Eugene McCarraher (2019), The Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity. Harvard University Press.
Thomas Piketty (2020), Capital and Ideology. Harvard University Press.
‘It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism’. Such was the strange malaise of our times as captured by the late Mark Fisher’s notion of capitalist realism: ‘the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it.’[1]
Marxism was always defined by its eschatology—its central prophecy of the inevitable collapse of capitalism under the weight of its own internal contradictions—yet, since the demise of actually-existing communism and the ‘end of history’[2] in 1989, an ennui has come over the Left. Entrapped within capitalist realism as much as the Right’s willing dazzlement with the market, socialists were left grasping for a new conception of emancipatory politics. As Perry Anderson lamented at the turn of the millennium, a spirit of accommodation came to haunt post-‘89 socialism: ‘The underlying attitude is: capitalism has come to stay, we must make our peace with it… The only starting-point for a realistic Left today is a lucid registration of historical defeat.’[3]
In real politics, mainstream social democrats found themselves bereft of new ideas. With a shrug, they conceded to neoliberalism through the ‘Third Way’ liberalism of Blair, Clinton, and Hawke: ‘capitalism with a human face’. Today, the result has been the rejection of centre-left parties by their traditional voters and the curse of annihilation by ‘Pasokification’. In their vacancy, an insurgent populist Left has asserted itself—Sanders, Corbyn, Mélenchon, Tsipras—and yet their nostalgia for the halcyon days of twentieth-century class politics has led them to embrace well-worn policies of old, such as mass nationalisation. Certainly, an intellectual creativity has blossomed amongst progressives, with an increasing interest in future-facing policies like a Universal Basic Income (to meet the challenge of automation) and the Green New Deal (to ameliorate the ecological crisis)—yet such have still yet to find favour with mainstream voters or home in left-wing governments.
Within academia, the marxisant too have been somewhat reticent in their capacities for post-capitalist imagination—as exemplified in Wolfgang Streeck’s prophecy of an extensive period of capitalist stagnation. Indeed, his 2017 work was insightfully titled not The End of Capitalism, as would have been the case maybe fifty years ago, but a rather more tentative and resigned How Will Capitalism End? (perhaps the most depressed formulation would be Will Capitalism End?). Streeck’s prescription for ‘the crises of democratic capitalism’[4] is a similarly nostalgic neo-Bennite siege economy oriented around a national democratic Staatsvolk, as represented in his almost lone advocacy for German withdrawal from the European Union.[5] Elsewhere, a resurgence of utopianism has been a defining feature of much leftist theory: as with Aaron Bastani’s provocative Fully Automated Luxury Communism, or Paul Mason’s more measured PostCapitalism and its twin, Srnicek and Williams’ Inventing the Future.
However, in these two recent works by Thomas Piketty and Eugene McCarraher—both grand (and long) economic and intellectual histories—the horizons of capitalism’s social totality have been probed not by casting an eye forwards toward utopia, but by turning the gaze backwards; thus embodying a rich tradition of Marxist historical inquiry exemplified by Christopher Hill, Robert Brenner, and Ellen Meiksins Wood. Yet rather than simply asking ‘where did capitalism come from?’, these two new books seek to locate historical explanations for our incapacity to even imagine anything else: they are genealogies of capitalist realism.
Thomas Piketty shot to global fame in 2013 with Capital in the Twenty-First Century, a surprise bestseller which caught the Zeitgeist of the post-2008 slump. Yet, in contrast to the sometimes coldly analytical prose of that book, Capital and Ideology (2020) brings Piketty towards that stalwart of Marxist theory: ideological analysis. Indeed, the author acknowledges the failings of that original work, especially its West-centrism and its ‘black box’ treatment of the actual political changes which drove changes in inequality over time—with this new book an attempt to remedy those shortcomings.
Of course, Piketty has not abandoned his almost emotional belief in the explanatory power of data, but here he combines this quantitative impulse with a new energy. Whereas Capital in the Twenty-First Century gave essentially a richly textured description of the history of inequality across the longue durée, in Capital and Ideology he sets his sights on the ideologies which have actually maintained such inequalities in various temporal and spatial contexts.
Piketty’s central notion here is the ‘inequality regime’, understood as the ideological structure of legitimation of a given historical arrangement of income and wealth inequality. The animating claim is simple: ‘Inequality is neither economic nor technological; it is ideological and political.’[6] It is an anti-determinism which sets Piketty apart from Marx—who saw changes in productive technology (the invention of the steam engine, for instance) as the main causal factor of transformations of social and cultural structures.
Piketty’s message is therefore a more optimistic one: change the ideas, and you change the system. There is, however, a naïvety here—as Walter Scheidel (2018) argues in an alternative account of inequality, The Great Leveller, the worrisome historical record attests that major egalitarian moments have only ever been achieved in the wake of great violence (the French Revolution and the Second World War being the most notable examples).
