by Dan Gouge

Karl Marx was, among other things, often a perceptive observer of capitalism. He once admiringly referred to it as "a machine for destroying limits." By this he meant that our economic system had ways of innovating around what were thought to be barriers to increased trade or production or even longevity or better health. What I want to suggest is that our economic system is also a machine for destroying our moral limits. We read about the abuses of the environment or of workers from the left or the glorification of a nihilistic culture from the right. Are these aberrations or part of the systemic nature of 21st Century capitalism?

Consider that the archetypal business form of our time is the corporation: a legal "person" created for the purpose of doing business. As Joel Bakan points out in The Corporation, this "person" is created for the sole purpose of enriching its shareholders. Now, for those of us with pension plans invested in these "persons" this is actually quite a nice thing. Here's an entity with ample legal protection whose only task is to make more money for your retirement and mine. Of course the inverse of this is that the corporation does not have the other concerns that you or I or other actual persons might have - again it's sole concern is to make money. What would you or I call a person who was pathologically consumed with kind of drive? Bakan goes with the clinical definition, "psychopath." I'll refer you to Bakan if you want to quibble with that definition, but even if you aren't prepared to throw DSM-IV at the corporation, I think we could agree on something like "jerk".  Now this particular jerk's motto is not so much "if it feels good, do it," but rather, "if it makes money, do it.

As Christians we seem fairly comfortable with a system that pools our impulse to greed and uses it to exploit others (and often ourselves). It becomes disconnected from us, we do not think of wealth accumulation as "greed" but as "sound financial planning" or "just business." Here's a thought experiment: what jobs would your pastor ask you to resign from because they are considered immoral? (Or, if you are a pastor reading this, what jobs would you challenge your congregants to resign from?) I can picture only an obstetrician-gynecologist who performed abortions or a sex-trade worker being challenged about their career choices. What we do at work otherwise seems to be a zone around which the church tends not to penetrate too deeply.

Now before you start raising the objection that calling our economic model psychopathic is some kind of leftist commie socialist critique, let me point out that the other side agrees. I'll refer you to no less than Milton Friedman who wrote thatthe only social responsibility of business is to increase profits. It is not enough, in Friedman's argument that corporations are singleminded about profits, it is rather that they ought to be singleminded about profits. In other words a corporation shouldbe a psychopath. While Marxism is explicit in its materialist atheism, the implicit message of capitalism - that increasing profits is the highest good - may well be implicitly atheist. Certainly notable atheist pro-capitalist Ayn Rand saw capitalism as more compatible with enlightenment rationalism than with religion or "mysticism" as she called it.

This existing order has, in our society, generally invoked two sets of intellectual responses - a left-wing one and a right-wing one - that Slavoj Žižek characterizes thusly:

“In short, the right-wing intellectual is a knave, a conformist who refers to the mere existence of the given order as an argument for it, and mocks the Left on account of its ‘utopian’ plans, which necessarily lead to catastrophe; while the left-wing intellectual is a fool, a court jester who publicly displays the lie of the existing order, but in a way which suspends the performative efficiency of his speech.”

In other words the response on the right is to throw up one's hands and accept that this is the way things are while the response on the left is to point out what is wrong with the system while simultaneously participating in it. Lots of corporate publishing houses and film studios have done very well by the works of left-wing critics like Michael Moore or Naomi Klein or the aforementioned Joel Bakan.

The church has meanwhile been more likely in North America to join the camp of those that would throw up their hands and accept that this is the way it is. The other common response among some Christians has been the Wendell Berry sort of "back to the land" idea that gets pilloried here in a way that I think describes the impossibility of going backwards. I'll go along with Marx instead and agree that a lot of the limits demolished by capitalism have actually improved our lives. It has after all worked better for more people than either slavery or feudalism. But is capitalism then the final, perfected system? Are we accepting that we should pool our resources into legal fictions that act as psychopaths to enrich us? Here I would like to share something else that Žižek said about Marxism: When describing in what meaningful way he could still call himself a Marxist, Žižek said it was only in the sense that he believed that there was another system coming after capitalism. In other words, we are not at the end of history as Fukuyama suggested. Is this not also the belief of the church, that another age is coming? Is this not our great hope - however we might differ in the specifics from Žižek - that something is coming after this?

Whatever kingdom economics will look like, I imagine it will be quite different from what we have now. The Marxists are right, there is still another system coming.