The Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity

by Eugene McCarraher

am not one of those churlish reactionary radicals who see nothing in capitalist modernity but one long, unrelieved nightmare of greed, brutality, and desiccating rationalization. The technological achievements of capitalism have surely improved the social and material conditions of billions of people; as none other than Marx asked in the Communist Manifesto, what earlier time “had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labor?” Still—and this needs to be reiterated at a time of wavering but nonetheless ascendant capitalist triumphalism—these improvements would also not have been possible without labor unions, radical movements, welfare states, and political parties that mobilized unremitting popular struggle against the imperatives and institutions of capital.