How is Capitalism like a Religion?

Reflections on a Theme in Benjamin’s Early

Thought

Nathan Ross

In the fragment from 1921 ‘Capitalism as Religion’, Walter Benjamin formulated his
most distinctive, creative and critical account of capitalism. 1 He authored this text
before his more explicitly Marxist phase, before his encounters with Bertold Brecht
and Asja Lacis, and it thus challenges the view that the early Benjamin was not yet
galvanized to a political modality of thought, while also offering us the most
promising hints for a distinctively Benjaminian approach to critiquing capitalism. It
articulates a thesis on capitalism that also permeates his book One-way Street from a
few years later, and it thus shapes Benjamin’s practice of social critique in a crucial
way.
In what follows, I propose an interpretation of Benjamin’s thesis on capitalism
as a religion that follows the methodological practice of reading thought-images
(Denkbilder). Adorno formulates the notion of Denkbild in his essay on Benjamin’s
One-way Street: the thought-image is a startling juxtaposition of images that reveals
something exaggerated and yet at the same time so incisively critical of our ordinary
habits of thought that it can hardly be formulated in literal, conceptual terms. As
Adorno writes, Benjamin’s practice of writing in thought-images “grants objectivity
to an experience that might seem subjective and coincidental to a trivial
perspective.”2 The thought image is not to be taken literally, but also not merely as a
subjective metaphor. It is rather like a dream that brings heteronomous layers of
experience into contact with one another and thus reveals latent connections
between them that hide from view. I propose interpreting Benjamin’s analogy of
capitalism to religion in just such a sense: a brash juxtaposition, meant to shock, to
waken, as much as to be understood.
How is capitalism like a religion? Benjamin establishes two related, essential
thought images: first in his fragmentary text ‘Capitalism as Religion’, the image of
capitalism as a cultic religion organized around debt, and then in One-way Street, the
image of inflation as the experiential core of capitalism. We have to take the notions
of debt and inflation both literally as economic phenomena that structure human
behavior, and in an interwoven, broader psychological sense as features of social
experience that color our ability to make sense of every dimension of life. The
Denkbild allows Benjamin to move fluidly between what Marx would call the
substructure and the superstructure of capitalism, and thus to make experience into
a fundamental theme in the critique of capitalism.
In critiquing capitalism as a form of religion, Benjamin is not merely
addressing the ‘ideology’ of capitalism, the culture of capitalism, or the blindly

1 The fragment ‘Capitalism as Religion’ was not published until 1985 and it is believed that Benjamin
intended it to be a part of an essay to be titled ‘The True Politics.’ Some of the notions developed in
the fragment found their way into his One Way Street, such as the observations about religious
iconography on money.
2 Theodor W. Adorno, Noten zur Literatur (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2003), 680.
deterministic belief in markets, as opposed to the literal productive system of market
relations that characterizes the capitalist economy. He is not repeating a Weberian
analysis of how certain features of Protestant Christianity condition and make
possible a capitalist way of organizing production, but instead he means to show that
capitalism is, in its very system of organizing people and reproducing itself, a form of
religion. It is not merely analogous to other religions: it is rather an outgrowth of
religion that actually threatens to end all other religions. As he puts it, “Capitalism has
developed as a parasite of Christianity in the west.” But then adds: “Christianity’s
history is essentially that of its parasite, capitalism.” Thus to claim that capitalism is
a religion is not merely to critique it from a secular perspective, as if religion
inherently involved mystification from which we have to free ourselves. Rather, it is
to claim that capitalism stands in both an analogous and a parasitical relation to
religion: While Christianity might mystify our experience of reality in significant
ways, it does so for the sake of making certain kinds of redemptive experience
possible. Capitalism invokes analogous structure of social psychology not in order to
offer meaningful redemption, but in order to make redemption impossible. (It is thus
possible to compare Benjamin’s diagnosis of capitalism as religion to the way he
would subsequently use the notion of mythology in his essay on Goethe to describe a
blind context of guilt.) 3 Capitalism entails mythology, according to Benjamin’s
analysis from the Arcades Project, because it presents a highly developed social and
historical mode of activity as if it were natural and the only possible.4

