Christianity and the Logic of Capitalism (Part Four): Some Problems
Jean
Baudrillard[1]
Money has not only the ‘appearance of value,’ like other commodities;
it is the ‘form of the appearance of the value of commodities.’ It participates in a Platonic metaphysics in
which its abstraction is consummated by its disappearance [the Real is
no-thing finite, but the pure ideal and unrepresentable Form of Desire itself]. The
power of capitalism lies in the omnipresence of an absence that circulates in
and through desire…it is an environment, an atmosphere. It…possesses and promotes a cosmology…however
much it deals with material goods…its ethos and ethics are utopian and
transcendental…In a world where content disappears and brand names such as Pepsi, Armani, H&M…Reebok, and so on float
free and ethereally on electronic waves of advertising, we enter a parody of
Plato’s world of pure forms…corporate mythology [means]….raw objects…are merely
‘collective hallucinations.’
Graham
Ward[2]
For
our purposes we must here ask with William Cavanaugh, then, “when is a market
free?”[3] Friedman defines a free market as one in
which the transactions that occur are “informed,” and “voluntary.”[4] He writes:
So long as
effective freedom of exchange is maintained, the central feature of the market
organization of economic activity is that it prevents one person from
interfering with another with respect to most of his activities. The consumer is protected from coercion by
the seller because of the presence of other sellers with whom he can deal; the
seller is protected from coercion by the consumer because of other consumers to
whom she can sell; the employee is protected from coercion by the employer
because of other employers for whom he can work, and so on. And the market does this impersonally and
without centralized authority.[5]
Friedman is confident, in Cavanaugh’s terms, “that
the price system in a free-market economy transmits all the information needed
to make exchanges informed.” Yet this
definition, though powerful, is hardly neutral or natural, but in Taylor’s
terms an alternative imaginative construction of human fullness. Thus the prophetic movement of Christian
witness can, for example, unearth that the very demands of the market are a faith: our continued belief that our
freedom (and indeed, salvation) so-defined lies in the market itself. And so
the etymology of credit itself stems
from credo: I believe! Thus in the recent bail-outs “let us…not
forget that the sublimely enormous sums of money were spent not on some clear
‘real’ or concrete problem, but essentially in order to restore confidence in the markets, that is, simply to change
people’s beliefs!”[6] Augustine defined true freedom as the ability
to act for the end of the Highest
Good, namely God. Shorn of any higher good, however, Friedman’s definition of
freedom from restriction (and nothing
more) is little different than nihilism.
“To be entirely modern,” writes David Bentley Hart, “is to believe in
nothing.”[7] For “if the will determines itself
principally in and through the choices it makes, then it…at some very deep
level, must also be nothing: simply a pure movement of spontaneity, motive
without motive, absolute potentiality, giving birth to itself.” Some might object that this is special
pleading by a critic, yet though unrelated Hart’s analysis is remarkably
consonant with one of capitalism’s own proponents,
Michael Novak, who comments that
The ‘wasteland’
at the heart of democratic capitalism is like a field of battle, on which
individuals wander alone, in some confusion, amidst many casualties. Nonetheless, like the dark night of the soul
in the inner journey of the mystics this desert has an indispensable purpose. It is maintained…[and] it is swept clean out
of reverence for the sphere of the transcendent, to which the individual has
access through the self, beyond the mediations of social institutions.[8]
This
sounds remarkably like the nominalist God who does as He pleases as a
spontaneous act of power and will, as outlined in the last section, here merely
transferred to the sphere of humankind.
It thus fits almost without remainder to Hart’s definition of nihilism. Moreover we can ask whether or not it even delivers
what it offers. In one sense of course
it absolutely does—and in abundance. Yet
with no guiding purpose the market of “free” individuals merely becomes a site
of pure competitive power jostling in the same plane for expansion and shedding
imposed limits obviously this is the ideality of free-market capitalism. Yet is it something that as Christians we can
simply accept? It appears to be a sort
of Pelagianism of the market: we are free insofar as we are merely
un-coerced. Yet a more “Augustinian”
definition of freedom would say any true account of human freedom be embedded
in an examination of the true ends of human life. Moreover the Pelagian notion of freedom is a
feint, for we are under the sway of the market’s evolutionary dictum: expand or
be cast out. Alex de Tocqueville once
wrote that in art and poetry he was not so much worried about lapses into safe
realism so much as into flights of unanchored fantasy, which would in turn
render the real world intolerably boring, and thus more prone to cycles of
increasing escape.[9] This is illustrated by Zizek in his usual
humorous manner: “On the information sheet in a New York hotel, I recently
read: ‘Dear Guest!: To guarantee that you will fully enjoy your stay with us,
this hotel is totally-smoke free. For
any infringement…you will be charged $200.’
