The Vision

Let us not forget that we want to make the individual, and not the collectivity, the supreme value. We want to form whole men by doing away with that specialization which cripples us all. We want to give to manual labour that dignity which belongs to it of right, by giving workmen the full understanding of technical processes instead of mere mechanical training; and to provide the understanding with its proper object, by placing it in contact with the world through the medium of labour. We want to make abundantly clear the true relationships between man and nature — those relationships that are concealed, in every society based on exploitation, by “the degrading division of labour into intellectual and manual labor”. We want to give back to man, that is to say to the individual,the power which it is his proper function to exercise over nature, over tools, over socitey itself; to re-establish the importance of the workers as compared with material conditions of work; and, instead of doing away with private property, “to turn individual property into something real, by transforming the means of production… which at present serve above all to enslave and exploit labour, into mere instruments of labour freely and co-operatively preformed.

~ Simone Weil, Oppression and Liberty

The (Not So) Glorious Revolution

“The diminished and impoverished Crown could no longer stand. It fought against the new wealth the struggle of the Civil Wars; it was utterly defeated; and when a final settlement was arrived at in 1660 you have all the realities of power in the hands of a small powerful class of wealthy men, the King still surrounded by the forms and traditions of his old power, but in practice a salaried puppet. And in that social world which underlies all political appearances, the great dominating note was that a few wealthy families had got hold of the bulk of the means of production in England, while the same families exercised all local administrative power and were moreover the Judges, the Higher Education, the Church, and the generals. They quite overshadowed what was left of central government in this country.”

~ Hilaire Belloc, The Servile State, pp. 67-68.

Capitalism as Moral Anarchy

“For a society in which the determinant mass of families were owners of capital and of land; for one in which production was regulated by self-governing corporations of small owners; and for one in which the misery and insecurity of a proletariat was unknown, there came to be substituted the dreadful moral anarchy against which all moral effort is now turned, and which goes by the name of Capitalism.”

~ Hilaire Belloc, The Servile State (New York: Cosimo Classics, 2007), p. 52.

Identity Politics, You Just Got Served!

For each identification (the creation or cobbling together of identity) creates a figure that provides a material for its investment by the market. There is nothing more captive, so far as commercial investment is concerned, nothing more amenable to the invention of new figures of monetary homogeneity, than a community and its territory or territories. The semblance of non-equivalence is required so that equivalence itself can constitute a process. What inexhaustible potential for mercantile investments is this upsurge — taking the form of communities demanding recognition and so-called cultural singularities — of women, homosexuals, the disabled, Arabs! And these infinite combinations of predictive traits, what a godsend! Black homosexuals, disabled Serbs, Catholic pedophiles, moderate Muslims, married priests, ecologist yuppies, the submissive unemployed, prematurely aged youth! Each time, a social image authorizes new products, specialized magazines, improved shopping malls, “free” radio stations, targeted advertising networks, and finally, heady “public debates” at peak viewing times. Deluze put it perfectly: capitalist deterritorialization requires a constant reterritorialization. Capital demands a permanent creation of subjective and territorial identities in order for its principle of movement to homogenize its space of action; identities, moreover, that demand anything but the right to be exposed in the same way as others to the uniform prerogatives of the market.

~ Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundations of Universalism (Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 2003), 10-11.

The Sinfulness of Abundance

Here is a fascinating passage from Eugene McCarraher’s recent review in Books and Culture, “Break on Through to the Other Side.”

The Confession of Sin makes no sense unless the world is a place of abundance. A world of scarcity—the ontological template of capitalist economics—mandates a “balancing” of virtues, a mealy allocation of limited resources in virtue, especially charity. (“Balance” is one of the more noble-sounding buzzwords in the lexicon of compassionate stinginess. Like bourgeois bleating about “wanted” children, it conceals a parsimonious and resentful reluctance to share the fruits of the earth.)

We can make no sense of Christ’s injunction to heavenly perfection if we accept this ontology of penury and violence. The God who calls us to be like Him is a lavish and spendthrift Creator, a prodigal Father who will never cut production of material and spiritual provision. (So much for the corporation as “the mirror of God’s creativity.”) As Augustine realized, the imperfection of sin consists in privation, our lack of trust in God’s plenitude, our mean and shameful holding back in a fearful desire for power. If the world were a place of scarcity, sin would become necessity—in other words, not sin. Capitalist economics is the theology of scarcity, or a narrative in which the expulsion from Eden is the opening chapter of Genesis. To see the world as unending bounty is not to deny the consequences of the Fall; it’s to recognize the nature and magnitude of the tragedy, and the difficulty of living well.

I have never understood sin on these terms before, but it makes good sense to me. I am very curious, what do you systematic and metaphysical types out there think of McCarraher’s conception of sin? What holes or problems do you see?

Getting to the Bottom

I want to offer a quotation sandwich. When I read these quotes Barak Obama came to mind as he appears to be running on the Jim Wallis “Religious Values Matter” campaign (check out Obama’s speech “Call to Renewal”). I have to be honest, I am very intrigued by Obama, but for all his talk of a change, I’m not at all convinced he is really proposing something that Christian radicals can sink their teeth into.

