Idolatry and Human Sacrifice Under the Pink Dome

By Andrew Dobbs

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The Eighty Sixth session of the Texas Legislature has come to an end, and with it too my career as a legislative lobbyist. I may still need to do some song and dance shows at City Halls or the occasional county commissioner’s court, but the sooner I can get away from all that too, the better. One thing is certain, however, and that’s that I’ll never darken the door of the Texas Capitol as a lobbyist again.

I should have known better. I did. I told myself the last session — in 2017 — that I was done with this. I knew then that the contradiction between my personal values and the work of advocacy at the Texas House and Senate was absolutely antagonistic. It could only be resolved by jettisoning the lobbying work, and until I did that the stress would be unbearable.

But the prospect of “one last score” tripped me up and caused me to forget my own insights and commitments. It looked like I’d get some solid changes on some of the issues I legitimately care about, even if I know that their ultimate resolution lies outside the liberal state. People’s lives would be solidly improved, corporate power would be very modestly blunted, and while I have no social democratic illusions, it’d feel nice to get a W at the day job at least.

Like all opportunist illusions a simplistic optimism undermined my ability to perceive conditions, but for better or for worse those conditions slapped me back awake in no time. By that dreadful point in the session when half the legislative days are gone but the vast majority of the work and suffering still remains, when the ordeal stretching ahead of you looks entirely intolerable, I knew I’d fucked up badly. I began to regularly describe my feelings as “wanting to blow my brains out,” and while I held off from actually trying it I kept thinking that maybe I should unload my pistol and just see what the barrel felt like in my mouth.

My partner finally put a name to my feelings: dysphoria. It’s the kind of thing trans comrades and loved ones with eating disorders describe, and while I might have felt it before, now I had the word at the same time as the feeling. It was a pure existential conundrum, my body and all my energy moving of their own accord as my mind and heart screamed at them to stop. I felt as if I had no option but to be something I hated, and the exhaustion and dread was only underscored by the need to pretend like I liked it. Worst of all was when I found myself actually getting into it for a moment, only to feel shame at the perversity of it all when I came to. I am incredibly lucky that I get a day when the whole thing gets adjourned, and I have no idea where those who live this way for years at a time find the strength — they are the greatest among us.

At the same time I landed upon the name for my feelings I discovered the best word for describing the institutions causing my dysphoria: wickedness. The Texas Legislature is a wholly wicked thing, irredeemable and cursed. “Wicked” is used by New Englanders and skaters to indicate a good thing, which is too bad because it has tremendous, Biblical-level value as a way to describe evil things. Consider this an attempt to restore the word to its pejorative glory.

They use the word “wicked” and “wickedness” in translations of both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, but I was drawn during the session to what I grew up calling the Old Testament. There are a number of Hebrew words rendered “wicked” and “wickedness” in translation, and they all entail willful, conscious wrongdoing. The English etymology goes to the very roots of the language itself, to old Germanic references to sorcery — hence “Wicca” as the name for the Twentieth Century revival of pagan witchcraft. It’s clear that the word “wicked” is thus a bit of Christian slander of these indigenous practices, and while I hesitate to perpetuate such an erasure, there’s something to be said for the idea of evil that is studied, conscientious, intentional, and expert in its execution.

That’s the world of the Texas Legislature, where the most rancid fat of imperialist surfeit is expended to pay the enormous salaries of lobbyists typically trained during years in the public trust to hone the sorcery of statecraft that they now practice in that abhorrent pink granite temple. It is a wicked place, and they are wicked people.

The precision of this word goes deeper than this, however. I was not only drawn to the Hebrew Bible this session, but most specifically to its prophets. These were the most vocal and principled dissidents in their societies, and it was anti-colonial struggle that prompted their adoption as scripture; revolutionaries ought to find a lot to love here. A historical materialist analysis of their conditions, at least broadly, indicates some strong parallels between the antagonisms in which they were caught up and those US dissidents face today.

As a child fascinated with the Bible I remember always being confused by Ancient Israel and Judah’s persistent lapse into idolatry, as described by the prophets. Why would they keep worshipping statues and false gods, I wondered? I think the evangelical line was something to the effect of “they were sinful” or “their hearts were hardened,” which is essentially just restating the question.

