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So, “biblicalization” of power language correlates not with transitions of the accumulation regime but with the power grip of capital onto society. The greater the power grip the “higher” the justification needs to be, economic justification is no longer enough. Awaiting a proper charting, it seems that at least in the phase after 1980 the change in language trails the rising power grip. If ideology came first it should be the other way round. This would conform Marx’s observation that the “material” process, here rising corporate power, comes first, and only afterwards a “suitable” consciousness develops.
The study is certainly very interesting. However, Fix’s premise that ideology dominates material life does not necessarily follow from his findings. Indeed, his findings may precisely document that Marx was right when turing things around. The “linguistic turn” from economics to “biblic” may be the “subconscious” indicator of a “material” social transition, which, in the conceptualization of CasP, is of course an attempted transition in the mode of power.
According to Bichler/Nitzan it may be that global capitalism may have reached a “glass ceiling”, i.e. a point when a social transition to a new accumulation regime is necessary. Or perhaps a transition from accumulation regime to something like a steady-state type of capitalism. I myself argue that we may be at a point where capitalism finally needs something like a world state (sec. 5.2 in my “The Autocatalytic Sprawl”).
Now, those who have followed the discussions around the fake “pandemic” will know that there is the conférencier of Davos, Klaus Schwab, who in numerous books postulates such a transition under the term “Great Reset”. The language of this comes with a lot of millenniaristic “the end of the world is nigh if we do not…” language (climate, overpopulation, epidemics, etc.).
I’d say it is to be expected that the masters of core capital and their servants in politics and mass media change language from ecomomics to something of “higher moral” if they try to establish a kind of global biopolitical police state but need to make the greater public accept such a transition (see current writings e.g. by G Agamben or CJ Hopkins for the relation of the pandemic to biopolitics). They can obviously not say that they’d like to turn planet Earth into a vast open air prison where “lockdowns” can imposed on anybody whenever the rulers think its necessary.
If you read e.g. through Bichler/Nitzan’s Israel book you’ll find a lot of “high moral” language accompanying the transitions of the accumulation regime in the 20th century. And in the end, the high moral language of Christianity served the establishment of feudalism as a new mode of power as much as liberalism and nationalism did to establish capitalism.
