Every shift at the factory began with our line supervisor reading a sheet of exhortations. She’d begin by belting out, in a voice to beat the machinery: “What are our top three goals?” And we’d respond in unison: “Safety! Quality! Productivity!” The sheet then transitioned into a list of instructions, things like “Check your machines are in good working order before using them,” and “Keep your workspace clean.” Basic stuff, common to most industrial workplaces.
I worked at this factory for months before I realized this sheet wasn’t busywork. By making everybody participate simultaneously, and requiring us to chant parts of the script in unison, management was steering everybody’s thoughts toward the requirements of work at the beginning of the shift. The unified participation forced us to leave outside obligations outside, unify our thoughts, and shift our brain rhythms toward work. We have a word for this. It’s called “liturgy.”
Liturgy is the verbal assertion of what religious people believe. Perhaps it seems silly comparing industrial labor to church, but bear with me. The order of worship in Christian churches; Islam’s five daily prayers; the tightly scripted mealtime recitations on Jewish High Holy Days—all these are liturgy, and they serve to unify everyone involved in one goal. By reciting liturgy together, believers stop being individuals, and become one coalescent body. Many souls become Soul.
Religions encourage this unity because individuals are necessarily arrogant. The untethered mortal frequently becomes an instrument of appetite, consuming and consuming without ever becoming full. Our culture likes the archetype of the nonconformist bohemian, but it’s an ideal very seldom realized; most people, including myself, can’t be trusted as individuals. We need community and the shared experience of others to restrain our animal desires and become completely human; liturgy is one way to achieve that.
Émile Durkheim wrote, clear back in 1912, that liturgy makes participants speak their values aloud, together. It isn’t enough to privately affirm our beliefs, and treasure their truths in our hearts; anybody can do that, but life’s constant strains force us to compromise our values. We’re all occasionally hypocrites. Speaking our values aloud, together, reminds us not only what we believe, but that we don’t struggle alone. Religions with sturdy liturgy see very little apostasy.
Many non-religious groups recognize this unifying power in reasserting what we believe in public, in unison. That’s why public schools require students to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, and why it caused such controversy when football players elected not to participate in the National Anthem. For national and government purposes, refusing to participate in these acts resembled refusing to speak the Apostles’ Creed and sing Kyrie Eleison in church. They risk generating widespread national apostasy.
For capitalists to embrace liturgical practice serves two purposes. First, it gets everybody in a work mindset immediately. At the factory, we needed to reset our mental rhythms to the pace of the assembly line, without hesitation. Our shared chant, with its almost Shakespearean cadence, accomplished that. At my current job, we have no such liturgy, and getting started on any meaningful work thus requires thirty minutes of grumbling and fumbling as our brains realign.
Second, capitalist liturgy forces us to accept, on some level, capitalism itself. Sure, not everybody who speaks the Kaddish or the Nicene Creed believes the words, but they at least give some level of assent to the principles, making themselves bearers of the words’ value. Likewise, workplace chants, company songs, and the tradition (most common in Japan) of calisthenics at the top of the shift, make workers leave their identities outside and become, temporarily, Employees.
In other words, workplace liturgies, like religious liturgies, make us subjugate our identities to The Other. Whether that Other is God or Capitalism matters only sub-structurally; both approaches get us to stop being individuals. The structure of Church and Capitalism bear remarkable similarity. That doesn’t mean the sub-structural qualities don’t exist; Church calls us to stop being individuals to serve humankind, while Capitalism wants us to serve Capitalists. But they structure it the same way.
Perhaps that’s what makes Capitalism so difficult to unseat, even as we workers look outside and see our labors making someone else rich. Our conscious minds know we aren’t achieving the promise of Capitalism, but we’ve liturgically committed ourselves to the capitalist ideal. Changing our minds now wouldn’t make us merely non-capitalists; it would make us apostates. Just as leaving religion can be terminally painful, abandoning Capitalism forces us to abandon the words we’ve spoken.
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