An answer comes by going back to the historical roots of these nations. The Egyptian-French communist thinker Samir Amin proposed categories of historical development different from the eurocentric version of history offered by Marx himself and most of his successors. In place of “slave society,” “feudalism” and other conditions that were specific to Europe and very heterogeneous even there, he grouped pre-capitalist class societies as “communal formations” and “tributary formations.” The Hebrew Bible — again, broadly — is the story of a communal society transitioning into a tributary society, and the class struggles of that tributary society.

Amin lays out this communal/tributary formation rubric in his 1980 work Class and Nation. Human populations all began in a state of “primitive communism,” where productive forces are close to non-existent as groups of people hunt and gather with no meaningful surplus and therefore no class divisions or states. “In order for class formation to begin,” Amin wrote, “an initial development of productive forces is necessary. This corresponds to the transition to settled agriculture.”

By adopting the technologies and tools needed to produce agriculturally, human populations can begin to produce a surplus. In the earliest versions of class societies the surplus is still very small and so class divisions are weak and fluid; the political institutions needed to control the exploited classes are consequently simplistic and weak as well. “At this stage of human evolution, ecological, demographic, and other conditions bring into being a great variety of organizations,” Amin says. “Communal ownership is organized in a great variety of specific ways, in which individual, family, lineage, and other uses are combined.”

Ancient Hebrew society is still at a communal level of development for the first part of the Bible. Kinship relations of production and gerontacracy — rule by elders — is typical of these societies and Ancient Israel. “Tribal leadership and institutions arose from among the elders, as the heads of clans and households were known,” writes S. David Sperling in the Encyclopedia Judaica. “They wielded political and judicial authority. This was a leadership elected by the units on the basis of lineage, experience, and wisdom, as well as the size of the bloc which supported the person in question.”

The books of Joshua, Judges, and Ruth address the transitional rule of the “hero judges,” originally temporary and extraordinary leaders when class struggles — either internal or external — reached a point where state power was needed. At those times the Israelites reverted to a more immediately repressive superstructural form. Over time the continued development of productive forces — perhaps symbolized by the mythic tale of transition from a wandering band of freed slaves to conquering the rich agricultural “land of milk and honey” — produced larger surpluses, sharpened class conflict, and generated rivalry over resources with closely related nations in the Levant. Rule by judges became more frequent, and the communal ownership of land broke down. A permanent state form became necessary, what Amin calls a “tributary formation.”

This “corresponds to a level of development of the productive forces which makes the growth of the state both possible and necessary,” Amin writes. “That is, it necessitates the end of the dominance of kinship (which can continue to exist but only as a vestige dominated by another rationality). The forms of property corresponding to this second step are those which enable the dominant class to control access to the land and by means of this to extract tribute from the peasant producers. The extraction of this tribute is controlled by the dominance of ideology, which always takes the same form: state religion or quasi religion.”

Land is still the dominant productive factor, but now the bulk of it is owned by a particular, small class. Likely the sale or leasing of household or clan holdings to other, more powerful patriarchs (or sometimes “judges” in the Biblical case) under duress of military threat or desperation for access to new factors of production (plows, irrigation, beasts of burden, etc.) prompted the elaboration of title and property relations. These titles are legitimated by a new authoritative political establishment which in turn is justified by an official state religion.

Most of the population is forced to either work these lands held by the ruling class in return for a share of the produce, or to work their own lands — often held communally with other peasants — while providing a regular tribute (hence the name “tributary”) in return for military protection and access to religious institutions necessary to legitimate their own property and other civic protections (marriage, inheritance, etc.). This extracted surplus then pays for the military, political, and religious leadership that are used to enforce this social order.

The Israelite transition from the communal form to tributary form is explicitly laid out in stark detail in I Samuel Chapter 8. It deserves to be read in its entirety:

And it came to pass, when Samuel was old, that he made his sons judges over Israel. Now the name of his firstborn was Joel; and the name of his second, Abiah: they were judges in Beersheba. And his sons walked not in his ways, but turned aside after lucre, and took bribes, and perverted judgment. Then all the elders of Israel gathered themselves together, and came to Samuel unto Ramah, and said unto him, Behold, thou art old, and thy sons walk not in thy ways: now make us a king to judge us like all the nations.

