In what sense does environmentalist discourse belong to religion, and what strategy of capital does it serve?
In this preface to Dominique Mazuet's book "Des Veaux et des choses," Dominique Pagani comments on the quip by Michel Clouscard that gives it its title, a variation on "Religion is the opium of the people." He places environmentalist discourse, in contrast to science, in the ideological order, as a species of the religious genus. He restores the passage by Marx from which the phrase comes and compares eco-lamentation to Hegel's "unhappy consciousness." Drawing on Book III of Capital, he shows that anti-productivism serves capital when the rate of profit falls. Finally, he counters Aurélien Barrau with the "freedom of the wild boar" that Marx mocked.
Translated from the French. Read the original.
Paraphrase? a variation on a hackneyed reference, or a mere quip? Unlike the theses that the tight dialectic by which Dominique Mazuet denounces the sophisms of bio-dominant discourse (1), unfolding it from pure tautology to manifest contradiction, these different hypotheses are in no way contradictory, and call for several remarks:
– From the pen, or in the conversation, of Michel Clouscard, the quip, far from being unworthy of “the strenuous effort of the concept” (2) is rather, like a rocket reaching the aptly named “escape velocity,” the well-earned reward of an arduous conceptual journey that it clarifies, illuminates, and gathers together in one and the same stroke.
– If we move from the quip to the paraphrase, we note immediately that the latter is the applied transformation (3) of a most celebrated formula of Marx’s, “Religion is the opium of the people,” very aptly recalled by D.Mazuet (p.66), at the very moment when he is developing the profoundly religious resonance of ecological discourses in the field that is theirs par excellence, the opposite of scientific discourse, despite the scientistic doggedness with which the “Greens” endlessly contrive to usurp the legitimate prestige of the “hard” sciences: their recurring themes and, generally speaking, the tedious semantic unity of their discourses assign them, contrary to this pretension, to the fields of “the symbolic order,” as they say in the Freudian field, or else, to prefer a decisive Marxist reference that long predates it, the ideological field.
In both cases, one formulates a generic concept, cutting across many disciplines, none of which, no more philosophy than any of those that entrust their expression to “natural language” (4), and hence to the element, political as can be (5), of the “words of the tribe” (6), could claim the slightest epistemic relevance: thanks to the prodigious effort of formalization supplied from its mathematical gateway onward, science states, far from natural languages, the logic of its objects, whereas ideology rather expresses, unbeknownst to them, the logic of subjects, inaccessible to the mere immediate consciousness of the latter.
By assigning the ecologist field to the religious, and the latter to the symbolic or ideological order, “Les veaux et les choses” at last allows us to rise from the species (ecologism, religion) to the genus, which alone is able at last to restore their truth... at the expense, it is true, of their certainties alone, which it rather brings crashing down! In the ideological order, ecological discourse is a species of the religious genus. A species, it is true—the opium metaphor oblige—of uncommon potency!
“Theology is serious,” exclaims Rimbaud in that Season in Hell, which one will have some trouble attributing to a pious bigot! “Opium of the people” or “of the beautiful people,” it is this formidable potency that causes people to misjudge the depth of the homage Marx pays to the bond exercised by religion within a community, and hence to the incomparable political force it exerts there. One must truly never have been in contact with victims of addiction to alkaloids (opium and a fortiori its derivatives, morphine or heroin) to get this formula so utterly backwards, endlessly trotted out as reductive, even flippant! It is no accident that, a few paragraphs before stating the addictive force of the religious bond, the young author of the unfinished “Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right” introduces it with these lines, significant to say the least, which people take good care not to quote, the better to diminish its import:
“Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritualist point of honor, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, its general ground of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization of the human essence, because the human essence has no true reality. The struggle against religion is therefore, by ricochet, the struggle against this world, of which religion is the spiritual aroma. Religious misery is, on the one hand, the expression of real misery and, on the other, the protest against real misery. Religion is the sigh of the creature overwhelmed by misfortune, the soul of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless age. It is the opium of the people.”
