspiring people and educating people and I know that they are fighting for a cause that is right and just, a cause I fight for and support too. But I dislike this approach to environmentalism for reasons I shall give. We have to stop pressing science into service as ethics and politics, and stop using science as an authority to dictate to politics, governments and citizens. Attenborough/Greta is telling governments, institutions like the EU and UN, and the rest of us to do a lot of things. I agree with much that is being said. I disagree profoundly with the way it is being said. It's an anti-politics. Environmentalists are not the only ones who can play that game. The rich and powerful with their own priorities can do the same. We protest this, rightly, as a denial of the democratic voice and will. With respect to the environment, I have said many of these things over the years. But I don't tell governments to do my bidding. I'm just one citizen among many. In a politics worthy of the name, you engage with citizens, you persuade them, you seek to mobilize people, you respect the agency of citizens, and you build a constituency that confers a legitimacy upon your political platform. It's called politics. I suspect an inherent scepticism in certain environmental circles with respect to the greed, stupidity, and passivity of the masses. Hence the constant appeal to governments to act on 'the science.' I am not denying science on the climate crisis. I am challenging the use of science in place of politics and ethics, privileging the voice of scientists over against that of citizens. That is a denial of the principle of self-assumed obligation. I have always been opposed to the idea of philosopher kings and lawgivers who legislate on the assumption that the people are too corrupt to give the law to themselves. I adhere to the principle that human beings are obligated only by those laws they have had a hand in making. That principle has been subverted in many ways in the modern world, by dominant forces within the economic world for one. The citizen voice and the agency of citizens is devalued and overlooked far too often as it is. I have no interest in replacing one elite with another. I don't believe in the authoritarian use of knowledge to rule the people. The truth cannot just be given, it has to be willed. I have said it time and again. That is Rousseau's great insight with 'the general will,' reconciling the two great wings of western political philosophy, objective truth and reality/knowledge and subjective will/popular consent and legitimacy.
Here's one article. Note the heading.
“Everyone” is an “apolitical” classless appeal to no-one in particular, hence the demands will be levelled on government as a surrogate universality and commonality. The trick behind “everything” must to change is to engineer a change through government in relation to the corporate form to ensure that nothing changes with respect to core socio-economic fundamentals.
“It’s okay if you refuse to listen to me… but you cannot ignore the scientists, or the science." https://greenworld.org.uk/…/greta-thunberg-everyone-and-eve…
Put this way, we shift from a climate rebellion based on the mobilisation of the masses, which would be an authentic autonomous movement of citizens, to the old delusion of science as politics. This is science being used by some politically to dictate truths to politics, undercutting the voice of citizens. I oppose it as an anti-politics, denying citizen agency and denying democratic will. There is a privileging of some voices over others. My position on this has been consistent over decades. There is a distinction between theoretical reason - our knowledge of the external world, the facts - and practical reason - the field of politics and ethics, values, the world of will and motives. The challenge before us is to bridge the two. Scientific knowledge and technological know-how give us the ability to act, but not the will. I profoundly disagree with dictating to the people, denying their agency as citizens, undermining the basic principle of self-assumed obligation.
Not only is this wrong, it is politically ineffective.
Environmentalists are seeing how religion can mobilize people and motivate actions, and then demand that said people they do the same for their own particular causes. Sorry, but YOU build the inner motives and character the same way to generate such responsiveness on the part of people, and you will not have to issue demands in this way. People will volunteer their actions. I don't believe in environmental philosopher-kings and dictatorships. YOU act on climate change, like people have acted on Notre Dame - don't expect to hijack the good will and character of others. And don't attempt to hijack governments and institutions in order to proceed over the heads of citizens (there has been too much of private interests embedding themselves in the public realm, hence the inability to secure the long term common good of all). If you don't build the inner motives and don't cultivate the mass support and consent of citizens, then don't be surprised to be politically insignificant and marginalised, and don't presume that because you are scientifically informed that your voice counts more than that of 'ordinary' citizens. That's not what politics is about, that is a denial of politics. I get the distinct impression that certain strands of environmentalism is misanthropic, exhibiting a deep loathing of humanity. There is an unmistakable pessimism as to the nature of human beings. There is a hopeless and ineffectual anti-politics at work here, born of a meagre view of human beings. There IS a lead which is inspiring and mobilizing actions on the part of citizens, and this may spread out in time. More than an external pressure on governments, though, I wish to see the creation and maintenance of permanent material organisations capable of constituting a genuine citizen public, so that instead of telling government what to do, the people form themselves as a new system of governance and give the law to themselves.
Also ... Why protesters should be wary of ‘12 years to climate breakdown’ rhetoric "Climate change is not so much an emergency as a festering injustice. Your ancestors did not end slavery by declaring an emergency and dreaming up artificial boundaries on “tolerable” slave numbers. They called it out for what it was: a spectacularly profitable industry, the basis of much prosperity at the time, founded on a fundamental injustice. It’s time to do the same on climate change."
