Experienced one of those coincidences which can seem like ironies or synchronicities this afternoon. I had just finished a discussion of Marx's theory of capitalism and its affinity with liberal Protestantism, when my next door neighbor reminded me of a recent university policy on faculty offices which seemed straight out of our text. There is a connection, I promise.In the "Fetishism of Commodities" chapter of Kapital, Marx writes: for a society based upon the production of commodities, … Christianity ... is the most fitting form of religion. His point, as we'd been discussing, was that especially liberal Protestant conceptions of "the abstract man" have a profound affinity with the alienation of modern man, who has lost a sense of participation in the world as labor and value are abstracted from the world of social relations. Premodern work (like fashioning a shoe for your foot so you can work in the fields) is satisfying because it is defined by and answers human needs, indeed the needs of specific people with whom you are through your work related. Modern workers, by contrast, are interchangeable cogs in factories which produce products whose value is determined not by their use but by their exchange value. Value is abstracted, labor is abstracted, and so - Marx seems to be arguing - is modern people's understanding of themselves. Modern forms of religion focused on individual religious experiences of "the infinite" are mute expressions of this alienated state, not of a new and closer relationship with the divine.
It's a socko critique of modern religious individualism, but as a teacher teaching this stuff one thinks one must have escaped the abstracting processes of the modern economy. Think again! My office neighbor took academic leave the year before I did, and when she returned her name had disappeared from next to her office door; it just said "Faculty office, 455B." When she asked about the card with her name on it, she was told it had gone lost, and the university's new policy was not to replace them. Soon none of our names will remain, and we'll look more like a hotel (or a prison) than an academic community!
We often complain about the take-over of our university (and universities across the land) by business-minded people (as I did last month), but this was the first time I made the connection to Marx. Academics of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your office numbers!
(The picture above is blissfully unrelated to the above. It's just a scene of a crisp winter day in the city, and my thanks for reading this far!)
