From Modes of Production to the Resurrection of the Body
* PhD Thesis: Suriano, Benjamin, "From Modes of Production to the Resurrection of the Body: A Labor Theory of Revolutionary Subjectivity & Religious Ideas" (2016). Dissertations (1934 -). 628.
URL = https://epublications.marquette.edu/dissertations_mu/628
"A Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School, Marquette University, in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Milwaukee, Wisconsin, May 2016."
Contextual Quotes
1.
“The Christian project is one of recreating the qualities of the Divine and Universal WITHIN the corporeal particularity of the human person. It is thus a project of Spiritualizing the bodily realm, not Escaping the bodily realm.”
- Formscapes [1]
2.
"A certain trajectory of monastic development and its intellectual valorization of labor came about from something closer to a communism of production and its new consciousness of labor as holding constitutive value, rather than a mere object of value instrumentalized for spiritual practices. Labor’s valorization thus emerged from recognition precisely in and through a religious form that implied labor was itself an intrinsic salvific act."
- Benjamin Suriano [2]
3.
"One cannot, therefore, simply reject the religious as such — which has been humanity’s enduring cultural expression of consciousness concerning the whole, the perfect, the potential for more and new life—by reducing it entirely to its irrational fundamentalist expressions. Rather we must look more closely at the diminishment of the standpoint of labor in its coinciding with the growth of religious fundamentalisms in the present. This is to suggest that the failure to think through and cultivate labor, as the material capacity for socially creating radical change, leaves the religious, as the cultural expression of real desires and intentions for radical change, to its most repressively alienating and distorting forms. If the disappearance of the standpoint of labor has coincided with the return of the religious in the form of radical fundamentalisms, might the return of the standpoint of labor, in a new more holistic way, coincide, not with the disappearance of the religious, but its return to a more rational form?"
- Benjamin Suriano [3]
Abstract
"In this dissertation I attempt two needed tasks within historical materialism: first, to reestablish the standpoint of labor as the normative basis for critical theory beyond irrational bourgeois categories, and second, to show that labor’s own self-mediating rationalization, if it is to move beyond these contradictory categories, necessarily requires a certain religious-utopian consciousness. The dominant Weberian and Marxist paradigms for understanding labor and its relation to the religious variously perpetuated irrational bourgeois conceptions of labor as a bare efficient cause, with religion paternalistically positioned as an inherently idealist or mystifying external form. I argue, however, that the concrete rationality of labor’s revolutionary nature necessarily hinges on a ratio to emergent final causes for which consciousness of such is itself the rational kernel of the religious. Thus I retain the historical materialist primacy of the modes of production as an organizing concept but with a more comprehensive account of its self-transcending movement. Herein the religious arises internally as a non-reductive function of labor’s self-understanding as more than a disposable instrument. I claim any materialist critique of alienated labor implies this religious-utopian consciousness, and therefore any critique of religion must presuppose the normative form of the religious as revolutionary rather than reactionary, reflecting ideal trajectories generated from the productive forces in their basic revolutionizing transformation of nature.
More specifically, I argue that theoretically the one religious-utopian ideal transcendentally necessary for grasping the normative standpoint of the laboring body as its own emergent final cause, without external mediation, is the resurrection of the body.
I then substantiate this historically. The comprehensive rationality of the modes of production demands that the Marxist distinction between historical periods of formal and real subsumptions yield new assessments of pre-capitalist religious ideology as positively integral to labor’s self-mediating history. I then genealogically trace a Hebraic discourse on bodily resurrection whose revolutionarily demythologized form emerged directly from and for social consciousness of its communal mode of production. I further demonstrate historically that prior to capitalism the laboring body became intelligible to itself as constitutively active without idealist inversions under this certain Judeo-Christian articulation of the resurrection of the body."
