(This is one of my various-thoughts-no-particular conclusion posts)

  • Firstly, don't think that by 'paganism' I mean some Tumblr thing: I mean the dominant religion of classical antiquity. And Marx does quote thinkers from Greece & Rome a lot, and talks about its productive system a bit.

  • Different productive systems differ in the way surplus value is extracted

  • Marxist theory thinks of religion as something that justifies and protects the productive system. e.g. Catholicism was the religious superstructure on the feudal base. Feudalism extracts surplus value by duty to your lord.

  • Quote from Capital Ch.3 Section 3 'Money': "The class struggle in the ancient world, for instance, took the form mainly of a contest between debtors and creditors" (The Marxist economist Michael Hudson writes about this.)

  • Religions tell us what is sacred.

Now, it makes sense that some things would be held sacred in the economy of the classical world:

  • Depend on conquest: glorify Mars

  • Depend on the harvest: glorify the harvest-goddess, have harvest festivals

  • Depend on fertility of livestock: glorify fertility goddess

  • Depend on the tribe: glorify your ancestors (Latin: maiores). We mock social rebellion as being a "fuck you dad" attitude; the flipside of that is that ancestor-worship implies social conservatism.

Tribe

To emphasise the last point a bit more: in capitalism we have the nuclear family at best. Lots of people have no family at all. In ancienter economic systems, the family/tribe was everything, was your economic support. It makes sense to revere fertility and having lots of kids, as that's the strength of your family.

Polytheism

Chapter 1 of 'Capital' talks about how use-values are myriad, exchange-value is singular....

...and about how people used to produce for use-value (catch fish to eat), but the commodity-form made them produce for exchange-value (which, I repeat, is singular).

Do you see how in the first case it would make sense to have many gods, and in the second case one god?

But none of that quite gets to the heart of surplus-value-extraction. (Well, Mars being an important god does: that's extraction-through-conquest.) But how does paganism justify extraction of surplus value by creditors? This is where my theory is incomplete.

  • quarrk [he/him]
    ·
    9 months ago

    Reminds me of this bit near the end of chapter 1 of Capital ... I'm sure there is more in other writings. Bold added

    Excerpt

    The religious world is but the reflex of the real world. And for a society based upon the production of commodities, in which the producers in general enter into social relations with one another by treating their products as commodities and values, whereby they reduce their individual private labour to the standard of homogeneous human labour – for such a society, Christianity with its cultus of abstract man, more especially in its bourgeois developments, Protestantism, Deism, &c., is the most fitting form of religion. In the ancient Asiatic and other ancient modes of production, we find that the conversion of products into commodities, and therefore the conversion of men into producers of commodities, holds a subordinate place, which, however, increases in importance as the primitive communities approach nearer and nearer to their dissolution. Trading nations, properly so called, exist in the ancient world only in its interstices, like the gods of Epicurus in the Intermundia, or like Jews in the pores of Polish society. Those ancient social organisms of production are, as compared with bourgeois society, extremely simple and transparent. But they are founded either on the immature development of man individually, who has not yet severed the umbilical cord that unites him with his fellowmen in a primitive tribal community, or upon direct relations of subjection. They can arise and exist only when the development of the productive power of labour has not risen beyond a low stage, and when, therefore, the social relations within the sphere of material life, between man and man, and between man and Nature, are correspondingly narrow. This narrowness is reflected in the ancient worship of Nature, and in the other elements of the popular religions. The religious reflex of the real world can, in any case, only then finally vanish, when the practical relations of every-day life offer to man none but perfectly intelligible and reasonable relations with regard to his fellowmen and to Nature.

    The life-process of society, which is based on the process of material production, does not strip off its mystical veil until it is treated as production by freely associated men, and is consciously regulated by them in accordance with a settled plan. This, however, demands for society a certain material ground-work or set of conditions of existence which in their turn are the spontaneous product of a long and painful process of development.