Nonetheless, Piketty’s analysis of ‘inequality regimes’ throughout history (supporting feudalism, slavery, colonialism, or, today, hypercapitalism) is impressively done. In the past, Piketty’s inclination towards grand history and economic abstraction had sometimes proven frustrating, but here he also indulges in some fascinating deep dives into specific non-European cases. Most interestingly here are the cases of India and the slave society of Saint-Domingue (later Haiti), perhaps the most unequal society in history (where, he informs us, in 1780 the top decile’s share of income was 81 percent in a population of which a staggering 90 percent were slaves).[7]
This inclusion of the Haitian revolution (one of the only successful mass slave revolts in history) is a pleasing one, as it remains less well-known than its maternal French revolutionary convulsion, despite such brilliant treatments as C.L.R. James’ classic The Black Jacobins. However, with Scheidel’s argument in mind, it also symbolises the slight sterility of Piketty’s analysis, with his oversight being the unignorable violence that accompanied egalitarian transformation. Without a doubt, ideological change was important—as with the Haitian slaves’ hijacking of French revolutionary egalitarianism to elaborate their demands—but their emancipation only came through enormous bloodletting (the apotheosis being Dessalines’ ordered massacre of nearly the entire white population in 1804). Piketty’s emphasis on the ideational aspects of inequality is important, but in cases like this it presents a somewhat too emollient story of the history of egalitarian transformation.
Eugene McCarraher’s The Enchantments of Mammon, like Piketty’s book, concerns itself with the grand historical sweep of capitalism. But where Piketty grasps for data, McCarraher’s explanatory bannister is more idiosyncratic: theology. The impetus of the book is a critique of Max Weber’s account of capitalism, especially his notion of capitalism’s role in ‘the disenchantment of the world’. In grand, declarative prose not unlike a sermon (a register which defines the book’s character), McCarraher outlines this typical story:
‘Once upon a time, the world was enchanted. Rocks, trees, rivers, and rain pulsated with invisible forces, powers that enlivened and determined the affairs of tribes and empires… But with the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and industrial capitalism in Europe, the company of spirits was evicted from the cosmos… Gradually, the sciences dispelled the realm of mystery; the prose of reason hushed the poetry of superstition; greed and calculation fostered callous disregard for the earth and the bonds of community.’[8]
Capitalism was the crucial catalyst in this process. Through its unstoppable forces of commodification and alienation, ‘capitalism evacuated sacredness from material objects and social relationships’,[9] evicting spiritual for monetary value in the material world. This story is a common one. Ellen Woods captured it in her narrative of how capitalism carved out an ‘economic’ realm as distinct from politics and sociality.[10] In anthropology, Marcel Mauss described it in his classic The Gift, which drew on Polanyi’s notion of ‘embeddedness’ in its contrasting of economic exchange in market societies with the ‘gift exchange’ of pre-capitalist societies.[11] These were reciprocal exchanges of ‘inalienable goods’—most famously captured in Malinowski’s case of the ‘Kula ring’, an elaborate circular social exchange of shell armbands and necklaces in the Trobriand Islands.
McCarraher’s contention is that this story is wrong. Capitalism did not desacralise the world, but rather reinvigorates itself precisely through a kind of secular religiosity: ‘Far from being an agent of “disenchantment”, capitalism… has been a regime of enchantment, a repression, displacement, and renaming of our intrinsic and inveterate longing for divinity.’[12] McCarraher’s diagnosis of the pathogenesis of Fisher’s capitalist realism is therefore spiritual—as the book’s subtitle puts it, to answer why we cannot imagine beyond capitalism we must tell the story of ‘how capitalism became the religion of modernity’. The metaphor is a muscular one:
‘Capitalism is a religion… Its theology, philosophy, and cosmology have been otherwise known as “economics”. Its sacramentals consist of fetishized commodities and technologies… Its moral and liturgical codes are contained in management theory and business journalism. Its clerisy is a corporate intelligentsia… Its iconography consists of advertising, public relations, marketing, and product design. Its beatific vision of eschatological destiny is that global imperium of capital, a heavenly city of business with incessantly expanding production, trade, and consumption. And its gospel has been that of “Mammonism”, the attribution of ontological power to money.’[13]
Theoretically, then, where Piketty’s quantitative Marxism exemplifies something like the Annales tradition or Wallerstein’s world-systems theory, McCarraher’s cultural analysis of capitalism owes more to the pessimism of the Frankfurt School (his debt to Walter Benjamin he acknowledges), offering something of a blend of Marxist humanism and Christian theology.
Thereafter, the structure of the book—like Piketty’s grand tour of historical inequality regimes—is a tracking sweep of ‘capitalist enchantment’ across the ages, from its origins in sixteenth-century England to the birth of capitalism’s most potent form, neoliberalism, in the twentieth. In mapping this vast topography, McCarraher’s empirical ecumenism is impressive—drawing on scripture, history, philosophy, speculative fiction, advertising, and much more besides—and many of the book’s cases stick in the mind.