Content
Benjamin Suriano:
"In beginning the critical presentation of such a history, the first chapter will set the historical stage by elaborating a trajectory of labor’s rationalization within medieval society and thought that broke from the classical disparagement of labor by valorizing labor as holding constitutive value in relation to the whole—perfecting itself in perfecting nature—without thereby anticipating a bourgeois ethos. This sets on the table a medieval movement of labor becoming conscious of itself and breaking with its feudal structures, while nevertheless expressing and reflecting upon itself in certain religious forms that are in no way reducible to a proto-Protestant lineage such as that bourgeois trajectory identified by Max Weber.
After challenging Weber’s dominant non-Marxist paternalistic reading of labor’s rationalization, I then show in chapter 2 that this medieval rationalization of labor also challenges the dominant Marxist readings insofar as Marxists exclusively define religious consciousness as mistily expressing only alienation from its laboring body. I argue there must be a more adequate accounting of this historical phenomenon and that theoretically, within historical materialism, the religious need not be defined exclusively in negative terms. But this requires returning to a science of labor’s self-transcendence, as a revolutionizing of nature in its anti-entropic activity. In rethinking the nature of labor beyond any reduction to a bare efficient cause, we can then see how the religious is a positive moment internal to the mode of production, as its fundamentally utopian-directed consciousness of new perfectible horizons of change opened by labor, rather than primarily a conservative fixation on stasis. I then argue that the one religious ideal that especially expresses and grasps its own concrete fact of material production as its final cause according to its emergent trajectories is the ideal of the resurrection of the body, since labor is itself a partial work of resurrecting the body beyond any abstracted image of mortal flesh. Here I argue that this ideal is transcendentally necessary for the laboring body if it is to realistically understand its revolutionary nature without mythically appealing to a dialectical necessity of its negation. I critically engage with Friedrich Engels and Theodor Adorno who both, in dimly suggesting a dialectics of resurrection, evidenced the importance of this ideal and yet failed to develop it properly in relation to the concrete act of labor. This chapter is by far the longest and most theoretical because there is so much ground clearing that needs to be done (extending the clearing into Marxism and sociology that has already begun in this introduction with bourgeois thought) in order to materialistically explain, from the ground up, the normative production of the religious as a functional yet non-reductive extension of the revolutionizing aspects of the labor process.
After making the theoretical case for a positive non-alienating sense of the religious in relation to the mode of production and its necessary ideal for thought, I then begin the historical substantiation of this in chapter 3 by beginning a broad genealogical account of the normative emergence of the religious within the first historical revolution of productive forces in the rise of the Neolithic village commune. Here I bring the distinction between the formal and real subsumption to the fore in order to then more critically engage with the religious and metaphysical ideologies that emerge in the Ancient Near East and the Classical age in relation to their productive base of the enduring village commune. The methodology for determining more adequately where the laboring body is both reflected and concealed in ancient ideology, hinges on identifying ideological distortion in terms of their imaginary representation of the contradictory fact of death. I then move on in chapter 4 to make an argument for the distinctiveness of the Hebraic notion of the resurrection of the body within its ANE context. Here I show how this ideal emerges early within the biblical text, prior to later apocalyptic distortions, as a more direct, demythologized reflection of the concrete fact of its social body of production prior to its state form. That it is demythologized means that it still intends the perfection of eternal life but it is more directly intuited and expressed according to the creative potentials of the productive act, whereby the social body of production is itself the final cause, without reifying death as necessary or absolute.
This genealogical trajectory of the Hebraic ideal is then traced through Christianity in chapter 5, following its development within Jesus and Paul insofar as through it they raised consciousness of the active body of labor as harboring its own seeds in relation to the perfection of eternal life. Yet, with Paul’s articulation of the cross of Christ as integrally salvific the body is reflected from an emerging standpoint of its exchangeability, rather than its concretely creative act, and thereby placed within a new myth of the dialectical necessity of its negation. I suggest certain late-imperial socioeconomic transitions for which Paul’s theology of the cross is an ideological reflex, providing some possible explanations as to why the sacred economy of the cross uniquely yet unfortunately began to express a sense of the body outside of both its classical captivity as well as its materialist Hebraic affirmation. In the final chapter I follow an underlying ascendant materialism in Origen and especially John Scotus Eriugena that challenges the idealist dialectical necessity of the body’s negation by articulating a sense of the spiritual body as the internal spirit of the active material body itself. This underlying trajectory is developed in these thinkers, I claim, precisely because of the pressure of properly working out the ideal of bodily resurrection as more adequately reflecting the concrete becoming of the historically active body.
