(This is one of my various-thoughts-no-particular conclusion posts)
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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.
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Different productive systems differ in the way surplus value is extracted
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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.
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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.)
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Religions tell us what is sacred.
Now, it makes sense that some things would be held sacred in the economy of the classical world:
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Depend on conquest: glorify Mars
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Depend on the harvest: glorify the harvest-goddess, have harvest festivals
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Depend on fertility of livestock: glorify fertility goddess
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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.
Are you making a distinction between the particular religious practices adopted and pushed by the state (like the imperial cult during the Roman empire) or are you talking about religious practices in general? My understanding is paganism was very localized and whatever religious practices that existed would be dependent on the local economy. For example, a fishing village would focus on worshiping a sea deity while town with a large mine would focus on worshiping an earth deity.
Do you see how in the first case it would make sense to have many gods, and in the second case one god?
I don't think there's a grand theory of religious progression going from polytheism to monotheism. Monotheism in the sense of one singular god and not just some abstract cosmic force nor multiple apparent gods being aspects of a singular god largely started in one location on Earth. Aten was from Egypt, the Abrahamic god was from the Levant, and Ahura Mazda was from Persia. But if you turn towards East Asia, none of this apparent progression occurred. Polytheism still was (and is) a thing and yet that coexisted with ancestral worship, which itself coexisted with the conception of the universe as ruled by cosmic forces instead of anthropomorphic deities.
I don't think there's a grand theory of religious progression going from polytheism to monotheism.
I didn't read the post this way, as though monotheism is a higher stage of development than polytheism. The argument was that cultures in which the mode of production depends on several distinct, independent entities — like the sun, the ocean, the earth, etc — these cultures tend toward multiple deities corresponding to each of these entities. But in capitalist society, the aim of production is not use-values which are innumerable, but value as such. This reduction of the many to a single object of production therefore has its basis in the development of the value form. At least that's what I think Vampire is arguing; pretty sure I've read similar thoughts from Marx and Engels.
I think I'm on board as long as it's not deterministic. It is not so much that capitalist society will necessarily, deterministically develop a monotheistic religion; it is simply that, capitalism having been established, Christianity is especially well suited, because it is monotheistic and abstract. Maybe I am splitting hairs, but it is hard to say that Christianity developed alongside capitalism, when their time and place of birth are so far apart.
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.
Fire is a good example of a use-value held sacred.
We all need fire to live. And then most pantheons have the fire-god.
But I feel like there's deeper analysis to be done. It's more than just "worship what's important", it should be "worship the social order"