I'll make a general observation here at the end of a long week of dealing with comments on Notre Dame. There have been far too many irrelevant arguments that "it is just a building" and that "nobody died." This is just plain uncomprehending rot that misses so many points that it has me questioning just how deep the radicalism is of those who have made the arguments. The cathedral of Notre Dame is not just a building, people need to ask what it means, what it symbolizes. To be is to build: we need to build in order to express and expand our being. It expresses something of us, something of that “something” which nourishes the core of our very being. It is that "something" that interests me in all of this. We are talking about more than the ownership of and power of decision over resources - as important a question as that is in respect of social relations and arrangements. If we are just going to pander to the physical side of things, then we are all just flesh, as buildings are just stone. As flesh and blood human beings. We are but flesh, ourselves, as transitory as our creations. This human civilisation is just flesh and stone: it corrupts, it decays, it crumbles and dies. And then it is gone. Nature too. So where does value lie? If you want the eternal you have to transcend this world of flesh and stone. So I have been exchanging angry words with people who engage in "What-aboutism?" This attempt to diminish the importance of one thing by reference to another is one of the most preeminent fallacies of the age, and there was plenty of it on social media this week. I don't mind radicals demanding resources be used for social use, and I don't mind radicals emphasising the things that are valuable in this world - ecosystems, health services, education and so on. In fact, I very much agree with them. But rather than telling governments subject to the systemic constraints of the capital system what to do, instead of lamenting that billionaires do not value the same things we value, I have sought to up the ante and see power and resources under the control of a dominant minority as our own power in alien form, to be restituted to the social body. I've seen too many arguments this week along the line that human beings are more important than cathedrals/architecture/culture/arts/heritage. Actually, all those things are integral aspects of what it is to be human. To value Notre Dame is to value human beings: there is NO separation here. It is impossible to divorce human beings from their cultural identities, histories, faiths, and stories without damaging their humanity deeply. To be uncaring about something because it is “just a building” is to be uncaring about human beings. And people who don't get that don't get anything. They are engaging in a form of reasoning that can be applied to any issue of concern to some. This simply opens up a Dutch-auction in which anyone can, in the abstract, outbid others in their profession of virtue, for the very reason that there is a vast range of irreducibly different kinds of value in the world we live in. If some are concerned with “A,” then people of all kinds of persuasions can respond with the objection: “what about “B,” “C,” “D,” “E,” “F” … anything at all. I utterly reject that kind of “what-aboutism?” Not least because those most vocal in raising the objection all too often talk the talk rather than walk the walk. If you think that x, y, or z is something that ought to be of practical concern, then YOU put your time and money where your mouth is. Comparisons are not only invidious, they are also too often covers for a passive radicalism. If you can cite any number of “cathedrals” that stand in need of rebuilding by somebody, remember that you are that somebody and be prepared to put a shift in. Don't denigrate the efforts of others by stating that something else is of greater concern or importance. By what scale? To whom? Let's note here how easily a sliding scale of values involves pretty much all things but the one chosen thing that trumps all others falls off the list of priorities. Human beings can handle a number of values at once and don't have to make these kinds of stark choices. It is appropriate to respond in love and concern to every problem concerning the things humans value as and when they occur, not to dismiss their importance by reference to some other problem considered of overriding concern. Take that reasoning to its logical conclusion, there could only ever be one thing that humans should be concerned about. Try to establish what that one thing is, and you'll see the impossibility of such value monism. Unless that notion refers to the God that encompasses all things of this world and much more besides. Within this world, such a value monism fails for want of ontological certainty with respect to the supreme value. “Nobody died,” say some. Is the life of human beings, then, the one valuable thing? What of the planetary ecology? Other beings and bodies? No insects on earth, no human life. And so on. Rebuilding Notre Dame doesn't preclude activity in other areas. The issue of resources is an issue of prevailing social relations and the power and control that some have over the ends to which these resources are put.
Valuing the cathedral of Notre Dame is inextricably bound up with valuing human beings and the various ways in which human beings express their needs and their humanity. Notre Dame was built and maintained all these centuries by human beings, who saw it as an expression of their identity. The cathedral embodies the love, labour, and longing of the generations: human beings who created beauty in worship of beauty, the great transcendental that lights the path to the two other transcendentals: truth and goodness. Do people today believe in such things? I do. Those generations built something for themselves and brought meaning to their world. They created something beautiful for themselves and passed it on for future generations. I have heard environmentalists call for the creation of “cathedral projects” to preserve the health of the planet. Such projects are more than physical: they speak to the spiritual dimension of life, something that impels human beings to create something beautiful that outlives them. That very many people fail to understand what is truly valuable about Notre Dame suggests that the age is bereft of the spirit and ethos required to build something that endures over the centuries. The real loss is the loss of a genuine sense of the eternal. We have sought eternity – and immortality – through machines. Tolkien referred to the “infernal combustion engine” – men as gods in command of infernal instruments manipulating matter and coercing human beings on or about the earth's surface. In the end – and the end comes to all flesh and stone - it's not enough to sustain a meaningful existence. It lacks a true sense of value as inherent worth.