The ‘Diabolical Ambiguity’ of Debt: An essential defining feature in Benjamin’s concept

of religion is the experience of Schuld, a term that can be translated into English as
either debt or guilt. In noting this “diabolical ambiguity” in the German term, as both
an economic term and a moral sentiment, Benjamin follows an insight of Nietzsche.
In On the Geneology of Morals, Nietzsche argues that archaic societies demonstrate
feelings of ‘debt’ that connect younger generations to the elders. This sense of
indebtedness grows so great that it can no longer be regulated in social interactions,
and becomes a pervasive sense of ‘guilt’ to the creator. However, the radicalization of
debt is tied to the possibility of atonement: the religious community might offer the
possibility of atonement through good conduct, through punishment (which
discharges the debt), or through ‘faith’ alone, that is through the complete subjective
identification with the will of the one to whom one is indebted.
Benjamin takes Nietzsche’s argument about the constitutive quality of debt in
religious consciousness even further in examining the role of debt in capitalist
society. What is radical in capitalism, in comparison to other forms of religion, is that

3 Such as a discussion of the fragment is developed by Werner Hamacher, who compares Benjamin’s
notion of religion to his later ‘Logic of Origin’, in On the Origin of German Tragic Drama. Werner
Hamacher, ‘Schuldgeschichte. Benjamins Skizze “Kapitalismus als Religion”, in Dirk Baecker (ed.),
Kapitalismus als Religion (Berlin: Kadmos, 2003), 111.
4 Eiland and Jennings write of the notion of mythology: “Although (Benjamin) will increasingly

recognize myth itself as a form of knowledge (as would Adorno and Horkheimer in The Dialectic of
Enlightenment), he will also come to myth as the form in which the capitalist world presents itself to
perception—as natural, as the only possible”. Eiland and Jennings, Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014), 165.
“Capitalism is probably the first instance of a cult that produces guilt, not
atonement.” 5 If in Nietzsche’s argument, religion makes sick in order to offer a
remedy, in Benjamin’s interpretation of capitalism as a religion, it makes sick in such
a way as to establish absolute despair of any remedy as a universal condition. In the
capitalist cult, guilt is pervasive in the radical sense that there is no longer a
distinction between creditor and debtor, but even ‘God’ is brought into the nexus of
guilt., as he writes: “A vast sense of guilt that is unable to find relief seizes on the cult,
not to atone for this guilt, but in order to make it universal, to hammer it into the
conscious mind, so as at once to include God within the context of guilt”.6 In that God
is drawn into the nexus of guilt, the nature of consciousness’ debt changes so that it
is no longer a debt that can be discharged, but one that can only grow. (Thus the
notion of inflation is just as central to Benjamin’s critique of capitalism as that of
debt.)7
Here it is necessary to consider the debt not merely as a subjective condition
of people within society, but as an organizing principle of the capitalist economic
system through which it reproduces itself and expands. Profit is the organizing
principle of capitalist ownership: an activity is only attractive to capital insofar as it
produces a profit. Insofar as capital owns the material basis of society (not only the
‘means of production’, but also the means of living and enjoyment), and human labor
exists in order to create a surplus labor value for capital, there is a sense in which all
human activity is caught up in a constant cycle of repaying capital. Even the investor,
the presumed owner of capital, is still not the sovereign owner, who can dispose over
resources according to personal wishes, but is merely ‘capital embodied with a will’;
that is, even the investor must ruthlessly follow the dictates of increasingly profitable
exchange or be dispossessed by a more ruthless investor. Thus all human activity,
labor, thought, planning and even enjoyment, is endowed with an intense
consciousness of debt/guilt: it may only exist to the extent that it profits capital to an
increasing degree, and it only generates a profit through allowing its own surplus
labor value to be appropriated by another. (Baudrillard demonstrates the
applicability of this insight to modern consumerism: the consumer does not merely
search for utility or satisfaction, but rather seeks to fulfill a social obligation that has
pathological features.) Debt thus characterizes the relation of the worker to the
employer, the relation of the employer to capital markets, the relation of capital
owner to the act of investing, even the relation of the consumer to industry. It seems
that this is what Benjamin means in arguing that in the capitalist religion, ‘even God
is drawn into the nexus of guilt’: it is no longer the matter of being indebted to a
greater power with a sovereign will of its own. The theological religion regards
atonement as possible because ultimately ones debt is to God, who possesses
subjective qualities such as love, forgiveness and understanding. But in organizing a

