"In an early text on “Capitalism as Religion,” Benjamin remarks on the ritual functions of the capitalist economy, which serve to “allay the same anxieties, torments, and disturbances to which the so-called religions offered answers.”[6] Unique among religions, capitalism is “purely cultic” with “no specific body of dogma, no theology”—that is, it is composed solely of the ritual actions that tie its practitioners to the cult without recourse to theological explanations or justifications for those actions. Certainly, theological reasoning abounds among the devotees to capital, as Marx shows aptly in his skewering of the “metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties” that infest the discourses of economics.[7] But these discourses are secondary to the rituals of investment, divestment, speculation, and manipulation that make up the cultic dimension of capitalism. With this concretisation of the cult comes a changed ritual experience of time:

“Capitalism is the celebration of a cult sans rêve et sans merci [without dream or mercy]. There are no ‘weekdays.’ There is no day that is not a feast day, in the terrible sense that all its sacred pomp is unfolded before us; each day commands the utter fealty of each worshiper.”[8]

That there are no weekdays under capitalism does not mean there are no workdays. Rather, because the capitalist feast day no longer marks a special period of remembrance set apart from other days, and instead becomes a generalised state of adherence to ritual, it begets a never-ending demand for worship. Every day requires a sacrifice, an offering to the God, with no days for ourselves in between. As Deleuze and Guattari observed in Anti-Oedipus, or as David Graeber has noted more recently, capitalism is a state of generalised, infinite debt, spiritual and economic, which we labour endlessly in vain to repay.[9] In Benjamin’s words, “the cult makes guilt pervasive. Capitalism is probably the first instance of a cult that creates guilt, not atonement.”[10] With each tick of the clock, this debt can only increase, as the ritual demands of capital far outpace our abilities to meet them''.

thewastedworld