The beauty of this formulation, taken literally, is that you are to be
punished for refusing to fully enjoy your stay.”[10]
Cavanaugh,
following Zizek, is surely right then when he notes wryly, “rather than
celebrating the growth of enormously powerful corporations as the manifestation
of consumer freedom, it is more realistic to examine the ability of sheer
concentrated economic power to control patterns of consumption.”[11] With the saturation and power of marketing
forces “freedom,” (defined as freedom to choose) becomes more an ironic
simulation than the actual exercise of choice.
“In a world of consumption without ends, it is assumed that the consumer
will want to maximize his or her own power at the expense of the laborer, and
the manager does not feel free to resist this logic, lest his or her
corporation fall victim to competition…”[12] The ascent of the brand image coupled with
the quest for the ephemeral “cool” is by its very nature an imprecise and
anxiety ridden enterprise, “except now the harrowing doubts of adolescence are
the billion-dollar questions of our age.”[13] Faith in the freedom of the market can be
parodied by the analogy that success is like picking the top ten photos of
pretty girls out of one hundred: only you are not picking your favorites. The choices now revolve around your thoughts
about what the other’s opinions will be and vice versa: everyone else is
choosing based upon their guesses of what everyone else will choose. Is this freedom?
Nor
is this even an issue relegated to personal opinion: marketing has a serious
interest in influencing the universal average by capturing it with powerful
marketing images. Klein parodies this by
analyzing the phenomenon of marketing “street snitches,” who look like ordinary
people who hang out with groups in order to secretly determine their
preferences, so that they feed back into the marketing machine to begin
influence on everyone else. “The vision
is both horrifying and hilarious: a world of glorified diary trespassers and
professional eavesdroppers, part of a spy-vs-spy corporate fueled youth culture
stalking itself.”[14] Or this situation can be flipped on its head
and explained another way. It is a
solipsism in reverse: instead of “I am the only thing that exists,” it becomes “I am the only thing that does not (but must!) exist.” This means often the question of our desire itself is this enigma of the average
opinion, not primarily “what do I want?” but “what do others want from me?” “By no longer simply repressing the lack of a
fixed identity, the hegemonic ideology [of capitalism] directly mobilizes that
lack to sustain the endless process of consumer self re-creation.”[15] In a very real sense then, “we are forced to
live as if we were free.”[16]
This
sense of the illusion of freedom (the “nowhere” of its utopianism), if real
even for we who live in an affluent country, how much more is its “nowhere,” of
false freedom for others in worse situations.
Part of the illusion of our freedom is that the market is set up to make
us forget the actual sources of our goods and their means of production. The ideal spirit of consumerism constantly
tries to flee from its earthbound bones, so to speak. But this flight is an ironic refusal to
affirm to limitations inscribed into the market’s own notion of freedom. “On the one hand we are told that we live in
an era of unparalleled freedom of choice…on the other hand there is a profound
sense of resignation to fate in attitudes towards the market. The process of globalization seems to have
advanced beyond anyone’s control.”[17] The “hollow corporations,” described at the
beginning of this essay had to jettison their bulk somewhere. So began the creation of sweatshops as
extensively outlined by Klein in her book No
Logo.[18] The utopian “nowhere,” ideal of brands that
float free of products, and capital which floats free of goods, can hurriedly
mobilize in a vast, global circulation of virtual currency carried
electronically in binary, but labor, bound to the earth, cannot move so fast. “It is the very fact that laborers south of
the border can be paid a tenth of what laborers north of the border can that
accounts for the phenomenon of factories in the United States shutting down and
moving to Mexico [and elsewhere.] It is
the immobility of labor that accounts for the mobility of capital.”[19] Thus “we shop; they drop.”[20]
The
common retort is that these so-called sweatshops, even in their
how-low-can-you-go limbo wages, are providing a better lifestyle for these
people than they would have if the factories were not there. This, however, is in many ways itself an
illusion of the utopian idealism of the market.