5 Benjamin Selected Works 1, 288.

6 Ibid.
7 Benjamin explores the theme of inflation in the text ‘Imperial Panorama: A Tour Through German

Inflation’ from One-Way Street. The text analyzes inflation as an economic phenomenon as well as a
structure of modern consciousness: he cites a number of examples in which the mental and cultural
medium of exchange is so dependent on market changes that it blocks the possibility for interaction
or experience.
cultic religion around capital, there is no sovereign pole, no creditor who corresponds
to the debtor. He writes: “(Capitalism) is the expansion of despair, until despair
becomes a religious state of the world.”8 Despair, in Benjamin’s term, is the state of
guilt that is so powerful because it has lost any hope of a life in the future that is free
from guilt.
Benjamin’s thesis on capitalism as religion rests on the separation between
two elements of hitherto religion, cult and theology. He writes that capitalism is “a
religion of pure cult, without dogma”(289). And latter: “Capitalism is a purely cultic
religion, perhaps the most extreme that ever existed. In capitalism, things have a
meaning only in their relation to the cult; capitalism has no specific body of dogma,
no theology.” The cultic religion is characterized by an intense identification of the
individual with the group and the pursuit of extreme practice as a show of faith.
Benjamin’s thesis on capitalism as religion is thus explicitly not a theory of ideology,
of subjective belief. Rather, capitalism’s religious dimension shows itself in the way
that individual judgment is replaced by group psychology. It would be highly
insightful to hear an echo of Freud’s Group Psychology (Massenpsycholgie) here, a text
that Benjamin seems to reference in his adoption of the term ‘mass.’ What
characterizes the ‘mass’, according to Freud, is that it is able to call forth extremes of
devotion, energetic action, generosity, as well as stupidity and cruelty that are not
attributable to the subjects that make up the group, but a kind of chemical reaction
emerging from their involvement in the ‘mass.’ Benjamin develops this theme even
more clearly in One-way Street. He writes here of the group psychology particular to
the Weimar Republic: “A curious paradox: people have only the narrowest private
interest when they act, yet they are the same time more than ever determined in their
behavior by the instinct of the mass. And mass instincts have become more confused
and estranged from life than ever before” (451). This passage seems to express the
paradox of the capitalist cult: the relation between blind self-interest and conformity
to an irrational group behavior. While the capitalist ethic seems to be characterized
by devotion to ones own self-interest, greed rooted in the desire for self-preservation,
this ethic of selfishness actually implies a conformity to mass instinct, the deadening
of any individual, self-posited goal so as to devote oneself blindly to the pursuit of
profitable exchange. Just as debt is the underlying reality behind profit, the sacrifice
of the individual to the cult, the mind of the group, is the truth of the ethic of self-
interest. Benjamin effectively diagnoses this sacrifice of the individual to the cult in a
series of crippling shifts in Weimar Germany that result from inflation and poverty:
“The most European of all accomplishments, the more or less discernible irony with
which the life of the individual asserts its right to run its course independently of the
community into which it is cast, has completely deserted the Germans”(453).

