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

by Eugene McCarraher

To see a world in a grain of sand, And a Heaven in a Wild Flower, Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand, And Eternity in an hour.

A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man: A motion and a spirit that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things.

Though warning of the brutality of instrumental reason—“our meddling intellect / Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things; / We murder to dissect”—Wordsworth described imagination as “Reason in her most exalted mood.”6 Imagination is the ecstasy of reason.

In one of his earliest poems, “Mammon,” Blake recounted how one morning, while praying for riches, he realized that he had prostrated himself before the demon deity of money: “I took it to be the throne of God.”

Blake identified Mammon as the sponsor and architect of industrial capitalism, the proprietor of those “dark Satanic mills” that augured death and eternal damnation. (Urizen is his factory manager, “the great Work master.”) Bankrolled and designed by the zealots of Mammon, the expanding apparatus of industrial might was a “Babylon builded in the Waste, founded in Human desolation.”

Here was Ure’s “vast automatum” and Marx’s “mechanical monster,” unveiled as a temple of Mammon.

Robert Southey bewailed the “undisputed and acknowledged supremacy” of the spirit of Mammon in England. “Commercial nations, if they acknowledged the deity whom they serve, might call him All-Gold,” Southey wrote, warning that Mammon is “a more merciless fiend than Moloch.” Wordsworth recoiled from the commercial frenzy of London, lamenting that “rapine, avarice, expense / These are idolatry; and these we adore.” “Money, money is here the god of universal worship,” he complained to his sister Dorothy. To the middle classes, “rapacity and extortion,” he continued, were “glory and exultation.”

Coleridge rued that Britain had become a “monstrous, mammon-bloated Dives, a wooden idol of stuffed pursemen.”

In The French Revolution (1837) Carlyle dubbed Mammon “the basest of known Gods, even of known Devils.” But the most powerful indictment of Mammon came in Past and Present, Carlyle’s angriest polemic on the condition of England. Converted to “the Gospel of Mammonism,” England, Carlyle charged, had exchanged the beneficence of medieval Christianity for a “Mammon-Feudalism,” a “brutish empire of Mammon.” Both downtrodden workers and their heartless masters were “spell-bound” by a “horrid enchantment.”

Disdainful of the bromides dispensed as gospel in Victorian Christianity, Carlyle surmised in “Signs of the Times” that middle-class religion was little more than “a wise prudential feeling grounded in mere calculation.”

More staid and mendacious than earlier forms of enchantment, Mammonism linked the fury of greed to the algebra of pecuniary reason.

Carlyle was closer to the evangelical worldview than his champions and detractors have imagined, for the moral economy of his “Everlasting Yea” turned out to be the Protestant ethic. “Love not pleasure, love God,” Teufelsdrockh admonishes in Sartor Resartus; “Produce! Produce! Were it but the pitifullest infinitesimal fraction of a Product, produce it, in God’s name!”

He insisted on the necessity and inevitability of hierarchies, and apologized for the rankest forms of servility. “No position is so good for men and women, none so likely to bring out their best human character,” he told British workers and laborers in 1873, “as that of a dependent or menial.”

Yet he despised the English nobility and gentry as “the scurviest louts that ever fouled God’s earth with their carcasses”

Long before radical historians called for a “history from the bottom up,” he asserted that “the lives we need to have written for us are of the people whom the world has not thought of, far less heard of, who are yet doing most of the work.”

1854 to

Though he referred to himself in his autobiography as a “violent Tory of the old school,” in Fors Clavigera he had called himself a “Communist of the old school”—indeed a “dark-red Communist, reddest of the red.” Tories like himself had to champion the cause of the working class, he explained, because the clergy were lackeys of the wealthy. “Have they so betrayed their Master’s charge and mind in their preaching to the rich,” he asked in another letter, “so smoothed their words, and so sold their authority, that … there is no man in England … who will have mercy on the poor?”

The clouds were full of “bitterness and malice”; the “poisonous smoke” bellowing from factories consisted, in part, of “dead men’s souls”;

Now it is a good and desirable thing, truly, to make many pins in a day; but if we could only see with what crystal sand their points are polished,—sand of human soul, much to be magnified before it can be discerned for what it is.

“The worship of Mammon,” he began, proceeds “with a tender reverence and an exact propriety” reminiscent of Jonson’s Volpone. The merchant “rises to his Mammon matins with the self-denial of an anchorite” and asks forgiveness for the distractions that may keep him from his “Mammon vespers.” Later, in Munera Pulveris (1871), Ruskin maintained that, far from a “secular” denial of the supernatural, capitalism had its own ensemble of gods, sacraments, and spiritual devotions. “We have, indeed, a nominal religion, to which we pay tithes of property and sevenths of time,” he conceded.

“Life” meant not merely biological survival, but the exuberant flourishing of all our powers of “love, of joy, and of admiration.” Ruskin’s famous declaration that “there is no wealth but life” stemmed from something more than a vitalist moralism; it was the motto of a sacramental economics in which life is the efflorescence of divinity.

Thus the real alternative to the competitive hedonism of capitalist societies was not austerity but rather wisdom in consumption.

Those who look to Ruskin’s humanism as a philosophy for “the simple life” will be disappointed, as his economy of heaven is an invitation to delight, not to asceticism—“to use everything, and to use it nobly.” The wealth that is life mandated “good method of consumption, and great quantity of consumption.”34 To Ruskin, self-denial is no part of the good life.

In the warfare of “modern business,” Ruskin observed, “the seeking of death is a grand expression of the true course of men’s toil.”

