(This is one of my various-thoughts-no-particular conclusion posts)

  • Firstly, don’t think that by ‘paganism’ I mean some Tumblr thing: I mean the dominant religion of classical antiquity. And Marx does quote thinkers from Greece & Rome a lot, and talks about its productive system a bit.

  • Different productive systems differ in the way surplus value is extracted

  • Marxist theory thinks of religion as something that justifies and protects the productive system. e.g. Catholicism was the religious superstructure on the feudal base. Feudalism extracts surplus value by duty to your lord.

  • Quote from Capital Ch.3 Section 3 ‘Money’: “The class struggle in the ancient world, for instance, took the form mainly of a contest between debtors and creditors” (The Marxist economist Michael Hudson writes about this.)

  • Religions tell us what is sacred.

Now, it makes sense that some things would be held sacred in the economy of the classical world:

  • Depend on conquest: glorify Mars

  • Depend on the harvest: glorify the harvest-goddess, have harvest festivals

  • Depend on fertility of livestock: glorify fertility goddess

  • Depend on the tribe: glorify your ancestors (Latin: maiores). We mock social rebellion as being a “fuck you dad” attitude; the flipside of that is that ancestor-worship implies social conservatism.

Tribe

To emphasise the last point a bit more: in capitalism we have the nuclear family at best. Lots of people have no family at all. In ancienter economic systems, the family/tribe was everything, was your economic support. It makes sense to revere fertility and having lots of kids, as that’s the strength of your family.

Polytheism

Chapter 1 of ‘Capital’ talks about how use-values are myriad, exchange-value is singular…

…and about how people used to produce for use-value (catch fish to eat), but the commodity-form made them produce for exchange-value (which, I repeat, is singular).

Do you see how in the first case it would make sense to have many gods, and in the second case one god?

But none of that quite gets to the heart of surplus-value-extraction. (Well, Mars being an important god does: that’s extraction-through-conquest.) But how does paganism justify extraction of surplus value by creditors? This is where my theory is incomplete.