8 Ibid. 289.
 En la medida que “[l]a capacidad de trabajo sólo puede ejecutar su trabajo
necesario cuando su plustrabajo tiene valor para el capital, es valorizable para éste”,
una vez la posibilidad de valorización se ve obstruida por cualquier causa, la propia
capacidad de trabajo de muchas personas termina “al margen de las condiciones de la
reproducción de su existencia” (Marx, 2011ª(II):116); esta población existe sin sus
condiciones de existencia, y es por ende a mere encumbrance; necesidades sin los
medios de satisfacerlas” (Marx, 2011ª(II):116). La superfluidad del trabajo, que
implicaría su carácter cada vez menos necesario –llave de acceso a una emancipación
de los seres humanos frente al trabajo (por lo menos, en su sentido capitalista)– se
convierte así en el terreno de una contradicción creciente dentro de un mundo social
anclado en la necesidad de producir valor. En virtud de esa contradicción se produce
una masa de personas condenadas al desempleo crónico o eventual, carentes de
trabajo asalariado –y, por tanto, de dinero suficiente para dedicarse al consumo
básico–, cuya subsistencia ya no depende del trabajo, sino de otros medios que se la
garantizan en cuanto seres vivientes –“lo mantienen otros por compasión, en cuanto
ser viviente; por lo tanto se convierte en zaparrastroso y pauper, al no mantenerse ya
mediante su trabajo necesario” (Marx, 2011ª(II):117). El capitalismo sólo puede
reproducirse a través de una reinvención continua de la escasez absoluta –y artificial–
(Echeverría, 2011:250). Sin ella no puede acumularse capital, sin ella no puede haber
un “ejército industrial de reserva”, esa “parte del cuerpo social que debe estar
condenada a no tener trabajo, para la cual la naturaleza debe resultar absolutamente
hostil, pues lo condena a no existir” (Echeverría, 2011:250). Es así que el capital
termina reactualizando “las formas arcaicas de la vida y la cultura de las mismas”
(Echeverría, 2011:250).
Paradójicamente, entonces, el poder ejercido por el capital incluye mientras
excluye. La inclusión universal corresponde, simultáneamente, a una exclusión
universal. “[…] si el capital crece rápidamente, crece con rapidez
incomparablemente mayor todavía la competencia entre los obreros, es decir,
disminuyen tanto más, relativamente, los medios de empleo y los medios de vida de la
clase obrera; y, no obstante esto, el rápido incremento del capital es la condición más
favorable para el trabajo asalariado” (Marx, 2000). El capital exige el cumplimiento
de un ethos cuya realización es impedida por él mismo; mantiene a grupos de
individuos en una zona de exclusión que simultáneamente sigue atrapada en su
interior. Aquél da lugar a que cada vez más seres humanos se vuelvan “no rentables”,
y sean convertidos en “residuos humanos” (Bauman, 2005), que ya no sirven ni para
ser explotados (Jappe, 2014:20), esbozándose así “la imagen de la vida económica
regida por la reproducción del capital como la de un organismo poseído por una folía
indetenible de violencia auto-agresiva” (Echeverría, 2011:78). Si el capital ejerce
poder sobre los cuerpos en cuanto que se apropia de la capacidad de gasto de trabajo,
la pauperización conlleva una doble y violenta exclusión en virtud de la cual, ni el
cuerpo vivo ni la fuerza de trabajo vital parecen existir más en el reino del capital,
pero se mantienen presos de su dominio. Vinculados con el proceso de valorización,
pero excluidos de él, el carácter alienado de la existencia social capitalista se hace más
crudamente patente para los seres humanos (como absoluta indiferencia frente a
ellos), materializándose en toda su negatividad la contradicción entre valor y valor de
uso; la valorización del capital sólo es posible a través del sacrificio iterativo de fuerza
de trabajo, justamente del valor de uso que le da vida:

However, Benjamin’s critique of capitalism as a religion holds fast to the

possibility of redemption: the more pervasive and immanent the relation of debt
becomes to consciousness, the more redemption comes into view as a possibility of
action. He writes of a potential link between the pervasiveness of debt as a form of
universal despair and the possibility of hope: “The nature of the religious movement
of capitalism entails endurance right up to the end, to the point where God too finally
takes on the entire burden of guilt, to the point where the universe is finally taken
over by the despair which is actually its secret hope”. And: “It is the expansion of
despair until it becomes a religious state of the world, in the hope that this will lead
to redemption”.9 In linking despair and redemption in this way, Benjamin anticipates
a remarkable passage from Adorno at the end of Minima Moralia: “The only
philosophy that that can responsibly be practiced in the face of despair is to
contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of
redemption”.10 However, in the framework of this text, how does Benjamin conceive
of the relation between pervasive, despairing guilt and the possibility of redemption?
It might be tempting to call to mind the view sometimes espoused by critics of
capitalism that capitalism must be allowed to develop to its extreme so that it can
arrive at the ultimate catastrophe that would lead to its collapse. Such critics oppose
labor unions and social democracy because they are half-measures that merely
preserve the system, rather than allowing it to develop its own contradictions. Could
it be the case that Benjamin sees such a dialectical progression at work between the
despair engendered by the pervasive indebtedness of capitalist consciousness and
the eventual emergence of a consciousness that is completely immune to
mystification because it has reached the point of complete despair? Such a teleological
view of history runs counter to Benjamin’s later ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’,
which reject the faith in progress as an ideological mode of justifying suffering in the
present, and which argue that redemption only has meaning as a practice towards the
past, not toward the future.11 Even in the brief fragment under discussion, ‘Capitalism
as Religion’, he rejects the notion that there is a dialectical link between despair and