This last chapter brings the genealogy back to where we began in the first chapter, identifying the development of this ideal as in the background of the medieval labor movement’s critical social consciousness of its constitutive value. It also suggests that with the modern account of bodily resurrection as an idealist metaphor for the spirit of self-consciousness over against its physical body, we find only a remythologization of the resurrection that loses any distinctive reference to the material and historical becoming of its laboring body. If the distinction between the formal and real subsumption requires Marxism to take pre-capitalist ideology more seriously, then I suggest it also requires Christian theology to examine more closely the remythologization of the resurrection of the body within the rise and reassertion of theologies of the cross insofar as these correspond to particular historical periods of encroaching real subsumptions of the laboring body.
At least one contemporary Marxist has recognized something of the positive value of the resurrection of the body for labor’s self-understanding. In a recent interview Antonio Negri speaks of a possible “rediscovery of a material religion” for which there is no longer a separation between the corporeal and spiritual. In passing he says, “the resurrection of the body is obviously the most important thing from the point of view of physical materialism. Perhaps I will wind up one day working on this problem.”70 Neither he, nor any other thinker, has yet begun substantive work on this problem within materialism. In what follows I will be commencing this needed work "
ToC
INTRODUCTION
- Deconstructing the “Science” of the so Called “Man as He Really is” ..................8
- Exposing the Social Production of the Reified Bourgeois Body...........................22
- Challenging Marxism to Rethink Labor and the Religious...................................39
- Overview of this Work...........................................................................................45
CHAPTER 1: SETTING THE STAGE: THE NEW VALORIZATION OF LABOR IN THE MIDDLE AGES
- The Weberian Influence.........................................................................................53
- Antiquity and Labor...............................................................................................60
- Monasticism, the Middle Ages, and the Valorization of Labor.............................65
- The Late Medieval Uprisings.................................................................................89
- Conclusion .............................................................................................................93
CHAPTER 2: RESURRECTING LABOR AS RESURRECTION: RETHINKING LABOR AND THE RELIGIOUS FROM WITHIN HISTORICAL MATERIALISM
- Historical Materialist Treatments of Religion .....................................................104
- The Self-Transcendence of Labor as a New Creative Act...................................114
- Labor’s Intrinsic Religious Consciousness..........................................................130
- The Religious Ideals Necessary for Labor’s Self-Understanding........................147
- Conclusion ...........................................................................................................177
CHAPTER 3: THE EMERGENCE OF THE SOCIAL BODY OF PRODUCTION AND THE IDEAL OF ETERNAL LIFE: RECONSTRUCTING A HISTORICAL RELATION
- Setting the Socioeconomic Base for the Concept of Eternal Life .......................183
- The Emergence of the Village Commune............................................................193
- The Tributary State and its Ideological Metaphysics ..........................................204
- Conclusion ...........................................................................................................229
CHAPTER 4: THE EMERGENCE OF THE HEBRAIC IDEA OF BODILY RESURRECTION FROM THE SOCIAL BODY OF PRODUCTION
- The Cultural Memory of the Prior Social Body of Production............................236
- The Social Body as a New Creative Act..............................................................244
- From the Modes of Production to the Perfection of Eternal Life ........................249
- The Non-Inverted Idea of Eternal Life as the Resurrection of the Body.............264
- The Apocalyptic Distortion..................................................................................281
- Conclusion ...........................................................................................................293
CHAPTER 5: THE AMBIVALENT CHRISTIAN DEVELOPMENT OF BODILY RESURRECTION: ADVANCING AND SUPPRESSING THE MEMORY OF THE LABORING BODY
- Jesus and the Normative Standpoint of the Rising Lower Body .........................298
- Paul’s Resurrection of the Pneumatic Body and its Crossing Out.......................309
- The Cross, Empire, and the Reproduction of the Docile Body ...........................336
- Conclusion ...........................................................................................................347
CHAPTER 6: THE EMERGENCE OF THE IDEA OF BODILY RESURRECTION FOR THE RISE OF THE LABORING BODY
- Undoing the Debt to Death: Resurrection and Change Without Corruption.......354
- Origen and the Corporeal Eidos...........................................................................359
- Eriugena and the Active Body of Artifice ...........................................................367
- A New Idealist Inversion .....................................................................................396
Excerpts
Benjamin Suriano:
1.
