The cloying embrace of the New
Age.
The criticism of religion ends with the doctrine that man is the
highest being for man, that is, with the categorical imperative to
overthrow all circumstances in which man is humiliated, enslaved,
abandoned and despised”. (Marx, Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right)
In the last thirty or so years there has sprung up a set of ideas,
loosely related in content but closely tied by form, referred to
collectively as the 'New Age' Aquarianism, Wicca, crystal healing,
aromatherapy, holistic remedies, along with a host of offshoots from
more conventional religions whether Christian or otherwise. These
institutions themselves are internal to a general 'change of
consciousness', in the main anti-technological and pro-'spiritual', or
'Green'.
We as Socialists often appear alone in standing against this seeming
tide of goodwill, good vibrations, and wholesomeness, as if
slaughtermen at a refuge for foundling woodland animals. People know,
and usually respect, our position on organised religion; that religion
is debilitating to the mind of the worker and thus to the progress
which we wish to make as workers in advancing our interests. But the
New Age? What could be bad about 'healing'? Who could protest against a
Green utopia? Or, indeed, the benefits of goddess worship in empowering
women? Surely this New Age is at worst harmless fun and at best a route
to a new, gentler society?
Our answer is that the New Age religion is merely the old age religion
in a new, consistently modern form. For example, it follows all the
rules of modern science, often becoming a cult of scientism itself,
demanding (usually)? no virgin births or flat earths, and steps between
the cracks of this modern science where it fails to tread, in the
subjective part of human experience; the New Age's powers are all
developed on the side of 'spiritual energy', 'psychic transformation',
etc. If the old religion was the opium of the people, then this is the
heroin; no longer extracted by chance from nature but refined, even
artificially manufactured, and all the stronger for the process. The
chants and prayers of the old religion have become commodified into
tarot cards, crystals, massage and healing workshops, incense burners,
and scented candles.
How did this come to pass? How could a modern working class, far more
capable at mental labour than our forebears, sink so low as to fall in
love with our own mental chains instead of merely bearing them in guilt
and shame? The answer is to be found in considering what religious
alienation is.
Religious alienation
Religion is not a set of monotheistic doctrines, whether Catholicism,
Protestantism, Islam, Buddhism, etc., but an ideal world where the
problems of society are transcended in thought. The underlying cause,
the system of society, capitalist social relations, which alienates us
as humans from our material powers, remains intact, in fact, unchecked;
it reproduces the problem. The New Age is not different from religion
as anciently conceived; it is the perfection of it.
The old religions are dying in the West not because of a lack of
proselytisation, the loss of God's favour, or any other cause which
religions might claim, but because actual experience of the modern
world has ripped them asunder, and as dogmas they must break instead of
bowing to this change. The Pope cannot end the Catholic Church's stance
on abortion, for example, even though every Catholic with a rudimentary
scientific education knows that there is no divine spark at conception,
unseeable until nine months later; the entire process of human
reproduction is now well known and it would be expected in any doctor's
surgery that in practice no-one would hold such a belief.
Protestantism instead is the basis of the New Age religion, even though
virtually unrecognisable once it has cast off its particular historical
cloak of inherited catholic ideas, adapting new materials to its needs.
What remains is that 'each man and woman is their own priest'. As Marx
put it, "Luther freed the body from its chains in order to put the
heart in chains"; rather than obeying a priest, we choose the form of
our own mental domination, just as in work we no longer slave for one
master but can choose from hundreds to slave for. The pagan backdrop of
Catholicism is filled by that of Hinduism, Buddhism, even Islam,
removed from their own social contexts of native exploitation; all are
grist to this mill, generating a thousand and one cults, sects, and
aquarian societies.
What all these have in common is the form they take; the flight from
reality into a magical world where the evils of the material world are
transcended in thought. They are not revolutionary, as some might
suppose, from their content of peace, love and contentment; they are
escape, the only escape of the life prisoner staring from their cell
window, and the form is the acceptance of their existence only as an
ideal life, never as a fully material one. They are the product of
personal inspiration, mental focussing, or good vibrations, not the
actual powers of human beings living and breathing in and out all of
the powers of nature.
Socialism/communism
So what is the socialist answer? Quite simply that we wish to abolish
alienation at its root; rather than fleeing from its effects we wish to
tackle its causes. These causes are, briefly put, the forces behind the
capitalist mode of production.
To expand a little, the capitalist mode of production involves a
division of the productive process into the production of two kinds of
values; use values, which the capitalist later sells to make more
capital, and exchange value, which is the labour cost, including
reproducing our labour-power, of producing them. Note that there is no
need to invoke Dickensian poverty or the lash of the Pharaohs in order
to explain the reproduction of the working class; we are not
necessarily materially impoverished by the process, that would be like
failing to put oil in a car engine or charge the radiator with
antifreeze. Instead, like the car, we are objects of use, means rather
than ends, and as the productive process accelerates, as capitalism has
come to predominate, mere cogs in a machine, and our creative powers of
producing values appear irrevocably transferred to the objects we have
made. As Marx put it, "in proportion as capital accumulates, the lot of
the labourer, be his payment high or low, must grow worse". Contrary to
popular apprehension, therefore, we as socialists are primarily
concerned not with becoming better fed workers, but ending our
existence as the ciphers of our own life process. Our immiseration,
which we wish to overcome, is precisely that which the New Ager
recognises at one remove, as the world of other people who have not
heard of healing, spiritual crystal workshops, or whatever, which has
transformed their life: we as socialists (or, the same thing,
communists) do not have the luxury of such self-delusion, whether
through an inability to be so hypnotised, an allergic reaction to
religion, or sheer bloody-mindedness, and must therefore instead
overthrow the conditions which give rise to the pain from which New
Agers flee.
We are not fighting blindly. We have a theory of society, of our
history, which explains how we have come to this pass and how we can
escape it – a theory explained further throughout this journal and in
books, pamphlets, in fact every time you stop a socialist and ask them
the time of day. We have the vast mass of society potentially as
allies, and stand at the end of society's historical alienation
process, with no further worlds to be won but our own. Moreover, the
process itself is liberatory; again, as Marx put it, "Communism is the
actual movement which abolishes the state of affairs" and anyone who
has been to a big rally or demonstration will know a small part of the
power that is to be had through participation in one's own liberation,
be the goal seemingly ever so far off.
These are the things which we offer instead of the New Age, and why we
consider it to be such an enemy and attack it with such determination.
It is a trap for our kind, all the more pernicious because of our
potential to transcend its petty gifts were all its prisoners released
and their energies devoted to socialism. Its supposed similarity to
socialism at isolated points are invariably arrived at from opposite
directions; 'world peace' from a sense of passivity as to world affairs
rather than a wish to participate in world affairs; 'communalism' from
an inability to conceive of social action above the level of the
commune, a retreat rather than an advance; 'abolish money' in order to
live the passive existence of a lotus eater rather than to produce and
consume with abandon.
We would thus urge anyone who would see themselves as a 'New Ager' –
and is probably now just angry enough from reading the above to have
started thinking – to free themself from an imaginary world; there is a
real world to be transformed, and that transformation itself contains
within it the realisation of our social powers.
SJW
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