9 Ibid. 289.
10 Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia, transl, EFN Jephcott (London: Verso, 2005), 247. (Section 153)
11 Benjamin Selected Works 4 and also in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New

York: Schocken, 1968), 253-264.

redemption from guilt, a view that he associates with both Nietzsche and Marx in
different ways.12 He writes:

The paradigm of capitalist religious thought is magnificently formulated by

Nietzsche’s philosophy. . . (Nietzsche’s) Übermensch is the man who has
arrived where he is at without changing his ways; he is historical man who has
grown up right through the sky. . . Marx is a similar case: the capitalism that
refuses to change course becomes socialism by means of the simple and
compound interest that are functions of Schuld.13

In this final passage of the fragmentary text, Benjamin argues that the belief in some
kind of miraculous transition between despairing man and Übermensch or between
capitalist economy and socialism is itself a product of indebted consciousness. Both
of these views see redemption not as a real transformation of consciousness,
brought about by knowledge that transforms its object, but as a kind of reward
conferred for loyalty to a structure in which one is not sovereign. This passage
already suggests the way that the later Benjamin would distinguish himself from
orthodox Marxism, which views the suffering of the proletariat in present society as
a necessary means for future utopia, and which orients itself in materialist terms
towards the teleological view of redemption as a product of historical suffering.
Although the text ends at this point, without any explanation of how Benjamin
thinks of the relation between totally pervasive guilt and redemption, it is here that
the notion of criticism from Benjamin’s thought seems most applicable. It might be
asked, what is the political or transformative point of critiquing capitalism as
religion?14 I argue that it is not Benjamin’s point in this text to establish a simple
critical juxtaposition between religious consciousness and secular consciousness.
Rather, it is to reveal capitalism as a particularly pernicious form of religious
consciousness by showing the way that it radicalizes the need upon which religion
rests. In this context, it is illuminating to compare this pernicious form of religious
consciousness to the kind of secular mysticism that Benjamin finds in the

12 Benjamin discusses Marx, Nietzsche and Freud as the three ‘priests’ of the capitalist religion. This
might seem curious especially in relation to Marx, the adamant critic of capitalism. Uwe Steiner gives
a strong explanation of how Benjamin means this: “The three theories of Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche
prove themselves to be ‘thought in a thoroughly capitalistic manner’ in that the religious structure of
capitalism leaves its mimetic traces in their works”. See Uwe Steiner, ‘Kapitalismus als Religion’ in
Burckhart Linkner, ed. Benjamin Handbuch (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2011), 171.
13 Ibid. 289.
14 For an alternate approach to this piece, see Uwe Steiner, ‘Die Grenzen des Kapitalismus.

