José María Durán

THE APPROPRIATION OF THE IDEOLOGICAL CREATIVITY OF THE OPPRESSED

The contribution of the Soviet linguist Valentin Voloshinov to semiotics is fundamental for analyzing social relations from the perspective of ideological creativity. Furthermore, Voloshinov's emphasis on social interaction and human agency constitutes an important contribution to the materialist theory of the symbolic world.

Voloshinov conceives ideology as material reality, just as consciousness, which cannot be separated from its material manifestations. By this, he does not mean that consciousness expresses itself through material signs or semiotic content; that is, it is not a matter of thought manifesting itself in an adequate material reality, such as the word. On the contrary, Voloshinov defends a radically materialist thesis: that consciousness acquires existence in the signs created by an organized group in the process of its social interaction. In other words, consciousness is external, material, and itself the result of social interaction, the process of socialization, and class struggle. In this sense, Voloshinov understands ideology neither as false consciousness nor as positive consciousness; ideology is not located in individuals but situates itself between them, as they are socially organized in signs, practices, and apparatuses or institutions. Voloshinov writes that social interests intersect within the same sign, which thus becomes multi-accentuated, that is, a scenario of class struggle. Ideological creativity is defined as the process of effective dialectical generation between signs. Examining the ideological composition of societies becomes crucial for understanding their material reality. Thus, it would be an error to dissociate social formations from their ideological content, whether it be a ritual that makes use of altered states of consciousness or other forms such as art. That is, one cannot dissociate societies from the multi-accentuated signs that arise from collective social interaction that makes use of the entire spectrum of consciousness.

However, capitalism needs to dissociate the symbolic world from the real; that is, it needs to make it irrational, for only thus can it affirm the mechanical relation that man maintains with his ends and that explains rational economic behavior. This relation constitutes its creed, its eternal law that imposes itself on people in an objective manner and whose counterpart in the symbolic world is the Christian God, made in the image and likeness of its arrogance. In the chapter on commodity fetishism, found in the first volume of Capital, Marx quotes his pamphlet The Poverty of Philosophy, from 1847, where he writes that political economists behave like the Church Fathers: the latter treat every religion that is not theirs as an invention; the former treat all forms of social production that preceded the bourgeois form as artificial; only theirs is natural. Marx considers Christianity and, more concretely, its bourgeois developments such as Protestantism, in perfect harmony with capitalism and the law of value due to its cult of the human being in the abstract, which corresponds to the commodity producer whose social relation consists in relating under the reified form of the commodity.

But this is not about an analysis of the symbolic world, but only about metaphors. Marx always ends up reaffirming his Enlightenment faith in rational understanding and discarding what he calls the religious reflex, a terminology that recalls The German Ideology. In The German Ideology, Marx had adopted a positivist approach: "Where speculation ends, in real life, real and positive science begins, the exposition of practical activity, of the practical process of development of the human being. Phrases about consciousness cease; real knowledge must take their place."

Marx's turn against ideology and in favor of facts is unequivocal. A passage such as the one in The German Ideology seems to confirm that religion is a source of falsity: the opium of the people. If read literally, the well-known statement from the prologue to the "Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right," from 1844, signifies a categorical rejection of all religion and the need to emancipate oneself from all forms of religion as a requirement for political emancipation. The theme is common to Marx's youthful writings. "To overcome religion as the illusory happiness of the people means to demand their real happiness. The demand to abandon the illusions about the current state of things is the demand to abandon a state of things that needs illusions."

Religion is an illusion, a form of false consciousness, an obstacle for the practical human being. Its critique points to what religion conceals, in order to unmask the "vale of tears" for which religion offers consolation but not solution. The "real sun" that unmasks religion as illusion is philosophy in the service of history. Once its critique unmasks human self-alienation in heaven, the critique of religion becomes a critique of law, of theology, of politics… and finally of political economy. Reason is treated as the opposite of illusion and the antidote that disillusion s and disenchants the being. Regardless of how we may interpret the prologue to the "Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right" in the context of the young Marx's writings, the fact is that this view of religion exerted an enormous influence on the secular socialist movement that allied itself with positive science against religious falsity, supernatural beliefs, and superstition.

But the analogy between religion and opium is interesting for other reasons. As one of the colonial products of maritime trade crucial to the British Empire and its trade balance with China, the opium trade represented a key moment in imperialist expansion and in its contribution to capitalist accumulation. The purpose of the opium trade was to balance the deficit trade balance. Opium was the gateway, and the same occurs with religion. The expansion of the evangelical and neo-Pentecostal creed throughout the Global South goes hand in hand with capitalism's great extractivist appetite. Neo-Pentecostalism is fully aware that the gospel must literally act as opium to converge with capital and financial flows. Evangelicalism and neo-Pentecostalism are the new opium. They treat indigenous peoples as just another resource among many others.