""If anything, this enduring expression and its vociferous forms now given to growing irrationality, is simply evidence of a more fundamentally irrational social body that does not know how to organize its labor toward its own ends of creative and collective self-mediation with nature. One cannot, therefore, simply reject the religious as such — which has been humanity’s enduring cultural expression of consciousness concerning the whole, the perfect, the potential for more and new life — by reducing it entirely to its irrational fundamentalist expressions. Rather we must look more closely at the diminishment of the standpoint of labor in its coinciding with the growth of religious fundamentalisms in the present. This is to suggest that the failure to think through and cultivate labor, as the material capacity for socially creating radical change, leaves the religious, as the cultural expression of real desires and intentions for radical change, to its most repressively alienating and distorting forms. If the disappearance of the standpoint of labor has coincided with the return of the religious in the form of radical fundamentalisms, might the return of the standpoint of labor, in a new more holistic way, coincide, not with the disappearance of the religious, but its return to a more rational form? Marxists, in militantly attacking the religious or simply ignoring it altogether have thereby failed to follow Marx’s own directive to scientifically explain the religious by beginning with its modes of production. "
2.
"If the modes of production in their truly rational form are simply the transformation of nature toward new creative potentialities serving qualitatively social values, then seeing how this produces the material and social conditions for change could help explain the religious as to its true form of expressing and articulating utopian ideas about change. What is needed, and what I attempt to think through within this dissertation, is then a return to labor as a selftranscending activity. This is nothing short of resurrecting a revolutionary sense of labor as itself an act of resurrection, a fundamentally social and creative activity whose final cause is to raise humanity into a new historical body beyond any reduction to the merely mortal flesh prescribed by the present. Thus, the laboring body qua labor always already harbors all the seeds for its immortality, for producing the perfection of life for itself, which is the qualitative perfection of eternal life. The task, then, is not to eliminate its religious consciousness, but to develop it from the true rationalization of labor according to its own ratio of perfection, i.e. to therein find its corresponding religious forms of thought that illuminate and reinvest in its capacities for the infinite and eternal."
([4])
Labor in Antiquity
Benjamin Suriano:
"That labor came to be valorized as a perfective activity, however, stands in marked contrast with the sociopolitical world of antiquity and its classical philosophical expression. Within the ancient world, whether speaking of the Greek polis or the Roman Empire, sociopolitical reality was determined by those who owned land and expropriated slave labor through private land ownership worked by slave labor. The great masses constituting almost the entirety of the social whole were not slaves, however, but peasants, artisans, shopkeepers and hired laborers who lived mainly at subsistence levels with little or no property and thus scant opportunities for social mobility or political membership. Because the property and wealth of the social whole—especially with the development of the Roman latifundia— was consolidated within the hands of a few through their advantageous exploitation of slave labor, the mass of “free” laborers therefore held no real leverage in determining their sociopolitical reality and were often slavishly subordinated to aristocratic interests, especially through debt bondage.81 The social body was thus marked by a severe and tightly maintained division between a small fraction of a propertied class free from the need to labor and the rest, “free” or unfree, whose lives were consumed by laboring for another.