But the thing displeased Samuel, when they said, Give us a king to judge us. And Samuel prayed unto the Lord. And the Lord said unto Samuel, Hearken unto the voice of the people in all that they say unto thee: for they have not rejected thee, but they have rejected me, that I should not reign over them. According to all the works which they have done since the day that I brought them up out of Egypt even unto this day, wherewith they have forsaken me, and served other gods, so do they also unto thee.

Now therefore hearken unto their voice: howbeit yet protest solemnly unto them, and shew them the manner of the king that shall reign over them. And Samuel told all the words of the Lord unto the people that asked of him a king. And he said, This will be the manner of the king that shall reign over you: He will take your sons, and appoint them for himself, for his chariots, and to be his horsemen; and some shall run before his chariots. And he will appoint him captains over thousands, and captains over fifties; and will set them to ear his ground, and to reap his harvest, and to make his instruments of war, and instruments of his chariots. And he will take your daughters to be confectionaries, and to be cooks, and to be bakers. And he will take your fields, and your vineyards, and your oliveyards, even the best of them, and give them to his servants. And he will take the tenth of your seed, and of your vineyards, and give to his officers, and to his servants. And he will take your menservants, and your maidservants, and your goodliest young men, and your asses, and put them to his work. He will take the tenth of your sheep: and ye shall be his servants. And ye shall cry out in that day because of your king which ye shall have chosen you; and the Lord will not hear you in that day.

Nevertheless the people refused to obey the voice of Samuel; and they said, Nay; but we will have a king over us; that we also may be like all the nations; and that our king may judge us, and go out before us, and fight our battles.

And Samuel heard all the words of the people, and he rehearsed them in the ears of the Lord. And the Lord said to Samuel, Hearken unto their voice, and make them a king. And Samuel said unto the men of Israel, Go ye every man unto his city. (KJV)

It’s all laid out right there. The judge system broke down as the political leadership demanded more and more property and labor — i.e. class struggle moved history to a new stage, as it always has and will as long as class society exists. Their demands at the end of the chapter for someone to “fight our battles” likewise indicate that the conflict with other, more advanced nations already experiencing the superior productive forces of tributary society made their own advance necessary.

Samuel warns them that the system is one with exploitation, state retinues that consume huge resources, forced labor, and war. He does indicate too, however, the technological advances in the society, as artisanship, especially for military technology, will take more people out of the field. Manufacture becomes a meaningful part of human society for the first time.

The Judeans beg for the tributary formation just as the masses demanded the socio-political ruptures that broke feudalism — the European experience of tributary society — and moved society into capitalism. For the rest of the “Old Testament” the Israelites and Judeans are governed by kings who live off the forced tribute of the populations, with militaries, clergy, merchants, and privileged landowners upholding their power in return for a share of the exploited surplus.

This is where the persistent problem of idolatry comes in. What isn’t always emphasized in Bible studies and Sunday Schools is just how marginal and weak the Judeans and Israelites really were. They had some resources and were settled in a strategically valuable position on the Mediterranean, but ultimately their power — their capacity to launch military violence at their rivals — paled in comparison to that of nearby empires over the course of the centuries covered in the Bible.

Subordination to these ancient empires may have been unavoidable, but there was strong incentive on the part of the Judean and Israelite political leadership to negotiate vassal terms whereby they would in turn pay tribute to the larger nation. The client state could expend less of their local tribute on their own repressive apparatus and rely upon occupying forces to control their exploited masses. The ruling class of the client state essentially became what’s known now as a comprador class of local elites interceding between their own countrymen and the colonizer. They could step up their own exploitation and corruption secure in the knowledge that the imperial forces would crush any class struggle from below.