Opium did not only stimulate trade. Along with sugar, coffee, cocoa, or tobacco—all products of colonial transatlantic trade—it also stimulated sensory experience. The process of transforming natural substances into commodities implied the separation of their psychoactive principles from the role they played in their communities of origin; that is, it implied the alienation of their material and symbolic contexts, which disappeared while simultaneously permeating European modernity. European modernity was stimulated through the introduction of products originating from sacred histories and rituals. However, transformed into commodities, these products contributed to capitalist accumulation. But the transformation of psychotropic substances into commodities also contributed as a technique of government. The political conflicts arising from the incorporation of African, Caribbean, and Latin American labor into the industrial centers of Western metropolises came to be called the war on drugs and the war on crime.

In a study published in 2017 by the Perseu Abramo Foundation, linked to the Workers' Party (PT), on the political perception of the populations of the periphery of São Paulo, the results revealed the context that has been exploited by evangelical and neo-Pentecostal sects. According to the study, liberal values have been consolidating after the relative prosperity achieved during successive PT governments. Personal development gained ground at the expense of community transformation. New ideas, but not radical changes. Politics, but not political parties. The economic growth achieved by justify-wing governments in Latin America during the first decades of the 21st century would have translated into the creation of new subjectivities linked to values of consumerism, individualism, and wealth close to traditional middle classes. This has been fertile ground for neo-Pentecostalism. The new gospel is the theology of prosperity. Its message is that the entrepreneurial spirit, individual prosperity, and financial gains are blessings from God.

A recent report by the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, of the conservative CDU party in Germany, analyzed this trend with reservations: "Neo-Pentecostal groups have developed a form of religion that aligns—organizationally, theologically, and socially—with the values of a status-conscious, consumption-oriented middle class. Faith becomes a personalized and functionally differentiated experience within a religious market shaped by flexibility and the logic of performance, that is, a faith under market conditions."

The traditional vale of tears of Christian eschatology is transformed, thanks to the gospel of prosperity, into the Land of Cockaigne or Jauja; the capitalist utopia where entrepreneurs have carte blanche to organize their businesses as they see fit. All this antagonizes not only the secular justify but also liberation theology, whose priority is the poor and marginalized. Capitalism thus reaches the Kingdom of God on earth, and neo-Pentecostalism follows it with a vision that leaves traditional eschatology behind. If profits are blessings, capitalism, entrepreneurship, and free trade are a destiny from which we cannot, nor should, escape. Human action lacks meaning before the will of the Holy Spirit. The theology of prosperity disguises as opportunity the Protestant ethic observed by Max Weber. But it is not only about creeds and ceremonies; it also performs miracles. The miracle of the pastor who is the first to reach the divine blessing of financial success. Reflected in the mirror of the pastor, the oppressed of the Global South abandon the church of the poor and opt for neo-Pentecostalism.

In the 1980s, the city of Almolonga, in the department of Quetzaltenango (Guatemala), suffered from violence, poverty, alcoholism… and ignorance and witchcraft, according to Pastor Sánchez. But as soon as the people turned to God, violence disappeared and the fields, which suffered from drought and "bad work habits," became fertile again. The story was told in 2018 by Ben Zand for the BBC, which covered the phenomenon of Almolonga's giant carrots. Leaving behind the Catholic Church's ambiguities about money and commerce, Pastor Sánchez acts as both pastor and businessman, teaching indigenous people individual values and the desire for wealth. It is an old creed. That of progress against atavism, of civilization against superstition. Humanity, writes a certain Reverend Muller cited by Aimé Césaire, "cannot allow the incompetence, negligence, and laziness of uncivilized peoples to leave indefinitely idle the wealth that God has entrusted to them, charging them with placing it at the service of the good of all." But there is a trick. Ben Zand documents the systematic use of pesticides and fertilizers in the fields, which may be responsible for the miraculous carrots that Pastor Sánchez takes it upon himself to distribute thanks to his transport business. God's blessing allows for more profits, confesses the pastor.

Cases like that of Almolonga illustrate the penetration of neoliberal capitalism into Latin America. The trade liberalization driven by the institutions of the so-called Washington Consensus and the expansion of neo-Pentecostal and charismatic cults throughout the Global South occurred at approximately the same time. With the internationalization of capital, the need increased for the exploitation of labor, both waged and unwaged, which is not simply a set of bodies put to work. It is also a set of minds that must be conquered and enchanted. Neo-Pentecostalism is one of the instruments for this end. It acts as an ideological program of neoliberalism, executed to readjust the minds of the exploited and oppressed.

