Wages of Rebellion Read Online Free PDF Page B

drive for profit as service to the “beast.”
    Technological advancement and wealth are conflated in capitalism with human progress. All aspects of human existence that cannot be measured or quantified—beauty, truth, love, grief, the search for meaning, and the struggle with our own mortality—are ignored and ridiculed.
    Walter Benjamin argues that capitalism is not only a formation “conditioned by religion” but an “essentially religious phenomenon,” albeit one that no longer seeks to connect humans with the mystery of life. 55 And it is the religion of capitalism, the maniacal quest for wealth at the expense of others, that turns human beings into beasts of prey.
    “A Religion may be discerned in capitalism,” Benjamin writes, “that is to say, capitalism serves essentially to allay the same anxieties, torments, and disturbances to which the so-called religions offered answers.” 56 Capitalism, Benjamin notes, has called on human societies to embark on a ceaseless and ultimately futile quest to find fulfillment in the endless amassing of money and power. This quest creates a culture that is dominated by guilt, a sense of inadequacy, and self-loathing and that enslaves nearly all its adherents through wages.
    Benjamin calls capitalism “a purely cultic religion, perhaps the most extreme that ever existed.” In this system, “things have a meaning only in their relationship to the cult.” Capitalism, he notes, has no specific dogma or theology. Rather, “utilitarianism acquires its religious overtones.” It “is the celebration of the cult sans rêve et sans merci [without dream or mercy].” There are no weekdays. Every day is a feast day filled with consumption. With every acquisition the starting point for new desires, capitalism leaves human beings with a sense of never being able to achieve equilibrium. “Capitalism is probably the first instance of a cult that creates guilt, not atonement,” Benjamin writes. The system, he continues, “is entirely without precedent, in that it is a religion which offers not the reform of existence but its complete destruction. It is the expansion of despair, until despair becomes a religious state of the world in the hope that this will lead to salvation. God’s transcendence is at an end.” 57
    The barbarism of our new Dark Age will hold out Faustian pacts at the expense of others; first the poor in the developing world will be sacrificed, and then the poor at home. Communities and communal organizations that manage to break free from the dominant culture will find a correlation between the amount of freedom they enjoy and the amount of independence they attain in a world where access to land, food, and water has become paramount. Such communities that share the burdens of a disintegrating society, such as the ad hoc one formed in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, are our best hope for sustaining the intellectual and artistic traditions that define the heights of human culture and permit the common good. As those who build these communitarian structures discard the religion of capitalism, their acts of charity and resistance will merge—and they will be condemned by the corporate state.

III /The Invisible Revolution
    The death of the contemporary forms of social order ought to gladden rather than trouble the soul. But what is frightening is that the departing world leaves behind it not an heir, but a pregnant widow. Between the death of one and the birth of the other, much water will flow by, a long night of chaos and desolation will pass
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    —A LEXANDER H ERZEN, ON THE
FAILURE OF THE 1848 REVOLUTIONS
    “D id you ever ask yourself how it happens that government and capitalism continue to exist in spite of all the evil and trouble they are causing in the world?” the anarchist Alexander Berkman wrote in his essay “The Idea Is the Thing.” “If you did, then your answer must have been that it is because the people support those institutions, and that