This is precisely what happened in particular with Judah and the Neo-Assyrian Empire around the Seventh Century BCE, and while I am not going to go through all the political phases of Judah/Judea, subsequent occupations and colonizations all offered some permutation on these themes. In these ancient societies there was no distinction between the political and religious powers; the rights and titles of the kings and nobility were derived from the divine authority exercised by the clergy. Subordinating the nation to another meant an acknowledgement of their authority and therefore their gods.

Thus the Israelite and Judean ruling classes were regularly compelled to engage in idolatrous worship of foreign gods as a part of reproducing and expanding their own power. This explains the frequent connection in the books of the prophets between idolatrous religion and official oppression and corruption. In Isaiah Chapter 58 God is calling out the Judean elite for their corrupt religious practices:

“Is not this the fast that I choose:

to loose the bonds of wickedness,

to undo the straps of the yoke,

to let the oppressed go free,

and to break every yoke?

Is it not to share your bread with the hungry

and bring the homeless poor into your house;

when you see the naked, to cover him,

and not to hide yourself from your own flesh?

Then shall your light break forth like the dawn,

and your healing shall spring up speedily;

your righteousness shall go before you;

the glory of the Lord shall be your rear guard.

Then you shall call, and the Lord will answer;

you shall cry, and he will say, ‘Here I am.’

If you take away the yoke from your midst,

the pointing of the finger, and speaking wickedness,

if you pour yourself out for the hungry

and satisfy the desire of the afflicted,

then shall your light rise in the darkness

and your gloom be as the noonday. (ESV)

“Wickedness” in this context is elsewhere translated as “injustice” or “perverting justice.” The bottom line is clear: the Hebrew Bible is railing not primarily against the worship of statues per se, but rather the perpetuation of colonialism and ruling class corruption, which it deems as wickedness.

The social order ruling at the Texas Capitol — capitalism — is defined by the reign of commodity fetishism, and Texas politics is thus as idolatrous and corrupt as the worst days of Judah “playing the harlot” with other gods, as Jeremiah and others so colorfully put it.

The transition from the tributary formation to capitalism happened long after the Bible was written, of course. Much of the specifics of this historical development are subject to debate and varying interpretation, but the broadest outline is that developing productive forces consumed raw materials and drove the acquisition of new lands, both a subjugation of still indigenous areas of Europe and the “discovery” of the Americas.

This created new opportunities for trade, and the merchant class which facilitated the trade grew consequently more wealthy and powerful. The establishment of new mines in the Americas dramatically reduced the labor power necessary to produce coinage, and so money flooded the European economy. The peasantry shifted more of their production from subsistence goods to cash crops, and began to insist upon the right to pay their tributes in money as opposed to in-kind.

This prompted a sharpening of class conflict between the peasantry and nobility, defined by the demand for lessened tribute. The growing merchant class had common cause with the peasantry, and helped advance their class struggle. Their success meant more production for exchange, which led to a greater accumulation of money, which meant in turn a new demand for commodities — manufactured goods made for their exchange value. Artisan guilds could not keep up with this demand without a shift to more sophisticated forms of manufacturing where several trades were combined into a single workshop. This broke down the traditional superstructural barriers inherent to artisanship under feudalism, and soon anybody that could afford the tools, facilities, and labor needed to make these goods could establish their own shop.

Altogether the wealth and subsequent social power of cash crop producers, merchants (who often then became lenders), and commodity manufacturers began to eclipse that of the nobility — or at least compelled the nobility to invest in commodity production and join their ranks. Nobility who fell behind this curve found themselves in a cash crunch with only one thing to sell: their lands. In many cases they did not have a legal means of transferring this property because of their archaic notions of title.

The political pressure was on to eliminate the feudal system of varying levels of property rights based on quality of birth and to allow equal access to property based on how much money a person had. Eliminating nobility then begs the question of why one family, the royal family, gets primary political power based on their condition of birth, which then highlights the superfluity of religious authority. There had to be a resolution for the contradiction between the bourgeoisie — from the Old French for “town dweller,” i.e. someone who made their living in money and didn’t have title to land — excluded from politics yet newly flush with cash and nobles exercising that power while going hungry and penniless on their fully-leased estates.

