In his review of Don DeLillo’s highly acclaimed Underworld – whose sheer size and overall chutzpah established it as the last great novel of the twentieth century – James Wood observed that "The book is so large, so ambitious, that it produces its own antibodies and makes criticism a small germ."
I’ve often thought that the same description could apply just as easily to capitalism. Every attempt to curb its voracious appetite, to ‘humanize’ its world-wide dominion, to place the world economy back in the service of the greater good, and thus temper its lust for unregulated growth, has not only failed, but has been assimilated. Almost inevitably, it has been folded back into the existing economic order and turned into yet another expression of capitalism itself.
Take, for example, the wide-spread use of ‘anti-globalization’ rhetoric by designer labels and marketing firms, or the current wave of chic enviro-fundamentalism. In both cases, there has been a convocation of dialectical opposites. Trends that are logically opposed — popular consumerism and radical conservationism, for example — are accomodated in the same space. The exemplar product of global capitalism are T-shirts made in Chinese sweatshops bearing the ‘World Without Strangers’ motto.
Yes – capitalism, too, produces its own antibodies. And it seems that nothing is safe from its grasp.
Perhaps the greatest achievement of global capitalism is to have made choice an 'inalienable' human right. The notion of democracy is now married to a right-to-excess; freedom is measured in economic or consumptive terms, by a 'Big Mac Index' amongst other things. DeLillo grasped this in Underworld:
"Capital burns off the nuance in a culture. Foreign investment, global markets, corporate acquisitions, the flow of information through transnational media, the attenuating influence of money that’s electronic and sex that’s cyberspaced, the convergence of consumer desire – not that people want the same things, necessarily, but that they want the same range of choices."
Choice itself has become the true object of human longing, a longing that goes right down to our genes. Karl Marx was right: the vision of capitalism just described – embracing the entire globe, generating more money, ex nihilo, through the mysteries of financial derivatives and futures speculation, bringing together polar opposites in apparent economic harmony – is, in the end, theological. Or, to put it another way, capitalism is Mammon.
So, here’s my question: how can we take Jesus’ statement –