Kapitalismus, Religion und Politik in Benjamins Fragment ‘Kapitalismus als Religion’’ in: Dirk Baecker
(ed.), Kapitalismus als Religion (Berlin: Kadmos, 2003), 35-59. Steiner argues that the point of
critiquing capitalism as a religion is to set up an implicit boundary between religious and political
forms of consciousness, with political consciousness being focused on the problem of earthly
happiness. It seems however, that this approach does not attend to the way in which Benjamin
critiques capitalism as a particularly problematic form of religion. The point is not to take us out of
religious consciousness, but instead to show that capitalism is embedded in the needs and problems
of religious consciousness in a way that is particularly unreflective.
Romantics, with their notion of immanent critique as a process of redeeming things
from their purely instrumental context.
At this point, it would be worth noting that Benjamin’s thesis on the religious
core of capitalism and his tentative interest in the problem of redemption intersects
with one of the most important figures in his work as a literary critic: Franz Kafka.
Benjamin challenged the first generation of Kafka scholars who sought an overtly
theological message in his writings. Instead, Benjamin proposes that the central
problem for Kafka is the organization of people within society, a point he illustrates
in a radio address on Kafka’s story ‘On the Building of the Great Wall of China.’15 The
experience of guilt is clearly a major theme and perhaps even an organizing
experience in Kafka’s writings: what fascinates Benjamin the most is that Kafka
demonstrates the truly insidious power that guilt has when it is freed from an
overtly theological context, and enters into the experience of the contemporary,
secular city dweller. The problem emerges in works such the ‘On the Building of the
Great Wall’: how does guilt persist and organize social relations even where there is
no one in the right, to whom one is indebted? Josef K.’s guilt is not conditioned by a
theological belief, but as Benjamin writes, is a guilt that emerges out of “everyday
situations, in backyards or waiting rooms.”16 Ultimately, his guilt emerges from his
desire to understand the inaccessible organizing principle of the social world in
which he lives, the law. Benjamin also found in Kafka the most promising elements
of a redemption from this state of guilt: “It is fear of an unknown guilt and
atonement that brings this one blessing: it makes the guilt explicit.”17 Kafka’s great
achievement is to make the reflection on guilt into a truly infinite experience that
engenders incessant reflection, much like the Romantic medium of reflection.
Benjamin cites approvingly Max Brod’s “The reflections to which (Kafka’s writings)
give rise are interminable,” and then adds: “They are pregnant with a moral to
which they never give birth. . . It is the fact that his books are incomplete which
shows the true workings of grace in his writings. The fact that the law never finds
expression as such—this and nothing else is the gracious dispensation of the
fragment.”18 In this passage, Benjamin is squarely in the world of his early writings,
particularly his dissertation on the German Romantics and their philosophy of the
fragment and the infinite medium of reflection. He also anticipates here an insight of
the great Kafka biographer Reiner Stach: that Kafka confronts hostile forces with a
‘masochistic’ solution.19 There is no discharging of debt through action, no transition
from debtor to creditor. But where action is impossible and futile, reflection gains a
potentially redemptive significance. From the standpoint of Benjamin’s thesis on the
religious structure of capitalism, it seems that Kafka stands in stark contrast to what
he has said about Marx and Nietzsche as embodiments of capitalist religiosity. Kafka
does not offer us the teleology of historical evolution, or the sovereignty of the
Übermensch, but a reflective deferral, which reveals the groundless and intractable

15 ‘Franz Kafka: Beim Bau der chinesischen Mauer,’ in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings Vol. 2, Part 2
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 495.
16 Ibid. 495.
17 Ibid. 498.
18 Ibid. 496-497.
19 Reiner Stach, Kafka: Die Jahre der Entscheidenungen (Frankfurt: Fischer, 2002).
logic of debt. The infinite delay, the masochistic solution at the basis of Kafka’s
practice of writing is promising for Benjamin, because it derives from a logic that
legitimately resists identification with the cult organized around debt.

Inflation and the Loss of Experience: There is another equally significant pole to
Benjamin’s critique of capitalism that emerges most clearly in a text titled ‘Imperial
Panorama’ from One Way Street: inflation. Benjamin had a crushing personal
experience with German inflation, as his father’s fortune was wiped out by the pace
of inflation in the post-war years. In one of Benjamin’s most famous texts, ‘Poverty
and Experience’ he articulates his view that experience, in its proper sense, has
become impossible in the postwar years because of the radical and inhuman pace of
change in all things, including economic inflation. However in ‘Imperial Panorama’,
subtitled ‘A Tour through German Inflation’, Benjamin analyzes inflation not merely
as a temporary economic occurrence, but as a pervasive structure of consciousness
that is endemic to capitalism. As he writes, those affluent Germans who experience
inflation as a sudden crisis fail to perceive the extent to which their very property
and their former position of privilege were actually founded on the very same
inflationary tendency that they now lament because it is dispossessing them of their
property and even their possibility to work. Behind the apparent irregularity or
market failure of the depression is the deeper stability of inflation in all capitalist
growth, as a force that mandates that work can only be had and property only be
maintained so long as it engages in a more intensive cultivation of surplus labor. He
writes:

