God, which are the culturally legitimating corollary of the more essentially
tabooed and hidden capitalist system of production. In modern civil society,
the State, culture and religion are subsumed into the service of protecting,
developing and legitimizing the aristocratic principle of systematic class dom-
ination and exploitation in the form of the antagonistic social totality of cap-
italist production. During this same time, Walter Benjamin (1996:288) wrote
that capitalism itself is an essentially cultic religious phenomenon“sans rêve
et sans merci” [without dream or mercy]. Capitalism as religion is a self-con-
tained, identity-producing cult with no dogma or theology [nothing “other”
than itself], in which everything has its meaning and purpose in relationship
to the antagonistic capitalist, utilitarian system of production and consump-
tion. Already in 1921, the capitalist essence of what is today called the Rational
Choice Theory of religion was identified and critiqued.
As Horkheimer (1989:78) asserted, “whoever is not willing to talk about
capitalism should also keep quiet about fascism.” Conversely, it should be of
no surprise then that today in the mainstream academic, political, religious
and media discourses nothing is ever said nor heard about the ever present
possibility of Western civil society collapsing again into the authoritarian hor-
ror of fascism since the inherent antagonistic nature of capitalism remains
tabooed as a topic in those very same discourses. Fascism as state capitalism
is the further historical development of the cybernetic rationalization of the
capitalist mode of production and the systematic reification of the extreme
class antagonisms it produces, particularly when the interests of the capital-
ist class are severely threatened. In his “Theses on the Philosophy of History,”
the last work that he produced before his suicide at Portbou, Spain on
September 26, 1940 as he fled Nazi Germany, Benjamin (1968:257) stated that
the “state of emergency,” which existed at that time due to Fascism, was not
an aberration but the very systematic principle and historical development
of the antagonisms of capitalist society. As he stated, this socio-historical cri-
sis is a reality that the socially disenfranchised, exploited and oppressed know
all too well. Benjamin advised that a critical notion of history as a whole, one
that is expressive of this systematically created and perpetual tragedy, be
developed, not only so it can be comprehended but also resisted. Although
its analysis goes far beyond the scope of this essay, the barbarous reality of
this “state of emergency” of capitalist society is the dominant form of what
presently goes by the name of “globalization.”
The Notion of the Totally “Other” • 135