Because the substantial surplus expropriated by the few allowed them to invest their time into developing a state, military, and cultural apparatus that reproduced their exploitative position of privilege, the collective consciousness ruling this sociopolitical body tended to comprehend its free citizenship abstractly, as if a natural given, with little consciousness of the contribution of the laboring body.83 As the constitutive value of labor to the social totality was concealed and left largely uncomprehended, there was then little incentive to develop and better organize productive forces or relations of production beyond their reproduction of the status quo.84 With this relatively low level of productive development there was a corresponding ideological conception of labor lowly construed as mere toil, bound within the transitory realm of necessity as an involuntary process of reproducing certain nutritive and sensate functions of base animal nature. That is, productive activity was understood in no way to perfect, change, transform or actively contribute to making and knowing the social and natural whole since its socially contingent degradation and diminishment as a lowly biological function was obscured and instead viewed and legitimated as if a natural fact. Labor’s meaning came to be accepted as nothing more than an inevitable and inescapable mortal process within base nature, a symbol of enslavement."
([5])
Bibliographic notes:
- G. E. M. De Ste. Croix, The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World: From the Archaic Age to the
Arab Conquests (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), p. 169. In other words, even though slaves represented a minority of the total population, the use of slave labor to produce and concentrate wealth only for a few was nevertheless a dominant means of extracting surplus that allowed for the ruling class to gain hegemony in the sociopolitical realm.
- The Greco-Roman world, at least up until the late Roman Empire, contained virtually no middle class
since it was divided almost exclusively by those who owned property and the means of production and those who did not. Yet the ranks of the aristocracy, especially in the Roman Empire, expanded somewhat into intermediate levels of wealth amongst small farm owners and the Decurion who functioned as something like an emerging middle class. Yet this still represented only a tiny fraction of the population, and as Ramsay Macmullen warns, “in a given city, however, the aristocracy nevertheless stood upon the summit of a very steep social pyramid.” Roman Social Relations: 50 B.C. to A.D. 284 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1974), pp. 89–90.
Medieval Christianity and Labor
Benjamin Suriano:
"Early Christian culture vacillated between two conflicting images of labor, as portrayed by the ambivalent views within the scriptural tradition. In Genesis labor is depicted as both a primordial good, given to the joyful task of keeping and cultivating creation, and as a cursed affair, the toilsome consequence of the Fall. As Jacques Le Goff notes, within the early Middle Ages Christianity tended toward the latter interpretation as it culturally retained the aristocratic Greco-Roman disdain for labor, compounded also by similar disparagements within the warrior ethos that came with the infusion of the Germanic peoples. Society was thus ruled largely through a bipartite structure of oratores and bellatores, clerics and warriors, with little place for the lot of ordinary workers.
In many ways, however, it is through the ascetic formations of monasticism that an opening was made for reevaluating labor positively rather than negatively. As the early monastics retreated into a life entirely devoted to spiritual exercise they nevertheless took up manual labor to provide a withdrawal not lacking in self-sufficiency. While the monk’s physical labors initially were deemed a matter of penitence and a means of resisting acedia, the fact that the significance of work was already integrated into the very practice of spiritual life evinced a consciousness of the laboring body far removed from the commonplace Neoplatonic asceticisms of late antiquity. Still conditioned by the upper-class ethos of a slave-based society, ancient pagan ascetics, especially with the arrival of Gnosticism, typically protested the present social body out of contempt for the lower body of economic activity itself. Retreat from society was often in order to escape into an elite enclave of pure intellectual contemplation without regard for the material contradictions that continually confronted individual and social bodies. Christian asceticism, however, from the so-called “desert Fathers” to especially the larger scale, coenobitic mobilizations that led to Western medieval monasticism proper, began to express and understand the body as the concentrated site of society’s contradictions.
In protesting and renouncing the dominant social structures, their task was not primarily to escape material contradictions through self-mortification, but more often to build an alternative communal embodiment of unity within the whole body itself, reconciling its lower with its higher elements. As Peter Brown states, the active physical body became not merely an instrument to be tolerated and efficiently used as in the ancient ascetic separation of spirit, but rather a “field to cultivate” holistically for a unified material and spiritual transformation.
