"The Enchantments of Mammon"

In his splendid essay “We Have Never Been Disenchanted,” Eugene McCarraher contests the prevailing narrative that the modern Western world has been drained of enchantment, a claim usually sourced to Max Weber but which in fact goes back much further.  McCarraher, citing Karl Marx in particular, argues that capitalism is an enchantment in itself; he further asserts that a variety of anti-capitalist forces, beginning with the Romantic movement of the 19^th century, have insisted in their own ways (religious and secular) that the enchanted world persists, had we but eyes to see it properly.

Here is McCarraher on Marx’s description of the enchantments of capitalism and on its “cash nexus”:

Having drowned religious faith in the arctic of pecuniary reason, money becomes “the almighty being,” the “truly creative power,” the de facto ontological basis of reality in capitalist civilization. “The power of money in bourgeois society” extends farther and deeper than the market in commodities; like the God of Genesis, it brings things into being from nothing, and consigns all indigent objects and desires to the void of nonexistence. “If I have the vocation for study but no money for it, I have no vocation for study—that is, no effective, no true vocation. On the other hand, if I have really no vocation for study but have the will and the money for it, I have an effective vocation for it.” 

As the metaphysical common sense of market society, money defines and even bestows all manner of qualities. “I am stupid, but money is the real mind of all things and how then should its possessor be stupid?” Money can even buy you love: “I am ugly, but I can buy for myself the most beautiful of women. Therefore I am not ugly, for the effect of ugliness—its deterrent power—is nullified by money.”¹ Like the fetishes of tribal peoples, money confers extraordinary powers once believed to belong to shamans, priests, and gods. 

Money’s enchanting powers are even more evident in Marx’s analysis of “the fetishism of commodities, and the secret thereof,” one of the more trenchant passages in Capital. From the sardonic opening of the chapter—the commodity is “a queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties”—through the exposure of “all the magic and necromancy that surrounds the products of labor as long as they take the form of commodities,” Marx maintains that commodity fetishism amounts to the sacramental system of capitalism. (At one point, Marx compares the commodity fetish to the Eucharist.) 

The “secret” of fetishized commodities lies in their twofold character as “use-value” and as “exchange-value.” The use-value of objects resides in their particular, qualitatively different uses—shoes for feet, food for eating, shirts for adornment. Their exchange-value rests in their status as commodities, objects produced for sale in the market for the purpose of capital accumulation. In order for these commodities to be exchanged for money, their incommensurable use values must be obscured; they must somehow be rendered qualitatively identical to other commodities. 

The “universal equivalent” of money—“the god among commodities,” as Marx had dubbed it in the Grundrisse—performs this act of ontological prestidigitation.² Objects become “worth” so much in money; their value is defined in terms of money, not in terms of their utility for human purposes. In the market, this pecuniary alchemy induces the spell of “fetishism,” by which people attribute a kind of agency and independence to commodities, the products of their own labor. Pervaded and commanded by the “god among commodities,” objects are enchanted, enlivened, by money—the metaphysical substratum of capitalist society. Thus commodity fetishism is a specifically capitalist form of alienation, a modern recipe for the opium of the people.

McCarraher then explains how the Romantic imagination, fiercely opposed to the enchantments of capitalism, “provided an aesthetic asylum for the spirits of pre-modern enchantment”:

When Romantics praised “enthusiasm,” “reverence,” and “imagination,” they restated the venerable Christian wisdom that reason is rooted in love, that full and genuine understanding precludes a desire to possess and control. Against the imperious claims of “Urizen”—Blake’s fallen “Prince of Light” and your reason reduced to measurement and calculation—Blake countered that “Enthusiastic Admiration is the First Principle of Knowledge & its last.” “To know a thing, what we can call knowing,” Carlyle surmised in Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840), we “must first love the thing, sympathise with it.” Arising from a sacramental sense of the world as a “region of the Wonderful,” Carlyle’s incessant admonitions to “reverence” and “wonder” were, at bottom, exhortations to love.