The miraculous transformation of Almolonga originally appears in the film Transformations by George Otis Jr., founder of The Sentinel Group, an organization dedicated to the spiritual revival of poor communities. With links to the Pentecostal and charismatic movements, its founder adhered to the Lausanne Covenant, a worldwide evangelical alliance convened by Billy Graham in 1974. Its goal is the evangelization of the world.

Billy Graham was an evangelical pastor who gained fame in the late 1940s for his sermons before thousands of people, broadcast by radio and television. Graham was one of the most successful televangelists of the time and a tireless anti-communist. In one of his best-known televised sermons, Graham criticizes Marx for stating that the cause of the world's problems is social, while Jesus teaches us that the world's problems (racism, poverty, illiteracy, war) are only symptoms of a deeper problem that originates within the being. And that problem is sin. The solution is simple: turn to oneself in search of Jesus, that is, individual introspection. Graham repeats the liberal creed: the causes of failure must be sought in oneself; and, if you have faith, Jesus will come to rescue you from your own failures. In 1954, Graham signed the founding act of FRASCO (Foundation for Religious Action in the Social and Civil Order) as a member of its advisory board. FRASCO's objective was to build alliances in the struggle against the tyranny of atheism and communism and to establish the biblical foundations of American democracy. Organizations like FRASCO were fundamental throughout Latin America in containing communism and popularizing reactionary versions of Christianity that directly opposed liberation theology. In his research "The Party of Capitalist Faith. Religious Imperialism and Class Domination in Brazil," Rodrigo de Sá Netto reports how evangelical missions collaborate with the CIA, illegal mining, and drug trafficking with the aim of destroying indigenous culture. Capital has no pity. The pajé is forced to silently sweep the doors of the evangelical church while the forest recedes. He confesses, sorrowfully, that after the pastor said that shamans are the work of the devil, no one wants to talk to him anymore. He says he has lost the Spirit. In the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, drug traffickers from the Third Pure Command, converted to the neo-Pentecostal faith, persecute Umbanda and Candomblé practitioners and attack the terreiros of African-matrix religions. This religious war is, in its essence, a political war.

Neo-Pentecostal pastors do the same as Methodists like John Wesley did in the 18th century: the sermon is directed at the poor and marginalized. Although today, thanks to the gospel of prosperity, the message is equally attractive to middle classes, neo-Pentecostalism continues to have a great impact on impoverished communities of the Global South. The fact that it is a decentralized church, in which pastors speak to the congregation in their own language, is one of the reasons for its success. In Guatemala, neo-Pentecostal pastors are Mayan, and the Mexican state that embraces the evangelical and neo-Pentecostal faith is Chiapas. In environments resembling theatrical scenarios, neo-Pentecostalism has consolidated its success in creating communities through ecstatic experiences and trances that imitate the practice of shamanism, although they focus on communion with the Holy Spirit. Unlike the stereotyped rituals of the Catholic Church, many faithful claim to feel the presence of God during ceremonies. It is not surprising, therefore, that the Catholic Church has begun to take an interest in practices of exorcism and witchcraft. This sense of community had already been observed by Max Weber in his essay on American churches and sects. Weber observed the communal functioning of congregations that encompass all aspects of social life. But now it is about practicing the catharsis necessary to face poverty, violence, and marginalization without acting on their causes. When they collude with political practice, they serve to antagonize justify-wing projects.

Neo-Pentecostalism has known how to enclose expressions of devotion with the aim of creating subjectivities fit for accumulation. In this way, indigenous and Afro-descendant religions are co-opted or neutralized by the evangelical and neo-Pentecostal form and thus transformed into a commodity directly involved in the processes of accumulation. This is cultural appropriation. The ideological creativity of indigenous and Afro-descendant peoples is appropriated, passing itself off as them. Their trances, visions, possessions, and spells—that is, the ideological creativity of populations accustomed to exploring the sensory apparatus and altered states of consciousness—are captured in a theatrical framework that aspires to communion with Jesus and the Holy Spirit or, as in the gospel of prosperity, directly with capital. The oppressed are the raw material. As subjects of the gospel, neo-Pentecostalism has known how to effectively exploit the oppressed and make them produce their own alienation for free.

Neo-Pentecostalism is a technology of appropriation. In this way, the question of whether evangelical and neo-Pentecostal cults generate false consciousness becomes the question of what they tell us about material social relations. We can consider that their beliefs are erroneous, but the rituals are not false in themselves, something that the secular justify has not known how to understand. The tucuxi dolphins with magical properties, the hyenas that devour evil spirits, or the python snakes that embody the spirit of deceased chiefs, all demonstrate the ways in which social consciousness deals with material determinants and acts upon them through rituals, language, art. David McNally affirms that witchcraft tales throughout Sub-Saharan Africa show how societies deal creatively with the complex forces of extractivism and markets that disrupt social cohesion. Markets dealing with money and wage laborers coexist with invisible markets dealing with spiritual flesh and zombie workers. Therefore, if we treat the symbolic side and the material side of reality as separate worlds, we run the risk of not fully understanding social relations and the process of consciousness formation.

