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Laura: Hello! This is the Metaphysical Podcast in partnership with the Seattle Metaphysical Library. I’m Laura with my co-host Chris. We are very excited to be talking with a special guest today all the way from Oxford, England: Ian Wright. Ian is the author of the fascinating website “Dark Marxism: adventures in Marxist theory”. Do you sometimes feel like an enchanted rag doll? Would you be interested in a prolegomena to the demonology of capitalism? Please have a listen!

Chris: Thank you Ian for joining us today. It’s a huge pleasure. I’ve been a fan for a long time. I think that one of the things I wanted to start with was mystification. Marx and Marxists have talked for a long time about mystification and how our economy, and the leaders of our economy, and the people who work in this capitalist mode of production, have worked to mystify some of the elements of that. I think one of the roles that Marxists have is to demystify. I also think that people have spiritually felt capital’s effect on them – both individually and collectively – and I think that your work helps us understand what that sort of spiritual feeling is, while also covering the material world that we live in. So I wanted to ask first: What is Marx’s real god?

Ian: Thank you Chris. Thank you Laura. And thank you for inviting me onto your podcast.

In the most general sense mystification is simply getting things wrong, and science, in the broadest sense, is about trying to get things right. The Marxist tradition has always considered itself within the scientific tradition that spans centuries and centuries. The particular contribution of Marxism, or rather one of the contributions of Marxism, is applying a generalized scientific methodology to understanding the society we live in. And that means taking an anthropological point of view on our own society, which can be very hard to do, because we’re born into our society and it works in certain ways which we accept as natural and normal. But appearance isn’t identical with what is actually happening. So we need to look into deeper structures of society, into the way society works, in order to demystify and understand our society. I just wanted to put demystification into that broader framework.

Many people understand that something is wrong but they can’t articulate quite how they feel. They feel like something’s wrong but they can’t put their finger on it. They feel like there’s something missing in their lives but they’re not sure what it is. The social relations we live in throw up certain kinds of mystifications. And different modes of production generate their own specific kinds of mystifications. And every society has its own self-image, which is how it understands itself. But you can’t really take that on face value because social systems are highly complex, highly structured and so we have to really dig deep to understand precisely the nature of the society we’re living in.

So to get to your question, what is Marx’s real god?

Marx’s real god is essentially the proposition that modern capitalist society isn’t really a secular
formation – as we’re led to believe – but a new kind of religious formation where we worship a god without really knowing it. So we’re ruled by a hidden demiurge, a kind of occulted god. We think we’re living in a secular and commercial culture, we think economics is a very pragmatic and rational affair – but actually no, that’s not the reality of the situation.

So it’s quite counterintuitive. And to understand it we have to really take an anthropological viewpoint on our own society. And that’s hard to do. It requires stepping out of our conceptual framework and looking at what we normally consider to be ordinary and accepted as unusual and questionable.

To explain Marx’s real god we need to first think about gods in general.

At different points in history, in different geographical areas, people have formulated very different theories about god or gods. We need to distinguish between our theories of gods and the proposed beings that those theories refer to and explain. There’s the theories and then there’s the entities themselves. I want to consider these as separate things: the religious belief systems, and the possible truth content of those belief systems. I want to focus on the content of the belief systems rather than their truth or falsity.

So, as we all know, gods in general are super mundane or superhuman entities responsible for controlling aspects of reality, maybe all reality, or causing it originally. And we can interact with them in various ways. Perhaps the god we’re most familiar with, given our particular upbringing, is the Christian god: all-powerful and ultimately responsible for the whole of creation. But there are of course other religious traditions who believe in a different kind of god or multiple gods, and so forth.

Now, there are also people who don’t believe in gods at all. And Marx is certainly someone that falls into that category. And the Marxist tradition in general, as I think everyone understands, is essentially an agnostic/atheist, scientific materialist tradition, as I mentioned. So when Marx talks of a real god he’s contrasting it with an unreal or imaginary god, which he would consider the Christian god to be. Now, all gods are imaginary in the sense that they are entities within belief systems that we hold in our collective imagination. But the contrast Marx is drawing – between real and imaginary gods – is simply that some gods are indeed purely fictitious entities, whereas some actually exist. So it’s pretty straightforward: a real god exists even if no one believes in its existence. The existence of a real god is independent of our beliefs – that’s what a real as opposed to imaginary god is.

So what does he precisely mean by the real god of capitalism?

It’s important to note that imaginary gods do have their own kind of reality, which can be hugely significant in material terms. In other words belief systems, whatever their truth value, have real social consequences. Ideas are real. Ideas have consequences. This is where the occult concept of an egregore comes in handy. An egregore is a non-physical entity that exists in virtue of the collective ritual activities of a group, yet it operates autonomously with its own internal logic, and it can materially influence and control the group’s activities. So the group creates the egregore but then the egregore controls the group – in a self-reinforcing feedback loop.

All gods, whether they’re real or imaginary, are personified egregores that their followers believe exist independently of them. So all Christians believe their god truly exists, and if Christians imagined that they did not believe, it would still be the case, according to their belief system, that in fact the Christian god created the universe and exists etc. Similarly, all the temples built for the pagan gods were all built by minds fully committed to their reality; and all the great Christian cathedrals, built at great cost to celebrate God’s incarnation as Christ. So egregores have enormous consequences for human society even if – even if in some important sense – they may be entirely fictitious entities.

On Marx’s Real God (transcript of Metaphysical Podcast interview)

Categories: Philosophy

Tags: Economics, Finance, Karl Marx, Marxism-Leninism, Philosophy, Politics, Psychology, Socialist Finance, Third Place, Work-Standard