First of May Reflections on Work, Marx, and Christianity

 

I have long thought that, up to a point, Marx’ understanding of labor and the capitalist system of production and consumption was consistent with Christianity, which should not be surprising given he was still part of a largely Christian culture. Still, he is treated by many theologians and Catholic philosophers as diametrical opposites (are there protestant philosophers? Luther’s “reason is a whore” has left Protestantism largely bereft of philosophers unless one counts Kant, whom Luther would have hated more than he did Aristotle; is Kierkegaard really a philosopher or an anti-philosopher? Not surprisingly, he is a kind of fideist, at least as I read him).

    If human life is sacred, then human labor cannot be understood merely as a commodity among commodities. For labor is not simply an external object exchanged on a market. Human work proceeds from the person himself:  from his intelligence, body, creativity, time, relationships, and ultimately from finite mortal life. To reduce labor wholly to market value is therefore to risk reducing the worker himself to an instrument within an impersonal economic mechanism. Which is largely what has happened.

     This is where the early Karl Marx’s critique of alienation retains moral force even for a Christian thinker. Marx perceived with extraordinary clarity that industrial capitalism tends toward a condition in which work becomes external to the worker rather than an expression of meaningful participation in reality. The worker experiences himself as replaceable, abstract labor-power. For Marx, alienation is the condition in which human beings become estranged from their own labor, from the products they create, from other persons, and ultimately from their own human nature because their work is no longer experienced as meaningful self-expression or participation in communal life, but as externally imposed labor performed for survival within an impersonal economic system. The worker’s activity and its products confront him as something foreign and dominating rather than as extensions of his own creative and social being. Technology itself, developed of, by, and for capital, in its essence capitalist, literally physically embodying capitalist imperatives, subordinates human rhythms and communities to the demands of production and profit. Most social relations themselves come to be mediated by exchange value. And consumption functions ideologically, promising fulfillment through acquisition while leaving deeper forms of human flourishing starved.

     Moreover, for Marx capitalism tends toward the immiseration of the worker because competition and the drive for profit continually pressure capitalists to reduce labor costs, mechanize production, and extract more surplus value from workers, while simultaneously rendering them increasingly dependent, alienated, and replaceable. Even where material living standards may rise for some (invariably at the cost of others), the deeper form of immiseration lies in the worker’s reduction to labor-power within a system in which human activity, relationships, and even consciousness become subordinated to the imperatives of capital accumulation (“growth” – sick metaphor here). We need not accept Marx’s metaphysics (historical materialism) or revolutionary conclusions to recognize the descriptive truth of much of his thought.

    A Christian account should deepen rather than reject this critique. For Christianity already is anti-reductionist to the core, certainly with respect to the human person. The person is not merely a producer, a consumer, a unit of labor, an economic maximizer, or an interchangeable component of a technical system. We are beings made for truth, love, contemplation, community, worship, creativity, and participation in the good. Labor therefore possesses dignity not merely because it produces wealth but because it is an activity of a person whose life is sacred. Thus the commodification of labor spiritually disfigures (literally) the soul. Under capitalism, the worker no longer experiences work as meaningful participation in creation or communal life but as survival within an abstract machinery whose ends he neither controls nor fully understands. One sells not simply products but hours of life itself. Time becomes monetized existence.

     The critique of consumerism then follows logically. If persons are alienated from meaningful labor, family, locality, religion, craftsmanship, and communal belonging, consumption easily becomes compensatory mythology. The market promises transcendence through acquisition: identity through brands, fulfillment through novelty, meaning through lifestyle, salvation through consumption. In this sense commodity fetishism is not merely an economic illusion but a spiritual disorder. Objects appear invested with quasi-sacred significance precisely because genuine forms of transcendence and participation have withered. The shopping mall or now Amazon is a parody of liturgy.

    A Christian critique would likely go further than Marx here. Marx often treats religion primarily as ideology masking material relations. But Christianity can instead interpret capitalist alienation as a deformation of the person’s orientation toward the Good. The problem is not simply unequal distribution of resources or ownership structures, but a deeper spiritual reduction of reality itself: 

• nature reduced to raw material
• labor reduced to a commodity
• community dissolved for self-advantage
• culture degraded to bare entertainment
• people reduced to human capital
• even attention becomes monetizable data. 

(I can already see ties here with thinkers I treasure, such as Josef Pieper and Simone Weil. Pieper warns against the “world of total work,” where human existence is reduced to function and utility. Weil writes with direct truthfulness about factory labor as spiritual affliction when the worker becomes subordinated to mechanized necessity.)

    The Christian affirmation of the sacredness of life therefore places limits upon economic systems just as it places limits upon political violence. If the human soul possesses irreducible dignity, then no system, whether capitalist, communist, technocratic, or nationalist, may legitimately treat them merely as instruments for production, efficiency, profit, or historical progress. Capitalism is a violation of the first article of the German Basic Law: die Würde des Menschen ist unantastbar / the dignity of the human being may not be violated. Of course, there are or have been states, the Federal Republic of Germany among them, that have tried to humanize the beast. But with globalization (opening to China, NAFTA, etc. All policy-driven choices. The state promoting the interests of capital), that project has died. Now all the workers of one town, one region, one country are in competition with all other workers in a deadly downward spiral.