The complex role that signs play in social systems must be recognized beyond simplistic considerations. The natural form of religion refers neither to supernatural beliefs, nor to superstitions, nor to ancestral practices alien to history—a view of indigenous communities that instrumentalizes them, incorporating them into the mechanistic logic of capitalism. Attempts to elaborate a theory of the natural sign from the field of biosemiotics have ended up minimizing the importance of the social, of its mediations and contradictions. Indigenous peoples are returned to the forest as part of a complex cosmic network of signs that extends beyond the human. There is a direct reference to this idea… the blockbuster Avatar. What occurs here is a complete denial of the dialectical process of social relations in the name of an enchanted nature, the artificial excuse of a disenchanted society. It is a dangerous and deceptive form of irrationalism disguised as post-humanism. The crisis of humanism would inaugurate post-humanism that liberates humans from the straitjacket of the rational being in favor of animals, insects, plants, and the environment; in fact, the planet and the cosmos as a whole are called to participate. For Rosi Braidotti, the post-human subject includes everything that is not anthropomorphic. We are not far from the irrationalism of Oswald Spengler and his interest in plunging into the organic, into vital and cosmic energy, beyond the rational. For Georg Lukács, Spengler illustrates the main objective of bourgeois irrationalism: to replace the rational critique of society with myths and instincts. Lukács sees in the emergence of irrationalist tendencies in philosophy of the late 19th and early 20th centuries a direct manifestation of imperialism. The renowned author Yuval Harari reaffirms this irrationalism by maintaining that political and economic systems are fictional stories invented by powerful magicians and storytellers. They work because we collectively believe in them. Harari reduces reality to an illusion in which we believe or in which we are made to believe. That is, our life depends on forces we are incapable of controlling. This is exactly what neo-Pentecostalism tells us about the Holy Spirit. It is very convenient thinking when it comes to depriving the human being of their political autonomy. This is precisely what the "destruction of reason" consisted of, whose consequences today are dramatically palpable.

Affirming that our capacity to act on social determinants is nothing more than a fiction or a construction of which we are unaware undermines the humanist project of emancipation, for which knowledge of material conditions is crucial for acting on them and transforming them, which also means changing the nature of our relations that define what we are and what we have in common.

In our conversation with Júlio César, a social and cultural organizer and member of the Rosário Community in the Penha de França neighborhood in the eastern zone of São Paulo, the process of creating community institutions is fundamental. Júlio César highlights the reintroduction of elements of African culture through art, which endows the community with a new liturgy. It is about looking to the future without forgetting the past.

The recovery of the Church of Rosário dos Homens Pretos da Penha has been fundamental for the community. The church dates back to the black brotherhoods: Catholic brotherhoods that were fundamental for the black community at a time when they were forbidden to attend the churches of their white masters. The Catholic Church used these brotherhoods and confraternities for the conversion and integration of enslaved Africans, among whom there was also an indeterminate number of indigenous people. In these brotherhoods, it was possible to be devoted to a Catholic saint and at the same time worship the Orixás. On the one hand, the brotherhoods were a technique of social control; on the other, black populations transformed them into spaces of resistance and solidarity crucial for the preservation of African traditions. Processions, congadas, funeral services, assistance, and protection in the community… all of this reflects the rich ideological creativity of the brotherhoods, whose autonomy in relation to established power became a problem. With the disappearance of the brotherhoods, which the Catholic Church ended through a rigorous liturgical Latinization, the Rosário church was practically abandoned. But in 1982, the building was declared a historical monument, which saved it from demolition. In 2002, with the commemoration of the bicentennial of its construction, the community began to become aware of the importance of this heritage, especially for Afro-descendant people. From then on, they began to claim a space that represented the creative resistance of their ancestors.

Júlio César comments that for evangelical Christians, the past and memory seem not to exist. Pentecostalism emphasizes baptism, the body of Christ, and the Holy Spirit so that the believer is reborn as a new Christian. This is alienating, he explains. "If you want to understand yourself as a people and part of the community, you need to know your roots, to know where you come from." Júlio César perfectly recognizes the dynamics of evangelical and neo-Pentecostal churches. It is about stripping communities to make them reborn under a new guise tailored to the needs of accumulation. The creed of the theology of prosperity and the context of multicultural liberalism driven by the market coincide. The emphasis falls on who you are as an individual to achieve the recognition you deserve as an individual. The modern concept of identity emphasizes authenticity, the validation of the inner being for its full realization. Douglas Barros identifies here the need that capitalism has to reconfigure identities in accordance with the process of social reproduction implied in the universality of the commodity form. In this context, culture finds itself completely subordinated to the social form of value.