This same process also eliminated the traditional privileges extended to the peasantry. Paternalistic arrangements between the nobility and “their” peasants gave way to tenant farming relations, with in-kind tribute replaced by cash rent payments. The seizure of communal lands in the enclosure movements to replace peasants wit commodities — namely sheep and other livestock — as well as the ever-escalating squeeze on tenants drove these populations off the land and into cities where they could labor for wages. They too lost their legal distinctiveness, and had to rely on selling the only commodity to which they had access — their labor power.

Juridically equal legal subjects all engaged in commodity exchange, with the work done by some of the participants who sell their labor power in exchange for cash wages paid by others who hold a secular, transferable title to the facilities, tools, and materials needed for commodity production: that’s capitalism.

The modes of production prior to capitalism — communal formations and tributary formations — were all focused on the production of goods and services for their use-value. The ruling classes extracted immediately useful goods from the labor of the exploited classes and consumed them directly. There is an obvious limit to such a system, as there is a finite amount of produce that can be consumed before the respective demands are satisfied. Capitalist production, however, produces commodities for their ability to be sold for money, which is simply the universal equivalent of all commodities. Money has no qualitative limits; it can be used for the satisfaction of any desire at any time. It has only quantitative limits — the amount you’ve accumulated — and so there is a drive to perpetually increase its quantity so that its holder can satisfy all possible demands.

But this same phenomenon has a peculiar character invisible to us now because we are so used to it. In these previous systems of production a specific, real human need called forth a particular act of human labor — people interacted with other people to satisfy their needs. Peasants worked the field so they would have food and other necessities, and they gave the elder or lord or king a portion of their produce because he needed to eat too. People could see how the work they did directly benefited their families and others, even if the others were sometimes their exploiters.

Under capitalism, however, production isn’t primarily meant to satisfy human needs, but rather to attract money. Rather than anticipating the need of another person first and foremost, the capitalist has to anticipate whether or not money will arrive as a result of their production. That’s why there are a multitude of human needs that are not met because they do not make money. The capitalist’s money can then be used to satisfy any of his needs, and the wages he pays out of the sales price can be used by the workers to buy other commodities made by other people for the same purpose of getting money. All of their particular types of work are reduced to a single action — labor power in the abstract sold for money. The connections between their labor and particular human needs recede into the background — each group of producers sees only the interchange of commodities.

This is a situation Marx calls “the material relations between persons and the social relationship between things;” all of human history before this was the opposite. He goes on to say that “we must have recourse to the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world” to understand this phenomenon. “In that world the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one another and the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men’s hands. This I call the Fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour, so soon as they are produced as commodities, and which is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities.”

Think about how often in our society we refer to inanimate things — various products, money itself, and “the economy” that they create together in their exchange — as if they had a will and life of their own. Under capitalism the reduction of all goods and services to commodities which can be sold for money requires us to constantly anticipate how the objects we possess or can create will interact with other inanimate objects made by people invisible to us. Human beings must humble ourselves before these seemingly self-animated fetishes; capitalism is inherently idolatrous.

The Texas Capitol is a place which epitomizes the worship of money and the commodities sold for it, as well as the reduction of people to things. The prophets knew that the inspiration for idolatry on the part of the Ancient Judeans and Israelites was a pursuit of wealth and power, and that treating objects like people would inevitably lead to its reverse too. The subordination of Texas politics to capital leads inexorably to the objectification and moral dismissal of human interests.

There are many fields in which Texas legislators do this, but I was most intimately exposed to this on the environmental front, which is probably the starkest example of their idolatry. Environmental observers have begun calling areas given over to polluting industry, wastes, or ecological consequences (such as climate change) “sacrifice zones,” and day after day over the course of the 140 days of the Eighty Sixth Legislature the priests and potentates of the House, Senate, staff, and lobby worked to offer up vulnerable Texas families as sacrifice to the dead-eyed god of Capital.

I remember reading in horror as a boy about the wicked practice of child sacrifice the Ancient Judeans engaged in from time to time to emulate their heathen neighbors. It seemed impossible, until you realize that the Texas Legislature refuses to pass any laws to test for lead pollution in school drinking water. They considered one bill briefly to do this, but only if it allowed high levels of lead before anybody was prompted to do anything. Even this couldn’t get six votes in committee.