Brown’s quotation marks out a key for understanding the monastic valorization as it began to recognize the laboring body’s constitutive value for actively integrating and reconciling the material and spiritual. Referring to the body and its work as a “field to cultivate” comes from Horsiesius (d. 400 CE), an early founder of communally organized monasticism that had begun with Pachomius.93 It at once reflects the communal mode of production that monasticism was taking up and its sociocultural consciousness of a more comprehensive spirituality reflectively emerging from this base. Despite the literature surrounding the legend of Antony and the exaggerated sense of monasticism as initially a retreat to the isolated desert, most of Western monasticism grew out of an urban asceticism whose movement found perfection not in the desert but rather in revivifying deserted villages.
With the decline of the Roman Empire, in the 3rd and 4th centuries, the village life of communal production became increasingly pressed into, not only heavy taxation, but crushing debt bondage. This entailed a process that effectively hollowed out much of Rome’s rural agrarian base, setting the stage for its eventual refilling by manorial conduits toward feudal serfdom.
With many villages abandoned, Pachomian monasticism occupied these depopulated rural villages by way of reclaiming their agricultural production. In reentering village production back into viable economic life this village monasticism had begun providing a kind of alternative socioeconomic organization to the emerging feudal relations of production, a movement that had begun to draw the people back to village life, beginning with Pachomius’s original successes in the deserted villages of Tabannese and Pbow.
As James Goehring states,
- “Its leaders were the new holy men of antiquity, but its institutions were also among the new purveyors of social and economic power in the hinterland. Its success in Egypt was dependent on both elements.”
From the constitutive involvement of coenobitic monasticism with organized communal production the notion of manual labor came to be understood not only as necessary for the maintenance of the body but also for the salvation of the soul.
This form of communal production and its affirmation of labor as constitutive for the life of
the spirit spread quickly from Pachomius into the West, with the Pachomian rule for
planned living directly influencing the rise of the Benedictine community.
For Benedictine monks manual labor was also understood essentially as a constitutive aspect of spirituality, to be practiced and improved upon daily, along with prayer and contemplation. The rise of this figure of saintly perfection amongst the oratores permitted, in a way unimaginable to the contemplative life of the Greek elite and the heroic life of the Germanic warrior, a more honorable view of work. This not only raised the consciousness of productive activity within the spiritual practitioner, who increasingly came to reflect upon the spiritual meaning and value of labor as more than merely a useful tool, but it also raised popular consciousness to the dignity of labor because of its integral association with the ideal life of the saints.
Yet, more importantly, the ongoing development of monasteries as societies of economic and spiritual flourishing led to increased technological innovations in the forces of production that facilitated their unified embodiment and spiritual growth. As René Dubos states, “for the first time in the history of human institutions, the Benedictine abbey created a way of life in which practical and theoretical skills could be embodied in the same person. … they destroyed the old artificial barrier between the empirical and the speculative, the manual and the liberal arts.” The increased organization of productive activity meant the increased experience of the transformative power of labor as well as a surplus of intellectual labor for reflecting upon the meaning, value, and use of work.
Such surplus labor led to a greater experimentation with the forces of production in themselves, a tendency that led toward vast innovative leaps beyond antiquity in the development of productive technologies, a transformation whose inventive scale has been estimated on par with the nineteenth century industrial revolution.103 With new developments in mills and machinery among other technologies, the Middle Ages saw productive yields, especially in agriculture, grow at unprecedented rates.
Thus, as the practices of manual labor increased and developed in their communal organization, creating a monastic social formation more complex in its forces and relations of production, there was also a greater development of intellectual and spiritual labors, which led to a greater appreciation of physical labor as an internal good to the totality of social and natural relations. This trajectory positively incorporated labor into a spirituality that was increasingly given not to a separation of the inner spirit, but to a higher cultivation of the unifying potentials of nature and humanity.105 The closeness of the community to subsistence production and the reallocation of surplus goods and surplus labor for perfecting and transforming productive activity into higher forms of communal self-organization allowed for a new view of labor as not merely a means of self-preservation but a transformation of subsisting according to new forms of creative development. This new view upon labor as integrating material and salvific economies was being opened, then, precisely because the mode of production did not primarily serve to produce commodities solely for trade and acquisition of wealth, but rather served to perfect the community of primary producers itself in their creative activity. As George Ovitt states in opposing Weber’s retrojection of a capitalist ethos on monastic industria: “Monasticism, as shaped by the early history of asceticism and by the earliest monastic Rules, saw significance in the process of labor, not its products; it was centripetal and socialistic in its pursuit of communal self-sufficiency.”