For instance, an extract from Nancy Mitford’s 1951 novel The Blessing is striking in its Fordist evangelism: ‘I should like to see a bottle of Coca-Cola on every table in England,’ the protagonist declares. ‘When I say a bottle of Coca-Cola… I mean an outward and visible sign of something inward and spiritual, I mean it as if each Coca-Cola bottle contained a djinn, and as if that djinn was our great American civilisation ready to spring out of each bottle and cover the whole global universe with its great wide wings.’[14] Golden examples like this litter the book, providing support for the author’s thesis, and testament to his scholarship. (It is of no surprise that the book took two decades to write.)
In the Epilogue, McCarraher arrives at the case of contemporary Trumpland, a society in which ‘most Americans remain far from serious about a new way of life not indentured to capital’. Indeed, whilst some on the Left (notably accelerationists) hoped that the vulgarity of a plutocratic Donald Trump presidency might finally break capitalism’s spell, McCarraher is more pessimistic. Instead, ‘despite Trump’s execrable racism and misogyny’, his election embodied the durability of capitalist enchantment: ‘his appeal stemmed, in large measure, from the dogged persistence of the capitalist idyll… Trump’s campaign slogan—“Make America Great Again”—evoked the waning but still mesmeric hope for a revival of the promise of capitalism, as well as a time when the purchasing power of the wages of whiteness and masculinity were high. It would seem that most of “the 99 percent” want to “take back” the American Dream, not awaken from and definitely repudiate it.’[15]
In all, McCarraher’s book is a tour de force. Of course, political theology is nothing new—Carl Schmitt’s 1922 analysis of political modernity as a form of secularised religion remains a touchstone—yet McCarraher’s use of theology to explain capitalist modernity is a genuine force of creativity, one sincerely conceived and brought to life with a spiritual urgency quite different to the cool-headed Archimedean objectivity favoured by an economist like Piketty.
So, in Lenin’s terms, what is to be done? Is it possible escape the grip of capitalism realism, whether conceived as an ideological regime of hypercapitalism or a spiritual imperium of capitalist religion? Helpfully, both authors end with ruminations on what their chosen past tells us about the future.
For Piketty, the practicality of his solutions echoes those of Capital in the Twenty-First Century, which proposed a global wealth tax to mediate the effects of gross inequality. In this new book, the final chapter spells out a broader package of policies under the banner of ‘participatory socialism’—consisting in high inheritance, income, and carbon taxes (intended to fund redistributing policies like a basic income and a citizens’ capital endowment), as well as a broader commitment to the ‘co-management’ of business with workers. In all, Piketty’s aim is explicitly a genuine ‘transcendence of capitalism’.[16] It is easy to criticise the seeming infeasibility of implementing such radical policies within the current political climates of advanced capitalist societies, yet Piketty should at least be applauded for always presenting tangible solutions to the problems he raises.
McCarraher’s solution, like his analysis, is less technocratic and more spiritual: a call for ‘repentance and renewal’.[17] His inspiration is the anti-capitalist Romanticism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, exemplified by figures like William Morris and John Ruskin, a reservoir of thought which McCarraher believes offers a humane understanding of man’s place in the cosmos—as something more than mere homo economicus. In contemporary politics, McCarraher’s ‘left Romanticism’ therefore exemplifies a kind of Christian eco-socialism or politicised ‘new animism’.
Whilst neither author really intimates towards an entirely new system to replace capitalism, both these books nevertheless exemplify the importance of historical inquiry as the first step to usurping the inheritance of capitalist realism. It is surely only by understanding the past that we might begin to imagine the future.
Caiban E. Butcher
[1] Mark Fisher (2009), Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?, p.2.
[2] Francis Fukuyama (1989), ‘The End of History?’. National Review.
[3] Perry Anderson (2000), ‘Renewals’. New Left Review, p.9-12.
[4] Wolfgang Streeck (2011), ‘The Crises of Democratic Capitalism’. New Left Review.
[5] Adam Tooze (2017), ‘A General Logic of Crisis’. London Review of Books.
[6] Thomas Piketty (2020), Capital and Ideology, p.7.
[7] Piketty, p.261.
[8] Gene McCarraher (2019), The Enchantments of Mammon, p.1.
[9] Ibid, p.1.
[10] Ellen Meiksins Woods (1999), The Origin of Capitalism.
[11] Marcel Mauss (1925), Essai sur le don: forme et raison de l’échange dans les sociétés archaïques.
[12] McCarraher, p.4.
[13] Ibid, p.5.
[14] McCarraher, p.507.
[15] McCarraher, p.670.
[16] Piketty, p.971.
[17] McCarraher, p.6.