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

by Eugene McCarraher

Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer were right when they later surmised that Marx wanted to turn the world into a factory, and that his vision of communism resembled “a gigantic joint-stock company for the exploitation of nature.”31 Aside from the extensive ecological damage inflicted by this promethean tempest, the fetish of productivity would appear to intensify the exploitation of workers—indeed, by none other than themselves. Under Marx’s auspices, Prometheus morphed into a technically proficient and always preoccupied Sisyphus, ever in search of new mountains and boulders to exhibit his accumulating powers. This is the real danger of Marx’s communism: not authoritarianism or lazy, flaccid repose, but the freely chosen and restless enslavement to work, productivity, and achievement. Storming the gates of heaven to prove their own divinity, the modern devotees of Prometheus would work themselves and the earth to death.