Capitalism’s chief weapon is constraint on political imagination---you should invert your standard for alternative solvency and prioritize anti-capitalist struggle even if it seems inconceivable.

Words such as “paradise” or “love” or “communion” are certainly absent from our political vernacular, excluded on account of their “utopian” connotations or their lack of steely-eyed “realism.” Although this is a book about the past, I have always kept before me its larger contemporary religious, philosophical, and political implications. The book should make these clear enough; I will only say here that one of my broader intentions is to challenge the canons of “realism,” especially as defined in the “science” of economics. As the master science of desire in advanced capitalist nations, economics and its acolytes define the parameters of our moral and political imaginations, patrolling the boundaries of possibility and censoring any more generous conception of human affairs. Under the regime of neoliberalism, it has been the chief weapon in the arsenal of what David Graeber has characterized as “a war on the imagination,” a relentless assault on our capacity to envision an end to the despotism of money.24 Insistent, in Margaret Thatcher’s ominous ukase, that “there is no alternative” to capitalism, our corporate plutocracy has been busy imposing its own beatific vision on the world: the empire of capital, with an imperial aristocracy enriched by the labor of a fearful, overburdened, and cheerfully servile population of human resources. Every avenue of escape from accumulation and wage servitude must be closed, or better yet, rendered inconceivable; any map of the world that includes utopia must be burned before it can be glanced at. Better to follow Miller’s wisdom: we already inhabit paradise, and we can never make ourselves fit to live in it if we obey the avaricious and punitive sophistry professed in the dismal pseudoscience.

The grotesque ontology of scarcity and money, the tawdry humanism of acquisitiveness and conflict, the reduction of rationality to the mercenary principles of pecuniary reason—this ensemble of falsehoods that comprise the foundation of economics must be resisted and supplanted. Economics must be challenged, not only as a sanction for injustice but also as a specious portrayal of human beings and a fictional account of their history. As a legion of anthropologists and historians have repeatedly demonstrated, economics, in Graeber’s forthright dismissal, has “little to do with anything we observe when we examine how economic life is actually conducted.” From its historically illiterate “myth of barter” to its shabby and degrading claims about human nature, economics is not just a dismal but a fundamentally fraudulent science as well, akin, as Ruskin wrote in Unto This Last, to “alchemy, astrology, witchcraft, and other such popular creeds.”25

Ruskin’s courageous and bracing indictment of economics arose from his Romantic imagination, and this book partakes unashamedly of his sacramental Romanticism. “Imagination” was, to the Romantics, primarily a form of vision, a mode of realism, an insight into the nature of reality that was irreducible to, but not contradictory of, the knowledge provided by scientific investigation. Romantic social criticism did not claim the imprimatur of science as did Marxism and other modern social theories, yet the Romantic lineage of opposition to “disenchantment” and capitalism has proved to be more resilient and humane than Marxism, “progressivism,” or social democracy. Indeed, it is more urgently relevant to a world hurtling ever faster to barbarism and ecological calamity. I wrote this book in part out of a belief that many on the “left” continue to share far too much with their antagonists: an ideology of “progress” defined as unlimited economic growth and technological development, as well as an acceptance of the myth of disenchantment that underwrites the pursuit of such expansion. The Romantic antipathy to capitalism, mechanization, and disenchantment stemmed not from a facile and nostalgic desire to return to the past, but from a view that much of what passed for “progress” was in fact inimical to human flourishing: a specious productivity that required the acceptance of venality, injustice, and despoliation; a technological and organizational efficiency that entailed the industrialization of human beings; and the primacy of the production of goods over the cultivation and nurturance of men and women. This train of iniquities followed inevitably from the chauvinism of what William Blake called “single vision,” a blindness to the enormity of reality that led to a “Babylon builded in the waste.”26

Romantics redefined rather than rejected “realism” and “progress,” drawing on the premodern customs and traditions of peasants, artisans, and artists: craftsmanship, mutual aid, and a conception of property that harkened back to the medieval practices of “the commons.” Whether they believed in some traditional form of religion or translated it into secular idioms of enchantment, such as “art” or “beauty” or “organism,” Romantic anticapitalists tended to favor direct workers’ control of production; the restoration of a human scale in technics and social relations; a sensitivity to the natural world that precluded its reduction to mere instrumental value; and an apotheosis of pleasure in making sometimes referred to as poesis, a union of reason, imagination, and creativity, an ideal of labor as a poetry of everyday life, and a form of human divinity. In work free of alienation and toil, we receive “the reward of creation,” as William Morris described it through a character in News from Nowhere (1890), “the wages that God gets, as people might have said time agone.”27

Rendered gaudy and impoverished by the tyranny of economics and the enchantment of neoliberal capitalism, our sensibilities need replenishment from the sacramental imagination. As Americans begin to experience the initial stages of imperial sclerosis and decline, and as the advanced capitalist world in general discovers the reality of ecological limits, we may find in what Marx called the “prehistory” of our species a perennial and redemptive wisdom. We will not be saved by our money, our weapons, or our technological virtuosity; we might be rescued by the joyful and unprofitable pursuits of love, beauty, and contemplation. No doubt this will all seem foolish to the shamans and magicians of pecuniary enchantment. But there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of on Wall Street or in Silicon Valley.