Advocates and experts have likewise told legislators over and over again about the terrible price of asthma for Texas children living under air pollution — thousands of them are hospitalized every year, and a dozen or more die from it. Legislators sacrificed those children to their money gods again this year as they aggressively moved to reduce air protections under Texas law.

In the middle of the session, when there was still a little time to take action, the ITC fire in Deer Park outside of Houston spewed black poison clouds across the entire region for days on end. People choked and felt their eyes burn, and children got sick — the little seeds of cancer or neurological or endocrinological disorders planted in them by the smoke. Lawmakers did nothing, refusing to give a hearing to concerned community members, calling forward corrupt environmental officials who elsewhere had compared the disaster to a backyard barbecue. These are men and women who would have barbecued their children in Topheth if they’d lived in that time and place.

What’s truly remarkable is that the pace and scope of their sacrifices to the wicked false god Money knows few bounds. This session saw their disregard for the lives of even well-to-do landowners dealing with the consequences of the Texas aggregate industry on display. Mining for the primary materials used to make the roads and parking lots and suburban home slabs paving over our state is expanding rapidly in the areas between San Antonio, Austin, and the Hill Country. The dust from this process is carcinogenic, the emissions from the trucks and machinery are likewise harmful to human health, and the water consumption threatens the livelihoods of communities and the environment.

These landowners and residents — many of them retirees with significant means, but others rural folks with few resources — were able to recruit bipartisan support for their cause in the Legislature, but their demands fell on the stone ears of the idol Capital. Lobbyists and consultants for the politically powerful aggregate industry — which include former top staff from the state environmental agency, like all polluting industry lobbies in Texas — said that it would make roads cost more to not sacrifice these people and their health. Of course, the costs are just being shifted onto these facility neighbors instead, but that’s a sacrifice the cultists of concrete are happy to make. God Money spoke through these priests and their followers obeyed by doing effectively nothing on this urgent issue.

There were other sacrifices made to the wicked gods of Money and Power as well — our water will be sacrificed to the mightiest cult of all, the oil and gas industry, as fracking water gets dumped in creeks and streams; sacred Native lands will be sacrificed to pipeline companies and heretics who stand in the way will face years in prison; and neighbors near trash facilities will sacrifice their stomachs, noses, lungs, and homes to stench and litter as the waste industry faced no new limitations despite bipartisan demand for change.

And this doesn’t even touch upon the sacrifice of women and other uterus-bearing people, of LGBTQ folks, of the poor, and many many others. Baal and Moloch and the other pagan gods of the Old Testament would blanch at the scope and scale of the wickedness at hand in Texas today.

It bears noting here at the end that there are of course many people in the halls of the Capitol trying hard to resist the evil at hand. It is also possible to be a sincere and ostensibly kind person caught up in that wrongdoing because of moral and political confusion. I suppose I was one of these people until now, but once I know for sure what’s going on and the stakes at hand I have no excuse if I go back and bow before these idols once more. I mean this very literally: I’ll be damned if I make the same mistake again.

And that’s the final point here. The books of the prophets in the Hebrew Bible don’t just condemn the wickedness of their ruling classes, they promise them that persistence in these sins will lead to their devastation and downfall. Selling out to various empires made Judah/Judea a pawn in great power politics and made their destruction a political priority of their patron’s enemies. It may have been unavoidable, but Judea was able to maintain a great deal of political independence over the course of centuries when they shifted to a practice of resistance to the recognition of foreign gods, even when they were under colonial subjugation.

They were eventually wiped out, but all the nations of that time and place are gone now — alone among them Judea’s gods and traditions live on.

Texas is sowing the winds of wickedness, and we will reap the whirlwind. Capital is as dead as the heathen gods were, and the flesh and blood people expected to die for its perverse glory are not going to lay down forever. The same sorts of contradictions that gave way from the communal societies to the tributary formations and from tributary ways of life to capitalism are reaching their peak in this system too. They will resolve in a world as foreign to our expectations as ours are from the Ancient Judeans.

It will end in the end to this wickedness, and the institutions which have given into it. I pray that the judgment comes soon.

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