I finished a draft today of “Christianity after capitalism,” which explores how Christianity might cope with the end of capitalism, assuming that it does not in fact go down with the ship. As with most classical texts, I have read Marx’s Capital several times. With each reading I discover something new. Such is the case with the text in volume 1, part 1, chapter 3, part 2:
There is an antithesis, immanent in the commodity, between use-value and value, between private labour which must simultaneously manifest itself as directly social labour, and a particular concrete kind of labour which simultaneously counts as merely abstract universal labour, between the conversion of things into persons and the conversion of persons into things; the antithetical phases of the metamorphosis of the commodity are the developed forms of motion of this immanent contradiction. These forms therefore imply the possibility of crises, though no more than the possibility. For the development of this possibility into a reality a whole series of conditions is required, which do not yet even exist from the standpoint of the simple circulation of commodities.
Capital, volume 1, chapter 3, part 2
Since they are predisposed to interpret Capital through the eyes of a thirty year old, if not a twenty-six year old, Marx, most interpreters of Capital miss many of its subtleties. In all likelihood they will therefore miss the theological dimensions of Marx’s analysis of the commodity. Hint: “immanent” (immanente) is not an economic category.
Perhaps it is not obvious, but religions in general and Christianity in particular are troubled by immanence, by the immediate presence of divine things in earthly things. It is important to note that Islam and Judaism will have nothing of it. God is transcendent. (Except when God is not. But we will not take that up here.) Christianity created a huge, perhaps insurmountable, problem for itself by highlighting not simply the immanence of God, but God’s arrest, incarceration, sentencing, and death.
Contemporary Christianity has overcome this problem by completely isolating Jesus’ material form of appearance (i.e., Jesus) from Jesus’ essence (i.e., Christ). In one among many comical passages in Capital, Marx dispatched this mental tick by crediting it to the commodified character of the contemporary Christian God:
For a society of commodity producers, whose general social relation of production consists in the fact that they treat their products as commodities, hence as values, and in this material form bring their individual, private labour into relation with each other as homogeneous human labour, Christianity with its religious cult of man in the abstract, more particularly in its bourgeois development, i.e. in Protestantism, Deism, etc., is the most fitting form of religion.
Capital, volume 1, chapter 1, part 4
Take that! You disembodied contemporary Christianity! Jesus had a body! Live with it!
Which leads me back to I.3.2.
Let us suppose that we — all of us whose lives are structured around the two-fold commodity form of capital — have grown accustomed to qualitatively differentiating the abstract values of things from their material forms of appearance. And let us suppose that it is around their abstract values that we all coordinate our decisions, judgments, prejudices, and turns of phrase. Since the world is, in fact, embodied and not abstract; since value is in fact substantive and not multivariate and abstract; does it not follow that bodies, real bodies, will find themselves in opposition to the abstractions dealt out by the abstract form of the commodity?
And might we not more accurately grasp this apocalyptic moment as “the end times”?
I do not promote this as a Book-of-Daniel-Revelations-Hal-Lindsey-End-Time-Prophecy. That clearly was not on Marx’s radar. What I am suggesting is that Marx discerned, in much the same way as the author of First Corinthians, that bodies were central to the stories that free people have to tell, and that the abstract value form of the commodity, much like the abstract laws of popular Roman Stoicism, was inadequate.
From this vantage point, the immanent tension between abstract value and its material forms of appearance counts as a kind of apocalyptic wake up call, an indication of the possibility, but no more than the possibility, that bodies might be resurrected after all.