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The Market: A Spiritual Power December 2000 I find it helpful to frame the ongoing discussions and battles around globalization in religious terms. In our world, the market functions as a spiritual power which most worship in the form of investment, work, and consumption. The market reduces everything in the creation to a commodity whose value is set by the market. And like all false gods, it requires human sacrifice and exists to benefit the rich and powerful who, of course, do everything, including funding universities, the media, political parties, ‘think tanks’, and churches to justify their god’s ascendancy. In terms of international living wage campaigns, the first obvious spot the market requires its human sacrifice is with international currency markets. A low valued currency means that people in that country can not access the creation’s resources for life: food, energy, mineral and other resources, as they can not afford to pay for them. Being left in poverty, they have no recourse except to accept whatever means of livelihood is available. In the last two decades, another spiritual power, technology, has combined with the market to add a further twist. With technology, the rich have been able to overcome the limitations of geography so that now they can control production, mainly labour, in almost any region of our earth. This has allowed production to be moved to the lowest wage regions of the world. Furthermore, through legal development, the control of production no longer has to be exercised through ownership of production, but through control of the market for the product. Most corporations now control production through contracts and patent and copyright law. Production is contracted out through a global bidding process and it is the lowest bidder who meets the quality and quantity conditions who gets the contract. The corporation owns the final product and often owns the process, but it no longer has to own the factories undertaking the production. The real insidiousness of the gods of globalization comes when people in these production centers try to organize for better working conditions. Because of technology, the rich can let the contract anywhere on the earth. When people get too demanding, the contracts are simply moved to another country which permits more abysmal working conditions, thus the expression “we kill for pennies”. For the rich who control the final market, the profits are in the sale of the product not in the production. Cost accounting is irrelevant or a smoke screen as prices are set by the market not by costs. It doesn’t matter what conditions led to the final product as long as the rich have unfettered access to their market – this is what the World Trade Organization is working to accomplish. This whole system of control is sold to us on the basis of low prices which is what the gods tell us we were created for – to consume and enjoy ourselves in our consumption. And that, of course, is the real meaning of Christmas in the western world. The other factor in understanding the market and technology as spiritual powers is that they are not recognized as such. Anyone can graduate from a seminary and learn nothing of the greatest and most dominant religion of our world – the religion of the market. Pastors and seminarians express no anxiety about admitting they don’t understand finance and business! So we end up with churches which name all the small sins and ignore the biggest sin of all – the heresy of the market which is driven by the love of money, the most discussed sin in the bible! A contemporary academic who has analyzed the market in religious terms is David Loy, a Japanese Buddhist. His analysis can be found on http://www.bpf.org/market.html. The key understanding is what do we do about it? It is in the doing that we experience and live by faith. And we need to be “as shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves” (Matt. 10:16). The genius of international living wage and environmental campaigns is that they have recognized where power lies and are focusing energy on the markets. We need many more such movements toward a new economic vision which respects and enhances the intrinsic value of all people and everything in the creation. |