“Imagination” was the name Romantics gave to this erotic and sacramental consciousness. Yet imagination was not only a subjective enchantment; in the Romantic sensibility, imagination was the most perspicuous form of vision—the ability to see what is really there, behind the illusion or obscurity produced by our will to dissect and dominate. To Samuel Taylor Coleridge, if reason is “the power of universal and necessary convictions, the source and substance of truths above sense,” then imagination is its vibrant sacramental partner, “the living Power and prime Agent of all human perception … a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM.” For Romantics, imagination did not annul but rather completed rationality. During the French Revolution, Wordsworth observed, reason seemed “most intent on making of herself / A prime Enchantress.” Though warning of the brutality of instrumental reason—“our meddling intellect / Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things; / We murder to dissect”—Wordsworth described imagination as “Reason in her most exalted mood.” Imagination was, for the Romantics, the ecstasy of reason.

The lineage of Romantic anti-capitalism is too long and motley to delineate here, but its first representatives, [Thomas] Carlyle and John Ruskin, sketched the outlines of a prophetic sacramental imagination for subsequent critics of capitalist enchantment. In Sartor Resartus, “wonder” is Carlyle’s term for both the awareness and the ontological condition of sacramentality. “The Universe is not dead,” he declares, but rather “godlike,” pervaded by “an Invisible, Unnameable, Godlike, present everywhere in all that we see and work and suffer.” Against this sacral materialism Carlyle poses the “Gospel of Mammonism” in his indictment of industrial England, Past and Present(1843). Mammonism is the good news that money possesses and bestows a trove of “miraculous facilities.” Money conjures a “horrid enchantment”—“enchantment,” to Carlyle, is the counterfeit of wonder—in which owners and workers walk “spell-bound” in the midst of “plethoric wealth.”

Lastly, McCarraher references Thomas Merton:

In “Rain and the Rhinoceros,” a haunting essay in Raids on the Unspeakable (1966), Merton imagined the sad perversity of a world reduced to inventory. As he listened to showers in the forest near Gethsemani, the Kentucky abbey where he lived, Merton hastened to convey the beauty of the rain before it “becomes a utility that they can plan and distribute for money”—they meaning business, determined to take everything free and incalculable and make it a paying proposition.

To Merton, this insatiable avarice indicated an evil much deeper than moral perversion; it emanated from a capitalist enchantment that only masqueraded as secularity. Business was launching an ontological regime in which “what has no price has no value, [and] what cannot be sold is not real”; in the cosmology of capital, “the only way to make something actual is to place it on the market.” Graphing the rain on the commercial axis of effective demand and scarcity of supply, the alchemists of commerce cannot “appreciate its gratuity.” Yet for those who saw the world as the lavish largesse of a loving and prodigal God, “rain is a festival,” a celebration of its own gifted and gloriously pointless existence. “Every plant that stands in the light of the sun is a saint and an outlaw,” he exulted. “Every blade of grass is an angel in a shower of glory.”

Child of pop culture that I am, Merton’s beautiful lines echo for me the words of Bob Dylan: “In the fury of the moment I can see the Master’s hand /In every leaf that trembles, in every grain of sand.”

Eugene McCarraher’s essay appears at The Hedgehog Review: http://iasc-culture.org/THR/THR_article_2015_Fall_McCarraher.php  He has a book forthcoming (from which this essay is no doubt taken): The Enchantments of Mammon: Capitalism and the American Moral Imagination.  It’s on my wish list.

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¹ Why am I suddenly thinking of Donald Trump?

² “ontological prestidigitation” is a wonderful phrase, the secular equivalent of the Catholic (and alchemical) term “transubstantiation”.  McCarraher had previously remarked that Marx compared “the commodity fetish to the Eucharist”; the phrase “ontological prestidigitation” illuminates that comparison beautifully.