Steps to a Mystique of the Economy

Disclaimer: God

There are several ways of understanding an object or a phenomenon. We can talk about its essence, its form, its origin... We can also understand it according to its way of being productive. I would like to use this latter point of view. The question, then, is no longer ‘what is it?’, ‘what does it look like?’, ‘where does it come from?’, but rather ‘what does it produce?’, ‘how is it definable according to its production?’.

Admittedly, the object we will talk about is not of the easiest type to handle, not even with the best precautions. It is not easy, but it is fundamental. Rather, it is splendid and necessary. After all, beautiful things are difficult.

What do we talk about, when we talk about God? To say it in one word, according to the point of view previously stated, we talk about His glory. ‘The glory of Him who moveth everything / Doth penetrate the universe, and shine.’ The glory of God, His power (puissance), expands and irradiates like light through any substance that shares its same universe. Just like light, His glory is the measure of His productive force, of His ability to produce results: to make blossom, to burn, to make grow, to make a desert. Can we, then, talk about God every time we encounter an object which is able to irradiate light? In a sense, yes, but we can’t really give the denomination of ‘God’ to any tiny little light trembling in the night.

We must be clear, now: when we talk about God – when I talk about God – I do so with the tongue and the eyes of an atheist. A benevolent atheist. With almost fideistic certainty, I place God in a position that follows that of humans along the chronological segment of History. As He was produced by humans (for reasons that we won’t explore now), God cannot exist without them. And yet, as I was saying, mine is a benevolent gaze. Better, it is passionate. Love as well, just like God, neither preexists humans, nor can exist aside from them. Yet, we cannot deny its devastating power, its extraordinary productivity. But there is a difference between love and God, a difference that is not to be calculated in terms of the intensity of their flame, but rather of the extension of their light. If love is a streetlamp, shining at road crossings, God is a sun that lights up the whole universe. God is a phenomenon that affects communities in their entirety. That is, He is a social phenomenon.

We could dare to define God as the main star that, through His glory, lights an entire society, producing His effects at a fundamental level of social life. Like the rays of the sun structure the color and the spines of plants, which in turn transform themselves in order to please Him, God functions within human communities as the horizon of reference according to which a society shapes its structures, dynamics, and scales of judgement.

Such a God, of course, is far form being immortal. Like in an accelerated galaxy, the stars that succeed each other in the role of God change continuously and take each other’s place according to the portions of History and of the world on which they shine. Many different Gods have crossed the sky of the West over the last two thousand years. The God of imperial law, that of theocracy, that of war, that of reason, that of the State... Let us lift our gaze to the sky and let us observe the face of the sun currently shining above our heads. We have long learnt His present name, and His power has been continuously expanding over the years, to the point of encompassing almost the totality of the globe that produced Him. He is a elderly-ish sun, now, almost two hundred years old. His name, as it is often the case, preexisted His Kingdom. We used to call Him oikonomia, when He was still in His youth. Now, in the glorious time of His zenith, we call Him Economy.

History of the Churches

Like any God, Economy has His own church or, rather, His own churches. And it is known that churches, when institutionalized, are permanently warring armies.

The main religious war ended just twenty years ago, when the crusaders of Western Capitalism exterminated the infidels of Soviet Marxism. Blood flowed like rivers, victory was tremendous, and the jubilee that followed lasted for a long time. During the 1990s, the holy trinity of GDP, Growth-Liquidity-Credit, casted its benevolent gaze over the chosen peoples of the West. Libations wetted the sweaty foreheads and prozac burnt on the altars. But minor divinities can be capricious. The great temple of Wall Street collapsed, as if under the assault of legions of demons. War erupted again. It was a civil war.

The front of the Church split and, while the orthodox put themselves in the hands of their most bellicose fringe, the Neoliberists, the Protestant wing gathered in arms around new icons. Protestants had threadbare clothes, preached sacrifices and moderation. Degrowth! they were shouting in university rooms. Sustainability! they were screaming in conferences. Enough with easy credit! they were telling each other. Protestants weren’t many, but their icy words were quickly winning over the most pavid hearts. Holy Mother Church closed itself inside a perennial council. No longer Trent, but Genoa, Cancun, London, Doha... Sometimes the council was limited to the Great 8 guardians of the Church, sometimes to the Great 20, sometimes opened itself to a plenary assembly of guardians, academic clerics, financial inquisitors, international guards. Activity was frantic, while official edicts started ordering terror and optimism in the same measure. But the capricious gods struck again.

Growth, Liquidity, and Credit frowned their olympic brows and turned their blessings over their chosen peoples into lighting of crisis and tempest. Recession hit the West like a billion locusts, devouring anything it found in its path. At the same time, on the horizon started to appear the sails of the caravels of the new conquerers: Chinese, Brazilians, Russians, Indians, and Turks set their flags on top of their masts and shone their swords in preparation for landing. Like the Aztec priests before them, the clerics of Holy Mother Church saw the apocalypse stretching its black wings and decided that only sacrifices could have appeased the fury of God and of His flight of vassal divinities. Austerity spread in torrents all over the altars, as the chests of thousands unemployed, elderly, disabled, youth, and migrants were cut open by the sacred knife. But it wasn’t enough. God’s thirst could not be slaked. Despite their number, the sacrificial victims didn’t have enough blood to offer. And they even started to rebel, forcing the priests to tighten the ropes with which they were dragging them to the altar.

