Victims of Predatory Capitalism
Photo by Xavi Cabrera on Unsplash
My good friend (and my erstwhile star student), Timothy Beal, has written a book entitled, When Time is Short: Finding our Way in the Anthropocene (2022). Beal traces the way in which the predatory, exploitative use of creation has brought it to exhaustion and eventually to termination. The human domination of creation has specialized in unrestrained, arrogant dominion of creation as if it were a useful system and resource without limitation. And now Beal’s compelling argument concerning toxic human management of creation is given an important refinement by Joerg Rieger in his recent book, Theology in the Capitalocene: Ecology, Identity, Class, and Solidarity (2022). Rieger substitutes “capitalocene” for “anthropocene” because he credits not all of humanity but a much more limited selective population of aggressive capitalists with the desolation of the created order. Among the major contributions in Rieger’s compelling analysis are these:
-ToP [treadmill production] theorists focus on the production side rather than the consumption side of the dynamic because they argue, as I have in my own work, that production is not driven by consumer demand but rather by the demands of capitalism (38-39).
Capitalist production must always find expanding markets for its goods. It seeks such expansion through seductive, misleading advertising.
-Liberation theology can be distinguished from liberal theology in that the former recognizes class conflict as a primary characteristic of society and positions itself consciously as an ally of one class against the other; whereas liberal theology, which also seeks to ameliorate the conditions of capitalism and sees the need for structural change, denies the class-conflictual nature of society and proposes instead a plan for social harmony among all classes (130-131).
Class conflict is an inescapable given, though benign liberal theology seeks to keep it hidden. In Rieger’s statement, the reality of class conflict is of elemental importance, because it is only through that active conflict that essential change can be brought about. Without conflict, there can be no important structural change.
-Instead of studying disembodied ideas and seemingly universal truths, the task is now to study material relations and the respective ideas that are produced and reproduced in the context of particular relations of power. We might call this the labor of religion, which develops in relation to productive and reproductive labor performed by working people, who make up the majority of humanity (the proverbial 99 percent) (72-73).
This is Rieger’s most urgent and most important word of advocacy. He calls for a radical shift and revision in the agenda and horizon of theological reflection with a fresh focus on economic relationships. This after so much religion has worked to screen out material questions through endless preoccupation with matters “spiritual.” This refocus requires sustained attention to economic and labor relationships. To this Rieger adds:
There are materialist ways to conceive of transcendence—for instance, when it is defined not in opposition to immanence but as transcending one kind of immanence in favor of another. This corresponds with the Jewish traditions, where salvation is not about escaping to another world but about the flourishing of life here and now, as noted above. In Christianity, this is one way to understand the incarnation of Christ, where the Roman Empire is transcended not by ethereal ideas or otherworldly dreams proclaimed in sermons but by God’s solidarity with the peasant movements with which the construction worker Jesus of Nazareth aligns himself. In this case, transcendence is what interrupts the status quo (an idea also expressed by the Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas) and that which is diametrically opposed to the status quo—totally other (79-80).
It is worth noticing that Old Testament study, through the work of Norman Gottwald, Marvin Chaney, and Frank Frick has led to this refocus with an accent on the community of covenantal neighborliness by the peasant class after defeat of “the Canaanites.” Richard Horsley has pursued a like subject in the New Testament, thus a rediscovery of actual subject matter of biblical faith.
-Production is not only the place of exploration but also the place of resistance (68).
It is certain that production is a venue for exploitation with its relentless quotas, its demanding long hours, and its lack of adequate breaks along the working day. Witness the long run of powerless labor at the hands of ruthless capitalist power. The insistent power of labor unions should make clear enough that production is also the site of resistance wherein reliable labor is organized effectively enough to engage in resistance and in demands that contradict the endless thirst for greater productivity. In that regard it is essential to recognize that the biblical narrative of emancipation begins in a confrontation concerning production schedules for brick-making in order to satisfy the insatiable needs of Pharaoh (see Exodus 5).
