Heiko Feldner is Co-Director of the Center for Ideology Critique and Žižek Studies at Cardiff University, Wales/UK. This is a guest op-ed and the Exception Magazine does not necessarily endorse the views expressed below.

Capitalism is not only a mode of production, it is also a religion. When this thought struck German philosopher Walter Benjamin ninety years ago, he was witnessing one of the most devastating crises of the last century. The debt crisis at the heart of it was resolved two years later, in 1923, by a colossal hyperinflation which wiped out the life savings of millions and paved the way for the economic slump of 1929 and the resistible rise of the Nazis.

Capitalism was not only conditioned by a religious mentality, as Max Weber suggested in his famous study The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. For Benjamin, capitalism was itself a through-and-through religious phenomenon. It had three essential features. First, it was a purely cultic religion, without theology or theoretical justification. Second, the capitalist cult was permanent in the terrifying sense that each day was a holy day demanding unrelenting devotion without exception. Such was the monstrosity of this religion that, third, it could no longer offer the reform of life as a road to redemption. Instead, the capitalist cult gave rise to ‘Schuld’ – debt, guilt and blame rolled into one – and self-destruction as the only path to salvation.

Was the neoliberal revolution a mistake?

One of the most extraordinary ideological manoeuvres in recent history has been the imposition of austerity rule on societies that only a couple of years ago were blackmailed into getting up to their ears in debt in a collective effort to rescue the banks. The crisis would be over soon and green shoots crop up once the silver bullets of state credit and money printing had rectified the situation and put us back on the royal road to growth. When at the beginning of this year the Financial Times’ chief economics commentator, Martin Wolf, ventured a historical retrospective on the crisis, what had come to a close was the first phase of the greatest corporate looting of public coffers in living memory. Since 2008, 15 trillion dollars have been dredged up from the public purse worldwide to combat the crisis, bringing up the total of ‘sovereign debt’ to a whopping 39 trillion dollars. Not a bad tally for the most efficient economic system we can think of.

Now that we brace ourselves for the second wave of the crisis to peak – a global stagnation with drastic forms of money devaluation waiting in the wings – is it not time we turned our backs on the fairy tale account of the crisis according to which it resulted from a distortion of an otherwise still efficient system (excessive greed, lack of regulation, casino capitalism, Anglo-Saxon aberration, you name it)? Rather than pathologise the crisis and hunt for scapegoats, we have good reasons to look at the neoliberal turn of the past thirty years as a rational response to the historic crisis of industrial capitalism in the 1970s. Deregulation and financialization – the shift in gravity of the economy from production to finance – were not simply a ‘mistake’ but system-internal answers to an irreversible profit crunch.

Let’s recall the structural crisis of the 1970s. When the Fordist growth model of industrial society hit the buffers, the state-capitalist economies of the Soviet bloc went tumbling down the road to collapse, while in the West the reign of Keynesianism ended in stagflation – the double bind of stagnant growth and rising inflation. In either case, the attempt of the state to subsidise the lack of real growth had proved unsustainable. The hour for the neoliberal revolution had come.