So in light of the upcoming elections and the buzz that is mounting about Obama, particularly from Christians, I wanted to offer some choice quotes from McCarraher and McCabe:

But as we look at a country frenzied and fatigued by the race for riches, armored and overextended in its expansive rage and fear, we will need, for lack of a better term, a new New Left, a movement of people who combine, in Alasdair MacIntyre’s wonderful couplet, “Trotsky and St. Benedict”; and I suspect that many of us, knowing in our marrow that business as usual cannot be allowed to continue, are more than ready for a militant renewal of the urge to make all things new (Eugene McCarraher, “The Revolution Begins in the Pews: Trotsky and St. Benedict” Books and Culture ).”

[The revolutionary] proposes to change not merely this or that detail within society, but the structure, and hence the values of the society itself. The revolutionary does not propose something that in terms of this society is better; he wants to change [t]he terms. He wants history to advance not [s]imply further along the established lines, but along new lines (Herbert McCabe, Law, Love and Language, p. 28).”

At a minimum, that means a metamorphosis in the ethos and curricula of business and professional schools at Christian colleges and universities. Christians should be pioneering a whole new economics, not just tacking “values” onto capitalism. They should be affirming abundance, not scarcity, as the primary ontological fact of economics. They should be offering courses, not in management, but in how to do without management as a distinct class. They should be offering courses and training in union organization, or in dispossessing those useless people otherwise known as stockholders and putting firms into the hands of people who actually work in them (Eugene McCarraher, “Britney Spears and the Downward Arc of Empire” in The Other Journal).”

Both McCabe and McCarraher use the word ‘values’, but they use it differently. I see the way McCabe is using it to denote a paradigm or ideological shift. McCarraher, on the other hand, is talking about the invertebrate Christian “values” we tack onto our inherently un-Christian political economy. In this regard, both McCabe and McCarraher would argue the the radical or revolutionary Christian will not settle for surface sentiments that we infuse our system with. Rather, what we need is to change our system from the bottom up.

Obama, on the other hand, is comfortable with tacking values onto the American political economy. And while I think Obama (and Wallis) are to be applauded for getting Christians who do not identify with the Religious Right to care about the relationship between religion and politics, my question remains:

For the radical Christian, is tacking Christian values onto our current system enough?

Phenomena As Production

I came across this insightful passage in Herbert McCabe’s Law, Love & Language (thanks Halden!). For some reason I had never connected the fact/value split with production before:

Very roughly the bourgeois industrialised society is one in which men come into relationship, form a community, hence come to agreement and thus to ‘truth’, only in terms of production. What lies outside of this sphere is free, is not a matter of agreement, is ’subjective’. The world of hard facts is the world in which the factories are working, wages are being paid, goods are being distributed; this is the are of necessary agreement in the bourgeois society. Such a society does not require agreement in matters of aesthetics, religion, or ‘private morals’; these belong to the sphere of comment and are relegated first to private judgement (sic) and then, as their social irrelevance becomes clearer, to the subjective world of ‘values’.

I’d be curious to hear people’s comments on this: Is McCabe too simplistic in his appraisal?

In Defense of Young Boys

A rather cheeky post has recently appeared on Danny Jenkins’ “Musing on the Theo-Political,” entitled “What Stanley Hauerwas Does to Young Boys.” The post consisted entirely of a quote from Halden’s post about why he isn’t going to vote, wherein he argues that voting is merely a choice between two terrible options that have been bequeathed to us by our benevolent corporate behemoths. Of course, Halden never mentions Hauerwas in this post, but I can see the point “Paul” was trying to make. A cursory read of Haurewas’ work could certainly lead one to believe that our best hope as Christians in America is to foresake politics and retreat into our sectarian enclaves. This is an argument that some make (you can check out critiques of this non-approach to politics by John Stackhouse and Slovoj Zizek) but I think it naive to attribute this passive sectarianism to Hauerwas. If any one were to spend actual time reading Hauerwas they would discover that his maxim, “The primary task of the church is to be the church,” is not a call for withdrawal, but a call for us to attend carefully to our own identity in order that we may serve the world on the terms of Christianity rather than on the world’s own terms. Hauerwas’ politics is not a politics of weakness or withdrawal, it is a politics carefully and intentionally Christian. Even Jeffrey Stout would agree.

This, of course, does not dismiss that fact that some people who read Hauerwas find themselves in a position where they reject the idea of voting (even if Hauerwas himself does not. Check out the comment on Halden’s post by Melissa Florer-Bixler). But what are the reasons for such non-participation. I think Halden’s point was manifold: He doesn’t vote because 1) the choice is either between a giant douche or a turd-sandwich (thanks South Park), 2) elections are ultimately determined by corporate plutocrats, and 3) voting functions as a legitimating ideology that serves the purposes of plutocracy under the guise of democracy. I think, to a degree, each of these points has merit, especially the latter two.