Notes in @NWirzba’s 'This Sacred Life', distilling McCarraher’s account of capitalism as an ontological reconstitution of the world, whereby intrinsic meaning and value are displaced by a regime in which life becomes intelligible primarily through exchange, accumulation, and use.
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41 McCarraher, The Enchantments of Mammon, 582. McCarraher’s characterization of neoliberalism builds upon his larger thesis that modern capitalism represents a seismic cultural shift that relocates the source of value and meaning in money rather than God. The pursuit of money, inspired by what Thomas Carlyle called “the gospel of Mammon,” altered in a profound manner how people related to places, fellow creatures, and things. Capitalism functions as economic and political system, but it also functions as a religion: capitalism is a form of enchantment – perhaps better, a misenchantment, a parody or perversion of our longing for a sacramental way of being in the world. Its animating spirit is money. Its theology, philosophy, and cosmology has been otherwise known as “economics.” Its sacramentals consist of fetishized commodities and technologies – the material culture of production and consumption. Its moral and liturgical codes are contained in management theory and business journalism. Its clerisy is a corporate intelligentsia of economists, executives, managers, and business writers ... Its iconography consists of advertising, public relations, marketing and product design. Its beatific vision of eschatological destiny is the global imperium of capital, a heavenly city of business with incessantly expanding production, trade, and consumption. And its gospel has been that of “Mammonism,” the attribution of ontological power to money and of existential sublimit to its possessors. (5)
Open original document@SandyMount18 @jasonwblakely Awkward but empirically obvious. The absolute scripture of world capitalism is less a providential order than a necropolitical death cult—a counterfeit covenant hollowing bodies and spirits alike, peddling this systematic immiseration to its victims as salvation itself.
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Copy of tweet and quote tweet beginning here: This sentence, in a 2021 US Federal Reserve document: “The primary role of mainstream economics in our society is to provide an apologetics for a criminally oppressive, unsustainable, and unjust social order." - Hildenbrand, 1994. Image: World Inequality Report 2022 Image: “In 2021, after three decades of trade and financial globalization, global inequalities remain extremely pronounced: they are about as great today as they were at the peak of Western imperialism in the early 20th century.” QT The Alston report is the most serious challenge yet to poverty triumphalism, to the political apologias that it has supported, and to the fiction that economies of massive inequality are destroying poverty rather than destroying the poor. @unitethepoor