See also: Pachomian Monasticism and the Communal Revivification of the Roman Agricultural Heartland
Homo Artifex
Benjamin Suriano:
"Building upon this anthropology, humanity came to be understood fundamentally as an artisan situated between opus Creatoris and opus naturae, thus giving birth to the new concept of “homo artifex” in the twelfth century. In his suggestive Theology of Work, Chenu characterizes homo artifex by a heightened consciousness of material reality within the meaning of the whole, “calculating the significance of matter not only in his body but in the fabric of the universe,” in order to discover the ways in which matter, in all of its physical processes, is necessary to “the truth of human nature.” While the meaning of nature was couched in personified images during this period, this did not lead to a subjugation of humanity to mythical animistic forces. Instead, this “new breed of medieval man,” was stirred by an enlightened consciousness of human productive power in pursuing truth as no longer simply an abstract conceptual unification in thought alone, but truth as a more comprehensive reconciliation of material contradictions in the totality of social and natural relations.
Because this new appreciation for the standpoint of labor recognized its constitutive value within a salvific economy that sought reconciliation precisely through new material productions of the good, beautiful and true, it is difficult to explain this valorization according to a proto-bourgeoisie attempt at dominating nature for an abstract will and its purely secular commercial interests around generating exchange values. As Chenu comments, for homo artifex, labor precisely as productive activity was revalued according to its transformative capacity to raise matter “into an economy which, at its final term of development in the ‘new heavens and new earth’ promised after the last judgment, would confer divinity upon the natural universe, this time for good.”136 Here the ideal or final cause of historically raising matter into a new economy is not in order to convert the materials of nature into abstracted values, as if to dissolve all things of their concreteness; rather the final cause is that of a new whole in which divinity is redistributed to and conferred upon the natural material movement of making whole. History was then increasingly conceived as the progressive perfection of nature in its creative capacities, as embodied in human labor—a productive act whose ideal approximation was to its own perfection as art rather than simply as procurement of bare subsistence or disposability to mechanical efficiency according to the external ends of acquiring abstract wealth. The notion of time, moreover, far from an indifferent quantitative mechanism of measurement, was conceived as qualitatively internal to this perfective activity, as “effectively the field and measure of its transformations, its efficacy, its purposes.”
Homo artifex was not only characterized by a raised consciousness of the productive power of labor to transform and perfect nature, but, moreover, of this transformative activity as essential to the constitution of the subject. As Jean Lacroix comments of this period of homo artifex: “To work is to make oneself while producing an achievement, to perfect oneself while perfecting the world. Consequently the aim of work is dual, said scholastic philosophers: perfectio operis and perfectio operantis, perfection of the work and perfection of the worker." Thus within this trajectory we even find Aquinas, that faithful Aristotelian scholastic, later admitting productive activity within the meaning of being. Commenting on Aristotle’s claim in Book 9 of the Ethics that craftsmen love their own productions because they love their own existence, Aquinas elaborates that “to exist is to live and consequently to operate … the producer actually producing is in some way the work produced.”139 As Kelvin Knight rightly points out, productive activity is presented here in Aquinas as essential to actualizing the subject’s participation in esse, of bringing forth the subject into being.140 Labor then is not an extraneously mechanical and local motion commanded by and for the purification of a detached inner spirit. Rather than identified with mortal or mortifying processes, labor is measured in metaphysical terms as a perfective act in itself, bringing into being and raising to life what was only in potential. This implies that participation in the transcendental perfection of pure act cannot be the exclusive domain of an abstracted intellectual activity leaving behind its laboring body for the contemplation of a pure stasis; rather, participation is better comprehended through the creative act of selfmediating production."
More information
- Jacques Le Goff, “Labor, Techniques, and Craftsmen in the Value Systems of the Early Middle Ages
(Fifth to Tenth Centuries),” trans. Arthur Goldhammer in Time, Work and Culture in the Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), pp. 71–86.