From their strongholds, Protestants chanted with the joy of the latter day. We told you! The end is near! Repent! Protestant priests wore their best robes and invaded newspaper offices, TV studios, radio stations. They took their icons out of the shrines and showed them to the public. Adore the true pictures of the gods! they ordered, as they presented their plans for recovery. Your theory, your paradigms, your models are wrong, they are blasphemous! they told the Neoliberal bishops. Seated around large tables, wearing their pointiest hats, orthodox and heterodox priests challenged each other over endless discussions on the true faith. As the walls of Byzantium started to crumble under the attacks of invisible Jannissaries, the clerics raised and raised their voices, their chants became ever more complex, their robes swirled faster and faster as they danced around with desperate vigour. All around them, the population held its breath, looked up at the sky in fear, and waited with trembling resignation for the seventh seal to break, for the seven trumpets to sing their deadly melodies.

Call (*)

Listen! That end that you see approaching will not be the end for you. The kingdom that you see crumbling is not your kingdom. The flags that you see burning are not your flags. Hold your tears, stop your trembling! The coming apocalypse will descend on your hair like the tender caress of God. The day has come when God will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left. Look at them burn, those horned priests, the goats that for centuries have been sinking their hoofs into your flesh – even worse, that for millennia have hidden the light of God with their deformed figures. The glory of Him who moveth everything doth penetrate the universe, and shine in one part more and in another less. It shines less in the shadow of your priests, sacks of worms bound together by silk ties and stacks of banknotes. Look at them, the priests, as they contort themselves in the fire of their own arrogance. They dared to think in your place, they dared to shit on your heads and twist the word of God. They claimed that God would have never talked to you in the depth of your heart, that you would never be able to access His mysteries without their mediation, without their intercession. Blasphemous mobsters! Maybe their God doesn’t talk? I will never pray to a dumb God, but I would rather open my heart to one who speaks. You were an ekklesia, my poor people, a permanent assembly of benevolent, clever creatures, naturally disposed to bring the voice of God into your hands like a handful of fruitful wheat. The priests descended on you like ravens, they wounded your fingers with their poisonous beaks and forced you on your knees. Rise up! The great are great only because you are on your knees! The ekklesia in which you used to find solace was born a virgin, plentiful of every wealth. The world was yours, because you had created a God that would create it for you only. But since you forgot to elect your ministers, your first servants, the priests with their lewdness have turned it into a whore. The deadly flight of the authorities was sent by God onto your fields to punish you for your sloth. But from the moment you will straighten your backs and you will clench one hand into a fist and you will lend the other to each other, you won’t have to obey the rapacious laws of the ravens any longer, and once again you will be able to organize yourselves in assemblies. The time of harvest is nigh! Omins potestas a Deo per populum! It is for freedom that you have been redeemed! What is to be done? How to do it? I desire from you only that which your diligence should demand: you should close your ears to the tongues of the priests and open them to the living word of God, flowing out of God’s mouth. And the priests will tell you: close your hearts, drown them in the litres of ink of the Scriptures, study the holy books until you have turned blind, before daring to challenge our authority. Ravens! They circle over you as if over open graves, with their eye-hungry beaks. Do not listen to them! Throw back at them the diarrhea of financial mathematics that they are pouring over you. Raise your bows and take down the harpies. The priests, the scribes, raise their books toward the sky to hide the sunlight. And you will raise your torches and will set them on fire! Bring down your axes on their greedy hands and smash the books they are brandishing with precise blows. Do not let your blades get cold, blow until they turn into swords of fire! God is not far from you. His word is in your heart. Talk to Him face to face, as a friend talks to a friend. Do not waste time explaining to the priests what you are doing. The person who has never found in himself the word of God, who has not lived it in his flesh, does not know how to say anything essential about God, even though he may have devoured a hundred thousand books. Accept God into your hands as a weapon, as a tool, as a toy. After having created Him, the seventh day you let Him rest, and now He’s curled up on your lap like a sleeping cat. Wake Him up! Let his claws mark your lives along the lines that you will desire to invent. Everything is permitted! But not everything is useful. Look into the spiderwebs of your dreams and of your needs and find which paths you want to walk, which ones you want to cross with the directions of your ekklesia, which ones you want to let be covered by weeds and thorns. But do not forget, properties are different from tools. Keep the latter for yourselves and share the former among you, according to everyone’s needs. Omnia sunt communia! Nothing else can and will limit the joy of your creation, the rain of your desires! Because you are the unconditioned, and in you is the truth. Because in you is the power, in you is the wood that gives birth to the flame. Everything is in you, and nothing is in the sky. Let the stars to be the ones that lean over to look at you, and to remain enchanted.

(*): The reader might find in this last paragraph hidden, literal quotes from Thomas Muntzer, Moses, Kirkegaard, Dante, Proudhon, Saint Matthew, Saint Paul, the sixth patriarch of the C’han school, Vernard Eller and others.