Because the relative stabilization of the pre-war years benefited him he

feels compelled to regard any state that dispossesses him as unstable. But
stable conditions need by no means be pleasant conditions, and even
before the war there were those for whom stabilized conditions were
stabilized wretchedness. To decline is stable, no more surprising than to
rise. Only a view that acknowledges downfall as the sole reason for the
present situation can advance beyond enervating amazement at what is
daily repeated, and perceive the phenomena of decline as stability itself
and rescue alone as extraordinary, verging on the marvelous and
incomprehensible.20

This passage relates the experience of inflation to a central theme in Benjamin’s

philosophy of history: the way in which the faith in progress often serves to conceal
suffering and undermine the possibility of real social change. Benjamin treats
inflation as the real economic truth content of the bourgeois notion of progress,
which can only be demystified when the bourgeoisie experiences expropriation as
the condition of their prior property. Inflation really represents an alienated form of
progress, because it embodies a rapid pace of change that is steered by the change in
the medium of exchange, rather than any change in human consciousness. This pace

20 Ibid., 451.
of change is so great that it outstrips the ability of the subject to experience any
social meaning in economic occurrences, any exchange of products of labor, and
eventually undermines the very ability to exchange experiences. In a manner
reminiscent of his work on the decline of storytelling, he writes of how the inflation
of the post-war years has undermined the ability to have a conversation:

The freedom of conversation is being lost. If, earlier, it was a matter of

course in conversation to take interest in one’s interlocutor, now this is
replaced by inquiry into the cost of his shoes or umbrella. Irresistibly
intruding on any convivial exchange is the theme of the conditions of life, of
money. It is as if one were trapped in a theater and had to follow the events
on stage whether one wanted to or not—had to make them again and again,
willingly and unwillingly, the subject of ones thought and speech.21

Benjamin argues that the forced preoccupation with cost of living engenders a
fundamentally different way of exchanging experiences, and ultimately, a decline in
the very faculty of producing similarities, mimesis. In Benjamin’s writings on
language and art, the word is a mimetic response to the language of things, and so at
the root of language is a kind of exchange in which the truth is produced out of a
kind of reciprocally creative act. However here Benjamin considers how the medium
of exchange, money, is now perverting this relationship, so that rather than
mimetically responding to things, conversation is compelled to relate them as
commodities to the rapidly changing context of exchange. When Benjamin writes of
the ‘denaturing’ of things in this text on German inflation, he essentially has in mind
a sickness at the heart of speech and experience.22 For example, he writes of how the
evolution of manufactured items mandates that they become signs of how much was
spent on them: “Each thing stamps its owner, leaving only the possibility of
appearing a starveling or a racketeer.”23 Rather than a language of things, to which
we may respond with a name, there is a language of commodities that dominates
human speech and thought by compelling attention to their exchange value. And this
exchange value is in such rapid flux that it leaves the bearer of its value with no
middle option between starveling and racketeer.
At its root, Benjamin’s exploration of the phenomenon of inflation is guided
by a similar intuition as his treatment of capitalism as a form of religion. In each
case, he seeks to show the mystifying tendency at the root of economic
developments. Departing from Marx’s insight into the fetishism of commodities, he
demonstrates specific structures of consciousness, such as the consciousness of debt
and the consciousness that is bound by inflation, that stifle the ability to experience
the social conditions of life in such a way that we could respond to them critically.
The debt or guilt inculcated by capitalism is radical and constitutive of society in
that it resolves the creditor-debtor relationship into a universal requirement for all
action to generate surplus labor value, while the phenomenon of inflation reveals a

21 Ibid. 453.
22 Ibid. 453-454.
23 Ibid. 454.
more fundamental tendency for capitalist growth to occur in a way that undermines
the possibility for humans to relate to the objects of their shared experience as
objects of common experience.