Klein, Zizek, Cavanaugh, and Bell (and numerous others)[21]
all tell horror stories of how factory life not only does not provide enough to
live on but alternate sources of income and revenue have been destroyed by precisely the same market
forces which have driven the factories to cheaper-labor territories. Often countries are, for example, pressured
into giving their land over to export crops from other countries, and as more
of their domestic crops were for pure exportation, they had to rely
increasingly (and ironically) on imported food, while farmers thrown off their
lands were forced into slums and consequently had to turn to sweatshops as
their only alternative.[22]
In
an especially bizarre case a recent study has correlated the rise of
Tuberculosis epidemics in Eastern Europe with IMF loans; once the loans
stopped, the TB epidemics declined. “The
explanation for this apparently weird correlation is simple, the condition for
getting loans is that the recipient state has to introduce ‘financial discipline’
i.e. reduce public spending; and the first victim of measures designed to
reestablish ‘financial health,’ is health
itself.”[23]
Gnosticism here intervenes: true health is the virtual and “pristine”
spirituality of capital, while the debased materiality of the hylic world is
but a small forfeiture. It’s coughing
sluggishness but residue, the detritus necessary to cast off for the
frictionless ascent of the absolute dollar.
Ironically,
then, poor health-care operations of these countries as a result gives others
the impetus to offer humanitarian aid in the form of charity, which is recycled
into the logic of the market. Money from
our Starbucks coffee for example goes to children in Africa (not at all a bad
thing!). Yet the deflating of our
conscience-alarms has occurred through a mechanism which ironically created the
poverty it is now, piecemeal, trying to alleviate. The act of charity is not an abnegation of
our desire to consume, but within that very act of egoistic fulfillment. And within that gambit the corporate reach
which has monopolized the harvesting of cacao and forced independent
contractors to conform to this standard and streamline business by eliminating
and so impoverishing most of its constituents, is also the major engine funding
the possibility for the American affluent, and caffeine intoxicated to find a
conduit for their pity to alleviate this destitution. Here is Derrida’s pharmacon: the poison/cure. Whereas before charity served often as the
dialectical abrogation of our concentric fascination with consumption, here it
appears merely as that very egoism’s consummation. Which is to say the deterritorialization of
capitalism has provided its own cure: namely in the course of its own limitless
expansion, it “corrects” itself for the territory it displaces and subsumes by
allowing proximate spending in its own heartland to partially sanction and
mythologize this border-pushing in the name of “charity” and normativity. And if buying into Starbucks’ “coffee ethic,”
is not enough, “and you continue to worry about Third World misery,” fear
not! “There are additional products you
can buy,” like Ethos water.[24]
Charity is no longer an embodied act, but a frictionless virtual one that is
identical to the gesture of self-fulfillment.
Indeed part of the same gesture of destruction which enabled charity to exist in this
form. Nietzsche remarked that charity
always secretly revels in the existence of its opposite, vice. For it is only in vice that virtue
appears. Nietzsche’s chilling take on
reality appears real, all too real. What is most important here is that the
economic strategies of capitalism, and companies within capitalism, which are
now “funding,” this charity, are symbols of the very logic which partially
drove these countries into needing aid in the first place. This charity is thus a very real case of
taking with the left hand what the right has given. These people in their earthbound squalor are
the heavy bones that our ghost-like freedom tries to leave behind. Thus the
economic “benefit,” they are receiving from their new labor is itself doubly
questionable, and our own freedom the negative echo of their near imprisonment.