Ruskin felt compelled to distinguish himself from the radicals across the Channel. What he dubbed the “Parisian school of Communism” taught that all property was common property. But “we Communists of the old school”—“dark-red Communists,” he emphasized, “reddest of the red”—while they, too, believed that “everybody must work in common, and do common or simple work for his dinner,” they nonetheless upheld a kind of private property that was communist in principle and practice. “Our property belongs to everybody, and everybody’s property to us.” Old-school communists dwell in charity; since they “exist only in giving,” and “dread, above all things, getting miserly of virtue,” they considered property to be a mode of graceful self-expenditure, not a vehicle for accumulation. Thus there would never be any fear of unemployment; but there would be “great fear … lest we should not do the work set us well.”

For Marx, the future form of common ownership was inextricably bound up with the course of capitalist development, as corporate consolidation prepared industry for collective expropriation and ownership by the revolutionary proletariat. But this meant that the communist principle of morality—the “abilities” and “needs”—would bear the marks of its promethean ancestor: its technocratic politics, its equation of “abundance” with industrial production, its defiant insensitivity to natural limits.

while “mammon-service” ensured, not the conquest of scarcity, but the triumph of productivity over love.

Following Marx, the left has tended to vilify Ruskin’s kind of anticapitalism as “petty-bourgeois” fantasy. There is more than a little truth to this charge. Ruskin was at his best when playing the roles of critic, provocateur, and visionary; he failed utterly when he tried to be the architect of a fundamentally new economics, and that blend of genius and ineptitude augured more moderation than radicalism. Even in Unto This Last, Ruskin conceded too much to the realities of mammon-service: his proposal of equal wages, for instance, still assumed both wage labor and a competitive labor market.

Ruskin often expressed his disappointment at the meagerness of workers’ demands—a poverty of imagination he thought ultimately traceable to the mechanization of labor. Considering only “their immediate interest,” unions, he lamented in The Crown of Wild Olive, never considered “the far more terrific power of [capital’s] appointment of the kind and the object of labor.”

If they insisted only on higher wages—a demand that implicitly ratified both the wage system and the industrial division of labor—workers would become complicit in the system that corrupted their desires and degraded their skills.

pyrrhic,

Ruskin anticipated the concerns of Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and other “Western Marxists” vexed by the decidedly unrevolutionary consciousness of the working class. If the effects of industrial production and culture are so profoundly demoralizing,

“even tackled Marx,” specifically “that great work” Capital. Though he plumbed “the historical parts,” Morris confessed to “agonies of confusion of the brain over reading the pure economics.”

Through Ruskin—not Marx—Morris “learned to give form to [his] discontent”—a discontent, he reiterated, that “was not by any means vague.”

“The Lesser Arts” (1877)—a talk delivered to an educational guild of artisans—Morris celebrated such allegedly lowly skills as carpentry, pottery, and weaving for their fusion of beauty and utility. The “lesser” arts “beautify the familiar matters of everyday life,” while the “higher” arts minister to the vanity of the rich.

Later, in “Useful Work versus Useless Toil” (1885), one of the finest essays on labor ever written, Morris saluted the medieval artisan who “stamped all labour with the impress of pleasure.”

Yet neither News from Nowhere nor the socialist essays justify Thompson’s contention that Morris achieved a harmonious blend of Ruskin and Marx.

Morris’s Marxism often seems dutiful; his keener perceptions are frequently at odds with historical materialist optimism.

Morris often seemed more convinced that the working class had renounced or evaded its historical mission.

Sounding more like Ruskin than Marx, Morris worried that the average worker “scarcely knows how to frame a desire for any life much better than that which he now endures perforce.” As Ruskin had feared—and as Morris now lamented—industrial technology and culture had crippled the moral imagination of the working class.

In private, Morris was even gloomier about the workers’ revolutionary potential. “It is obvious,” he once wrote to a friend, that “the support to be looked for for constructive Socialism from the working classes at present is naught.” Full of “vague discontent and a spirit of revenge,” the typical worker with any gift for leadership “finds ...

The energies that formerly might have been devoted to revolutionary agitation were now absorbed by what Jones dubs “a culture of consolation” that provided workers with a packet of compensations for social and political impotence: trade unionism, which accepted industrial workplace discipline, and the new urban mass culture of commodified entertainment and distraction.

The contraction of socialist ambition often attributed to Sidney and Beatrice Webb and the Fabian Society—as

The narrowing horizon of working-class hope was evident to Morris, and he clearly realized that the dynamics of capitalist production and culture posed serious obstacles to the development of revolutionary consciousness.

What if the everyday life of capitalism bred, not discontent and revolution, but rather discontent and acquiescence—or even contentedness and affirmation? What if the destruction of pre-industrial ideals celebrated by Marx left us, not with the freedom to write the poetry of the future, but with a protracted imaginative paralysis?

Morris’s desire for “hallowed labour” could have propelled him to challenge one of the central tenets of Marxist theory: that capitalism would create the materia...

In a remarkable passage in News from Nowhere, Hammond, the wise old teacher who guides Morris through the new society, reflects on the world after the revolution with an erotic, almost sacramental joy. “The spirit of the new days, of our days,” he muses, is “delight in the life of the world; intense and overweening love of the very skin and surface of the earth on which man dwells, such as a lover has in the fair flesh of the woman he loves.”

Both anarchists and Arts and Crafts writers expressed an antipathy to the managerial and technocratic elitism against which Morris and Ruskin had warned.

Anarchists assured workers that they would not have to wait to obtain direct control of the means of production—a promise that Marxists could not make, and that Engels emphatically rejected.

Marxists insisted that the proletariat would have to undergo an indefinite period of industrial tutelage from technical and managerial experts.