- On the difference with Neoplatonist asceticism see, John G. Gager, “Body-symbols and Social Reality:
Resurrection, Incarnation and Asceticism in Early Christianity,” Religion 12.4 (1982): 345–363. But especially see Peter Brown, The Body and Society, (Columbia University Press, 1988).
Discussion
Why Max Weber's Interpretation is Wrong
Benjamin Suriano:
"Characteristic of these extensions is a tendency to read a modern Puritanical asceticism back into the monastic asceticism of the Middle Ages and thus to read every possible valorization of labor’s rationality as leading to and culminating in the modern bourgeois ethos of capitalism. Hence Lynn White Jr. can read the Christian belief system and its ascetic practices manifest in Western medieval monasticism as simply authorizing and implementing a proto-capitalist rationalization of the labor process for the domination and exploitation of nature. The problem here is not simply that a Protestant and bourgeois ethos is anachronistically read into medieval asceticism, but more so that the meaning of labor in itself is predetermined as a brute secular fact whose valorization can only be commanded from and for a detached spirit as it exploits nature. For the Weberian, therefore, insofar as labor is rationally valorized within the medieval West, this is always to be attributed to a line of ancestry culminating in the bourgeois entrepreneur who effectively commands labor as a tool of mastery over nature.
While there are of course bourgeois threads that extend back into the medieval period, showing up even within certain monastic organizations, the point is that these are neither total nor the dominant form by which the rationality internal to labor itself was distinctively understood and valued. The rationalization assumed within the Weberian understanding of the valorization of labor, which retrojects its bourgeois assumptions and their Calvinist reflex, is one that exclusively regards only the efficient means by which labor can be instrumentally disposed to external ends set by an alien will—labor is not then understood as the creator of value but only an object of values set arbitrarily outside of its own good. The worldly application of a methodical instrumentalism given from a certain religious asceticism, which Weber is so keen to describe as a “rationalization” of labor, is therefore only a partial form of rationality being reified as rationality itself. Thus, in rightly seeing a connection between Protestant spirituality and the rise of capitalism, he is nevertheless only describing a process and ideology that serves the irrational subsumption of labor to arbitrarily external ends. This is a fundamentally irrationalizing process because a real rationalization process implies a ratio to a final cause that substantively perfects the thing being rationally ordered; but here in Weber’s instrumental rationality, there is only the bare efficient causality of ordering an object to be disposable to whatever external end, even if this end destroys rather than comprehends and perfects the thing being materially organized and so ordered.
The Weberian valorization therefore speaks not of an emancipatory change in the forces and conditions of labor, or of a radical reorientation of the ends for which the laboring body’s activity might be perfected according to its own creative potentials, but only an irrational process of decomposing the laboring body’s orientation to its own perfection so as to make it more available to an external spirit. He thus describes primarily a change in attitude toward the given bourgeois institution of wage labor, an ethos to remain in one’s vocation but to work harder and more efficiently."
More information
- Book: La Religion industrielle: Monastère, manufacture, usine. Une généalogie de l'entreprise. Pierre Musso. Fayard, . See: The Industrial Religion.
URL = https://www.fayard.fr/livre/la-religion-industrielle-9782213701806/
Summary via ChatGPT:
"Pierre Musso's book "La Religion industrielle: Monastère, manufacture, usine. Une généalogie de l'entreprise" explores the deep historical roots of what he terms the "industrial religion." Musso traces the origins of industrial and capitalist ideology far earlier than Max Weber's analysis of the Protestant work ethic. He argues that the foundation of Western industrialism lies in the medieval monastic organization, which combined religious discipline with economic production. This industrial religion, evolving from monastic systems to modern enterprises, highlights the continuity between religious structures and capitalist production.
The book challenges the idea that industrial capitalism is a modern invention, instead positing that it is deeply rooted in Western religious and philosophical traditions dating back to the 12th century. Musso's work has been well-received in academic circles for its innovative approach to understanding the historical development of capitalism through a religious lens."