-In one of the most exquisite and illuminating paragraphs I have read in a very long time, Rieger brings the conflict into focus in a way that links economic reality to theological concerns:
Which material practices are currently producing the most fertile ground for the alternative agency that is needed to transcend the exploitative relationships that affect both the people and the earth? In the times of Jesus of Nazareth, the practices of peasants seem to have provided this ground; in Marx’s time, it was industrial labor—what he called the proletariat. Today, that question is more complex—some would point to the so-called precariat, which includes not only people belonging to the traditional working class but all whose existence is precarious now, even once-proud professionals, managers, and university professors whose departments are eliminated (pp.85-86).
The triad of peasants, proletariat, and precariat identifies the victims of predatory capitalism and calls for structural change to the political economy:
Peasants: Rieger links peasants to Jesus of Nazareth. In biblical testimony, as he knows, the reality of peasants is highly visible long before the Jesus movement. In the Old Testament narrative it is likely that Naboth is the quintessential representative who is intimately linked to his ancestral land, but who is at the mercy of the rapacious throne (I Kings 21). We may hunch, moreover, that the “tax revolt” in I Kings 12:1-19 reflects the hostility of peasants toward central taxing agencies, because the extravagant affluence of the urban ownership class imposed heavy levies on the hapless, powerless peasants. The revolt against such exploitative taxation is, I suggest, exactly the kind of resistance Rieger has in purview. The peasants endlessly protested against the endless predatory power of the ownership class. It is for good reason that scholarship, following Norman Gottwald, has judged that the “conquest” of the land was a “peasant revolt” wherein the labor class worked its violent rage against the urban power structure.
Proletariat: Lenin effectively labeled, evoked, and mobilized industrial labor in Russia for resistance to the Tsarist governance in its presumptive exploitation. In one of the most remarkable and most effective historical acts of mobilization, Lenin was able to take the restless energy of the serfs and organize it into a potential political force. The outcome was, over time, the dismantling of the organs of acquisitive greed in a resolve that even the most lowly workers could benefit from the economic output of society. Of course it did not take long for the Communist movement in Russia to devolve into tyranny. That, however, is no mark against the singular gains of the revolution. The revolution effectively exposed the greedy self-serving economy that claimed all of the legitimacy of “Mother Russia.” What was required, as Lenin so clearly understood, is a sense of solidarity and a sustained conviction that an alternative ordering of the economy is possible.
Precariat: Rieger’s third component on exploration and resistance, the precariat, is in part speculative and anticipatory. (See Guy Standing, The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class (2011).
The notion of the “precariat” adds another facet to class analysis, as it designates a new subaltern that consists of people who otherwise appear to have little in common: gig economy workers, adjunct professors, freelancers, and so on, whose existence is to be precarious because they find it hard to make ends meet but who have rarely been able to develop class consciousness. In this context, the Occupy Wall Street movement’s emphasis on the 99 percent helped reclaim a rudimentary class consciousness by emphasizing a sense of connection among those who have to work for a living and who are benefitting less and less from labor relations in neoliberal capitalism. While the 99 percent does not constitute a coherent class, there is a growing potential for solidarity that respects difference, which is significant for the work of theological construction (134-135).
It is possible that this growing number of persons across the economy may come to a common consciousness and organize in a way that calls for the reconstruction of an economy that is contrary to the present economy that is shamelessly stacked in favor of the interests of big capital. The struggle to form labor unions in response to the exploitative work policies at Amazon is a case in point. The rare successes in such instances is ground enough to hope and to recognize that change of a serious kind is indeed possible when the exploited together make claims against systemic injustice. It remains to be seen whether such a prospect can have current credibility.
In any case the triad of peasant, proletariat, and precariat does not constitute a dominant social reality. The triad rather reflects an on-going social reality of powerless working people who live counter to capitalist predation who may claim authority, soon nor late, their own legitimacy in the political economy.
As is always my want, I am writing these lines in the service of the church and its ministry. Rieger is quite clear enough concerning the theological implications of his argument. He is able to assert:
God is found not first of all in the world of ideas, but in the tensions of life where alternative forms of production, reproduction, and agency—human and nonhuman—are emerging. This matches the experiences of figures in the Abrahamic religions like Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed, but it can also be observed in the lives of grassroots religious communities through time, like the Franciscans, the Anabaptists of the sixteenth century Reformation, the early Methodists, and African American slave communities, and the base ecclesial communities in Latin America (53-54).
