Zikes!

It's been 10 days since my last post. I apologize. Life got a little crazy. It's only now starting to stabilize - starting with the fact that I went to bed at 9:30 last night and woke up at 9:50 this morning. Anyway, here's what's shaking.

I've been immersed in Marx, Marxists, and Marxians for the past few weeks. It's been really thought-provoking, especially given the stigma attached to that line of thinking in this country (thanks, McCarthy!). After reading various parts of a Marx-Engels Reader (I felt pretty hip buying it), I've had to read major portions of The Making of the English Working Class by E.P. Thompson and The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America by Michael Taussig. I'm still slogging through them - they're quite long and quite dense. Thompson's book is especially difficult - every word involves some concept of English history with which I am unfamiliar. There's also this bizarre section of that book where Thompson analyzes hymns by the Wesleys and reads all of this crazy homoerotic, sado-masochist thinking into them (he blames it on the sexual suppression present in Methodism, a denomination which he and a colleague term "psychological masturbation"). Weeeeeird.

Anyway, Taussig's book is pretty dang interesting. He considers market exchange (read: the basis of capitalism) as something unnatural: "a social form that undermines the basis of social unity by allowing creativity and the satisfaction of need to be subverted by a system that puts profit seeking ahead of people and that makes man an appendange of the economy and a slave to the work process instead of the master of it" (29). This follows from Marx's view of work, particularly what he calls "the alienation of labor." This basically means that, in capitalism, skill and human worth isn't valued, only profit is. Because of this, humans are alienated from their work -- it really doesn't matter whether you worked 8 hours to build that table perfectly, it's just going to be sold in mass quantities for $20 regardless of who built it or how it was built. "Instead of man being the aim of production," writes Taussig, "production has become the aim of man and wealth the aim of production; instead of tools and the productive mechanism in general liberating man from the slavery of toil, man has become the slave of tools and the instituted process of production" (32). Humans now ask "What is good for business?" instead of "What is business good for?"

All of this relates to commodity fetishism, which I don't have time to explain here.

Here's why I find this interesting. In Christianity, we have the concept of the fall, particularly of the fall of work. Note Genesis 3:17-19, where God explains the curse to Adam:

"And to Adam he said, 'Because you have listened to the voice of your wife and have eaten of the tree of which I commanded you, 'You shall not eat of it,' cursed is the ground because of you; in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you; and you shall eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread,
till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return.'"

God says that work is going to be difficult ("By the sweat of your face"), it's not going to return as much ("cursed is the ground"), and it's going to be around forever ("all the days of your life"). Now, here's the thing. How much of the alienation of labor seen in capitalism is part of the curse of work -- i.e. it would be around in some form regardless of the economic system -- and how much of it is due to capitalism? What would the curse look like in communism (since it would definitely be present)?

These are the things I'm pondering. We're socialized in America to believe that capitalism is sacred. Don't believe me? Try asking students how much Marx they've read since middle school. Or here's something more disturbing: I've found that when I attack capitalism in front of Christians, many of them take it as personally as if I had just renounced my faith. To paraphrase and manipulate Thoreau, "We must remember that we are Christians first, and Americans at a late hour." If Marx and his followers have something valuable to say about work and money, then let's listen to them.

This reminds me. If you haven't read this article, do it now:
When Not to Refute Atheism: Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud for Christian Reflection

This lecture changed my life my freshman year of college.

Sorry for the length - my congratulations if you made it to the end of this post!

Peace,
Sam
P.S. I've just started The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck for my junior seminar. It was on the NYTimes bestseller list for 10 years! I'm sure I'll have a post about it soon.