Religion and Commodity

By Danish Khan

Christianity and the commodity relations in a “capitalist mode of production” have very peculiar and similar attributes, both of them dominate in our contemporary society because they represent and defend the interests of the ruling elites in our contemporary society of the United States. As in Christianity “God” is a judge (parameter) of an individual piousness, morality, purity, and an individual has to develop him/herself in a mirror of a god. While in commodity relations under the “capitalist mode of production”, the amount of “profit” the commodity produces determines the value of a commodity, so a commodity has to develop itself in the context of the profit it is going to generate, so the “profit” acts as a God in the commodity relations, as “Jesus” in Christianity. The ideas of Christianity and the commodity relations are rooted in very surface based analysis, and so Marx has pointed out a connection between the Christianity and Commodities in the paradigm of evolutionary historical development of a mankind. Marx has picked up on Christianity because it was the dominant religion in Western Europe during his time, and even today, but his example of Christianity would fit on almost every modern religion. Marx wrote in Das Capital, Volume One, Chapter one, The Fetishism of the commodity and its secrets,

“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 objectified form bring their private labors in to relation with each other as homogeneous human labor, Christianity with its religious cult of the abstract human, especially in its bourgeois development, i.e., in Protestantism, Deism, etc, is the most fitting form of religion”

So here, Marx is trying to point out the similarity between the attributes of a commodity in a bourgeois society and the christianity. The punch line of Christianity is the salvation of a mankind, it asks it’s followers to purify themselves from all the sins, and devote their lives in a certain (christian) manner which it claims to be the only right way of living. First of all, what Christianity claims to be a “sin” is very relative and peculiar to the time in which Christianity has evolved, “The Ten Commandments” is a classical example of it. It reveals the narrow and limited framework of Christianity, and it is not consistent with the laws of social evolution. Human needs and attributes tend to change over the time with the changing “means of production”, thus anything which might be very moral or pious for an individual from medieval ages would not necessarily make sense, or moral, or beneficial in our contemporary epoch. Thus the whole argument of Christianity of being virtuous and pious is based and rooted in those peculiar conditions in which it has evolved, and it undermines and ignores all the social and human evolution that has happened over the years. Similarly in a capitalist mode of production, the commodities have to refine themselves, and they have to obtain special attributes which can fulfill the tastes and preferences of its consumers, thus as neo-classical economists argue that the value of a commodity is determined by the utility obtained from it. This kind of thinking tries to undermine and neglect the “relations of production” between the workers and the capitalists, and it ignores those social conditions which allow that commodity to be produced, and the historical context in which “means of production” have been obtained by a Bourgeois class. Instead all it cares about is the profit maximization from the market exchange of that commodity.

As Hans Ehbrar, a professor of Marxian economics, illustrates in his “Annotations to Karl Marx’s Capital, 2011″,

“Just as the value relation abstracts from the concrete usefulness of labor and from the individual circumstances of production, so Christianity also makes an abstraction: namely from some of the more “bodily” aspects of humans. Just as the labor process must rise above its local and traditional character to withstand the test of the market, so humans must strip off their bodily encumbrances to become pure souls. But this correspondence between religion and commodity relations only holds for modern religions in modern time. Religion is a very old phenomenon, and the question arises how the old religions related to the socio-economic conditions of their time.”

Every religion through out human history has represented and reflected the dominating “means of production” of its time in its values and morality system. The anthropological studies have revealed the absence of organized religion in the primitive egalitarian societies, and the detail analysis shows that the accumulation of wealth in those societies has followed by the emergence of a new social class who claimed the ownership of that wealth, and it allowed them to free themselves from intense physical labor (hunting, etc.). This whole process allowed that new social class to develop and improve their cognitive skills more than the rest of the population, who were so busy in the physical labor. Furthermore, to keep their unjust claim on that socially produced surplus (wealth), they tried to justify it, and those justifications got refined and refined over the time and it paved the path for the emergence of an organized religion. Thus, as the birth of religion took place in a class based society, so the class based character of religion in our contemporary epoch can only be comprehended in its historical context.

As religion contradicts the laws of nature by claiming some fantasy stories about the creation of universe and life, similarly commodity relations in capitalism undermines the social process (Labor theory of Value, etc) which determines the value and the attributes of the commodity. When a modern religion talks about the heaven and the eternal life, it addresses to his male audience that, if you become a purified devotee in this temporarily life, God will reward you with substantial amounts of female virgins in heaven. This might be very attractive incentive to some putrefied and pervert male, but being a female, it doesn’t seem appealing at all, instead it portrays female as just a commodity to satisfy the sexual needs of male. So in this regard consciously or un-consciously religion itself has commoditized females, and it treats them like a commodity.

So besides the class character, religion has a gender bias in it too, and it only argues from the perspective of men (patriarchy), and consciously or un-consciously it denounces the existence of women in the society independent of the men. Similarly in capitalism, the relations of commodity are only concerned about the profit which can be obtained from that commodity by lowering the cost of production, i.e. labor (lower wages etc), which is very attractive for the capitalist class, but from the stand view of the workers it is not attractive at all, instead it is very un-desired for them. So the capitalist commodity relations only try to address society from the perspective of the capitalist class, and it denounces the existence and the well-being of the working class. So in this context and paradigm, we can see an obvious relation and similarity between the modern religions of our time and the commodity relations in our contemporary “capitalist mode of production”.

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