English Marxist historian E.P. Thompson, in his 1993 book, Customs in Common, offers a nonworshipper’s view of our national religion:
The “market economy,” I suspect, is often a metaphor (or mask) for capitalist process. It may even be employed as myth. The most ideologically-compelling form of the myth lies in the notion of the market as some supposedly-neutral but (by accident) beneficent entity; or, if not an entity (since it can be found in no space but the head) then an energising spirit — of differentiation, social mobility, individualisation, innovation, growth, freedom — like a kind of postal sorting-station with magical magnifying powers, which transforms each letter into a package and each package into a parcel.
This “market” may be projected as a benign consensual force, which involuntarily maximises the best interests of the nation. It may even seem that it is the “market system” which has “produced” the nation’s wealth — perhaps “the market” grew all that grain?
Market is indeed a superb and mystifying metaphor for the energies released and the new needs (and choices) opened up by capitalist forms of exchange, with all conflicts and contradictions withdrawn from view.
Market is (when viewed from this aspect) a mask worn by particular interests, which are not coincident with those of “the nation” or “the community,” but which are interested, above all, in being mistaken to be so. Historians who suppose that such a market really could be found must show it to us in the records. A metaphor, no matter how grand its intellectual pedigree, is not enough.
The Market as a religion... sad to say, that is what it is to many people. A religion. Not a means to allow individuals to fulfil individual (as vs. collective) needs by trading goods and services. But a religion, to be worshipped and all other ideas foreign to the religion to be decried as heretical (or "communist", in the terms of this religion). The very notion of collective needs is derided by the high priests of the religion, even as they take advantage of the government that was created to serve such needs to instead enrich the cronies and family members of the high priests as well as to enrich the high priests themselves.
The notion that our way of life, our system of economics, our system of government should be set up in such a way as to insure the best life for the most people... never penetrates the skulls of the worshippers at the altar of the mythical Free Market. They prefer their religious ideology to reality, which is that the free market is indeed important for providing a wide variety of goods and services at a low cost, but it is a means to an end, not an end in and of itself.
But the high priests in their temples hold black masses to celebrate the fact that tens of millions of Americans have no health insurance, and say it's all good because it's "the market's" will. As if "the market" were a God to be worshipped, rather than one (of many) means to an end...
Why is a Marxist praying?
Posted by: Red Tide on February 20, 2007 6:30 PMHe's no Marxist. He's Ben Bernanke, high priest of the Federal Reserve Board.
Posted by: Jerry Doolittle on February 20, 2007 8:10 PM... and our latest pope of capitalism.
Posted by: Dante lee on February 21, 2007 4:11 PM