A Small Case Study
In her brilliant sequel to No Logo, Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster
Capitalism is an immense and horrifying 700 page narrative of what she
terms “disaster capitalism,” in which there are “orchestrated raids [of
economic policy] on the public sphere in the wake of catastrophic events,
combined with the treatment of disasters as exciting marketing opportunities.”[25] The idea being that, analogously to “shock
therapy,” which attempts, through a series of traumatic electrical shocks, to
revert the brain into a pristine pre-lapsarian “blank slate” to be
reprogrammed, Klein’s basic thesis is that disaster capitalism (backed upon the
theory of Milton Friedman and the Chicago school of economics) uses high-level
disasters as opportunities to implement their economic policies on a “softened”
or “primed” system.[26]
Thus in direct contrast to
Webb’s statement that we “have no ideology to impose on others,” Klein argues
the opposite:
Seen through the lens of [the shock doctrine of Milton Friedman], the past thirty five years look very different. Some of the most infamous human rights
violations of this era, which have tended to be viewed as sadistic acts carried
out by anti-democratic regimes, were in fact committed with the deliberate
attempt of terrorizing the public or actively harnessed to prepare the ground
for the introduction of radical ‘free market’ reforms…the bottom line is that
while Friedman’s economic model is capable of being partially imposed under
democracy, authoritarian condition are required for the implementation of its
true vision.[27]
Klein’s
is of course a complex and controversial thesis, the most famous example of
which is probably the brutal Pinochet regime in Chile—recorded not only by
Klein[28] but is also the focus of
William Cavanaugh’s heart-wrenching book Torture
and Eucharist.[29] It can hardly be elaborated upon here. For our purposes it helps us understand the
absurdity of purely equating the spread of American “freedom,” with the gospel
message. If Klein’s narrative is even
partially true (and I am inclined to believe it is much more than that) then
the spread of American freedom (understood in some sense as the expansion of
the free market) has been marked by untold monstrosity, despite whatever
advantage and ignorance we who benefit from it back home have had.
Countless fascinating examples are given, among them however Klein's discussion of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will perhaps have the most immediate resonance with Christians, especially my fellow evangelicals who are (much as I often have been) prone to be "Pro-Israel," without so much as a second thought or nuance. This is then absorbed into the larger story of "American-style" freedom's we have seen, and which we showed Webb to advocate earlier. Two examples will hopefully complexify and problematize the pure compatibility of Christianity with that story of American (and free-market) freedom. The first is that of Russia and
the fall of the Soviet Union. “The
democratic revolution was already well under way—in order to push through a
Chicago School economic program, that peaceful and hopeful process Gorbachev
began had to be violently interrupted.”[30] And that
by unfortunate historical coincidence the start of the
Oslo period [of Israeli-Palestinian peace talks] coincided precisely with the
most painful phase of the Chicago-School experiment in Russia. The handshake on the White House lawn was on
September 13, 1993; exactly three weeks later, Yeltsin sent in the tanks to set
fire to the parliament building, paving the way for his most brutal form of
economic shock. Over the course of the
1990’s, roughly 1 million Jews left the former Soviet Union and moved to Israel. Immigrants who came from the former Soviet
Union now make up more than 18 percent of Israel’s total Jewish
population. Its hard to overstate the
impact of such a large and rapid population transfer to a country as small as
Israel. Proportionally, it would be the
equivalent of every person in Angola, Cambodia, and Peru packing their bags and
moving to the United States all at once.
In Europe, it would be equivalent to all of Greece moving to France.[31]
Even
more than this, as the Oslo accords came into effect, because of the new influx of Jews,
economically Israel no longer had any sort of need for reliance upon
Palestinian labor. This tilted the
balance as such labor always challenged Zionist projects by making demands for
restitution and equal citizenship. The
influx of Russian Jews provided a new cheap labor base that had no anti-Zionist
pretensions (even if they did not have particularly pro-Zionist affiliation).[32] There is an interesting coincidence with the
ultimate unfruitfulness of the Oslo accords and this influx. Israeli foreign minister Shimon Peres had
told the press that, yes, Oslo sought peace, and that this peace was
inevitable. But it was a particular kind
of peace. “We are not seeking a peace of
flags,” he said, “we are interested in a peace of markets.”[33] Peace with the Palestinians had been
primarily motivated for economic purposes, and the fear that Israel’s economic
future was in peril.[34] Not only had this influx of Jews because of
Friedman’s shock doctrine alleviated this in the immediate form of cheap
Zionist-neutral labor, but “amongst the hundreds of thousands of Soviets who
came to Israel in the nineties were more highly trained scientists than
Israel’s top tech institutes had graduated in the 80 years of their existence.”[35]
Israeli
technical markets boomed. “When Israel’s
niche in the global economy turned out to be information technologies, it meant
that the key to growth was sending software and computer chips to Los Angeles
and London…success in the tech sector did not require Israel to have friendly
relations with its Arab neighbors or to end its occupation of the territories.”[36] When the dot-com crash came, the tech-heavy
Israel was the hardest hit of all countries.