We thus begin to perceive, from this first part onward, gathered under the acronym LVLC, the matricial core of the work, that another kinship unites the ecological and the religious at a deep level, one that it is unforgivable not to recognize and identify ever since Hegel, the first to do so, in the very throes of our modernity’s birth, drew up for all time the certificate of that birth—a difficult one!—through his portrait of the “unhappy consciousness,” of striking present-day likeness in these hours of pre-apocalyptic eco-lamentation! For there is no need to recall that this unhappiness is the opposite of the one that drives millions of Sahelian women to walk several kilometers at daybreak to fetch water, then more kilometers to gather wood to heat the water, spending the rest of the day pounding food-crop grain with a child on their backs: one dares not imagine the welcome they would give our unhappy consciousnesses coming to talk to them about “happy sobriety,” “consumer society,” and other degrowtheries! And so the opium of the beautiful people is never so addictive as for the ecological discourse that positions itself on the left, to the left of the left if possible, going so far as to claim Marx as its own, even as the Postones, Fosters, and others hitch the car of their anti-productivist, even anti-industrial, vaticinations to the locomotive of the most Nazi of philosophers, comparing the equipment that made it possible to abolish famines to the death camps.
For if it is true that Marx implacably denounces the properly capitalist logic by which capital brutally rejuvenated the old ground rent by imposing on the agricultural sector a devastating industrial profitability, but far from finding in this a pretext, like our postmoderns, to move the cursor of praxis back in the direction of the slightest regression, his analysis of the crises peculiar to the most developed capitalism, an analysis of stupefying topicality, he reveals on the contrary the anti-productivist strategy of this capital as soon as it falls below the expected rates of profit: employers sound the hour of anti-productivism—and hence of mass unemployment long before the discourse of degrowth comes along to lubricate this immense social wreckage. Thus one finds in the 3rd book of Capital several passages pointing to this opportunism of production, in particular this extract from volume 1:
“1. With the fall in the rate of profit, the development of the productive force of labor gives rise to a law which, at a certain moment, comes into absolute opposition with the very development of this productivity. As a result, the conflict must constantly be overcome through crises.
2. It is the appropriation of unpaid labor, and the ratio between this unpaid labor and materialized labor in general, or, to speak in capitalist language, it is profit and the ratio between this profit and the capital employed, hence a certain level of the rate of profit, that decide the extension or the limitation of production, instead of its being the relation of production to social needs, to the needs of socially developed human beings. That is why limits already arise for production at a degree of its extension which, otherwise, under the second hypothesis, would appear insufficient, and by far. It stagnates not when the satisfaction of needs requires it, but where the production and realization of profit command this stagnation.”
Dominique Mazuet proves to be one of the very rare authors daring to transgress, in the name of Marx, this consensual omerta, by denouncing, the first to do so since Michel Clouscard, this veritable strike of industrial investment, which condenses the strategy of Capital in crisis, a strategy bolstered, on the ideological plane, by this ecumenical stigmatization of growth, of productive labor, of progress, even of the human race, the only species whose diminution, or even disappearance, would be beneficial to Dame Planet! This is exactly the apologia for that “Freedom of the wild boar” targeted by Marx, cutting the ground from under the feet, a century and a half ahead of time, of those who, in hours of social exasperation, need its naturalizing warrant, by clearly denouncing, one page after designating religion as “the opium of the people,” those who, like Aurélien Barreau today, harping on to anyone who will listen that the very first stage of the production of man by man, hunting and gathering, are already the beginning of the end: “Good-natured enthusiasts, nationalists by temperament and liberals by reflection, seek on the contrary the history of our freedom beyond our history, in the Teutonic virgin forests. But how does the history of our freedom differ from the history of the freedom of the wild boar, if it can be found only in the forests? And besides, does not the proverb say: The forest only ever echoes back what has been shouted into it. So, peace to the Teutonic virgin forests!” (9)
D.Pagani. Cachan, July 26, 2022
1 In particular in the first part of LVLC.
2 HEGEL/Phenomenology of Spirit (preface).
3 My mathematician comrades will kindly forgive me the redundancy. 4 In the sense that linguists give to this expression.
5 “Mathematics unites men, politics divides them” (Aristotle/Politics)
6 S.Mallarmé/The Tomb of Edgar Poe
7 K.Marx/A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (Introduction)
8 K.Marx/Capital, book 3, volume 1
9 K.Marx/A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (Introduction)