For a long time, the ownership class has dominated theological discussion in order to characterize God as a transcendent agent quite remote from the specifics of actual life. But alongside that dominant characterization of God, there has been a sustained critique of capitalist greed—from the revolution of Moses to the prophetic critique of society and anticipation of alternative, to the dangerous teaching of Jesus that an economy of greed, too long affirmed by religious leaders, is a betrayal of the truth of the gospel. We are able to see the danger posed by the gospel to established order in the succinct summary of Luke:
Every day he was teaching in the temple. The chief priests, the scribes, and the leaders of the people kept looking for a way to kill him; but they could not find anything they could do, for all the people were spellbound by what they heard (Luke 19:47-48).
The leadership-ownership class had promptly recognized that Jesus posed an enormous threat to their privilege and preeminence. The counterpoint is that “the people,” those without claim to property or title, heard him gladly. Indeed, they were “spellbound,” mesmerized by what he taught and performed as an alternative future and an alternative world partly already available to them.
It is now, in my judgment, an acute moment of urgency, a time when the church must and can repent of its long-running theological error and return to the truth entrusted to it, namely, that God enacts a different socio-economic political order that refuses our common assumptions of greed, monopoly, and parsimony. This hard work of “correction” cannot be top-down but must be bottom-up, work done in local settings by local agents who shape the way in which the God of the Gospel appears amid the realities of production, reproduction, and distribution. This work will require a deliberate and rather wholesale revision of our theology, our liturgy, and our piety. This will require and permit the singing of different hymns and the praying of different kinds of prayers. We may learn such singing and praying when we imagine what might be on the lips of the peasants, the proletariat, and the precariat. So much of our practice has been aligned with established power, so that the claims of privilege and priority have been enveloped in much of our liturgical practice.
Rieger finishes his book with a strong insistence on the payment of reparations to those who have been systematically exploited by the profit system. He sees the sustained claim of peasants-proletariat-precariat as a legitimate and proper demand for repayment for long running exploitation. His final paragraph is a compelling insistence that “religion and theology” have a decisive role to play in the work of reparations that is essential for the health of our society:
God has to often been made to look like the powerful of any age, including white Southern plantation and slave owners of the past and CEOs and politicians of the present, working via relationships of exploitation and extraction. At the same time, however, religion and theology also have been part of the struggle against oppression and exploitation from the beginning, embodied in the lives and theologies of enslaved Africans and their descendants but also in the often-forgotten efforts to reshape the interrelated relationships of class, race, and gender, in popular religion linked to peoples’ movements at the grassroots. In the process, alternative images of the divine and divine agency have emerged that are at the core of the work of resisting and pushing beyond the Capitalocene. That these efforts continue today testifies to powers at work that scholars of religion and theology, and the faith communities to which they relate, ignore at their own peril (213-214).
It is breath-taking to entertain the thought that “divine agency” is at work resisting the “capitalocene.” It is exactly the agency of this God that has authorized the practice of “the year of release” (Deuteronomy 15:1-18) and the Jubilee year (Leviticus 25) as occasions when debt cancellation permits the left-behind to become full participants in the political economy. Of course that has been a core claim of the tradition from the outset. [On this provision for debt cancellation see the important research of Michael Hudson, And Forgive Them their Debts: Lending, Foreclosure, and Redemption from Bronze Age Finance to the Jubilee Year (2018), and The Collapse of Antiquity: Greece and Rome as Civilization’s Oligarchic Turning Point (2023)]. There are in this bold suggestion of debt cancellation ample grounds for making “good trouble” in the preaching and teaching of the church as it testifies to an alternative neighborly economy. The faithful worship of the church can prepare us to host such “good trouble.” I return to Rieger’s opening sentence:
In times of rising pressure and catastrophe, people yearn for alternatives (p. 1).
His argument is an invitation for the church to do its proper work, even if that proper work serves to unsettle our conventional self-understanding. The gospel is likely “good news” unless it is a daring interruption of our old habits and assumptions. So it was every time with Jesus as he invited those in front of him to “follow me.”