However they were eventually saved from free fall when the market for
their services in communication technologies was channeled into security and
surveillance.
A slew of new start-ups were launched, specializing in
everything from ‘search and nail’ data mining to surveillance cameras, to
terrorist profiling. When the market for
these services and devices exploded in the years after September 11, the
Israeli state openly embraced a new national economic vision: the growth
provided by the dot-com bubble would be replaced with a homeland security
boom. It was the perfect marriage of the
Likud Party’s hawkishness and its radical embrace of Chicago School economics,
as embodied by Sharon’s finance minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Israel’s new
central bank chief, Stanley Fischer, chief architect of the IMF’s shock therapy
adventures in Russia and Asia…overnight Israel became, in the words of Forbes magazine, “the go-to country for
anti-terrorism technologies.”[37]
Klein
notes with a very level headed tone “economics is by no means the primary
motivator for the escalation in the region since 2001. There is no shortage of fuel for violence on
all sides.” Yet “within this context
that is so weighted against peace, economics has, at certain points, been a
countervailing force.” Indeed ironically
our homeland security push (also in a
chapter by Klein) created a perpetual market and “powerful sector invested in
continued violence.” It is not a
coincidence, says Klein “that the Israeli state’s decision to put
‘counter-terrorism’ at the center of its export economy [and primarily to
America] has coincided precisely with its abandonment of peace negotiations, as
well as a clear strategy to reframe its conflict with the Palestinians not as a
battle against a nationalist movement with specific goals for land and rights
but rather as part of the global War on Terror—one against illogical, fanatical
forces bent only on destruction.”[38]
Ironically
enough America’s push for security so it might be a “beacon of freedom for the
world,” is precisely a force keeping the Palestinians unfree. And ironically it is
in part the spread of American freedom of the free market pressuring “shock”
reform (either induced shock, or natural shock used as opportunity) which
became a major force squelching the Oslo accords (granted by a temporal
coincidence, but this does not mitigate the basic point).
[1] Quoted in Graham Ward, Cities of God (New York: Routledge, 2000) p.52.
[2] Graham Ward, The Politics of Discipleship: Becoming
Postmaterial Citizens (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2009) p.96-98.
[3] Cavanaugh, Being
Consumed p.2ff.
[5] Friedman, Capitalism
and Freedom, pp.14-15.
[6] Zizek, First as
Tragedy p.80.
[7] David Bentley Hart, The Atheist Delusions: The Christian
Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2009) p.20.
[8] Michael Novak, The
Spirit of Democratic Capitalism (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982),
pp.54-55.
[9] cited in Naomi Klein, No Logo
[10] Zizek, First as
Tragedy p.58.
[11] Cavanaugh, Being
Consumed p.20.
[13] Klein, No Logo
p.69.
[15] Zizek, First as
Tragedy p.65.
[16] John Gray as cited in Zizek, First as Tragedy p.10.
[17] Cavanaugh, Being
Consumed p.1.
[18] Klein, No Logo
p.195-231.
[19] William Cavanaugh, Migrations
of the Holy: God, State, and the
Political Meaning of the Church (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s Publishing, 2011)
p.73.
[20] Cavanaugh, Being
Consumed p.41.
[21] For a first-hand account see: Sarah Stillman, “Made by
Us: Young Women, Sweatshops, and the Ethics of Globalization,” the 2003 Elie
Wiesel Prize in Ethics, at:
http://www.eliewieselfoundation.org/EthicsPrize/WinnersEssays/2005/Sarah_Stillman.pdf
[22] Zizek, First as
Tragedy p.82.
[25] Naomi Klein, The
Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Picador, 2007)
p.6.
[29] William Cavanaugh, Torture
and Eucharist: Theology, Politics, and the Body of Christ (New York:
Wiley-Blackwell, 1998).
[30] Klein, The Shock
Doctrine p.277.
[33] Quoted in Ibid
p.543.
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