Thursday, September 28, 2023

From the cross to the commodity

My ongoing project of reading the Bible in general hasn't brought on a ton of spiritual insight. Such is life. But now and again I find a chestnut. For instance, in Luke 23:34, when Christ is hanging upon the cross, he says: "Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing." This is in the Oxford Study edition of 1961. 

Of course, this sounds an awful lot about Marx's classic phrase introduced in his discussion of commodity fetishism in Das Kapital, which is later latched hold of as an encapsulation of the concept of ideology: "Sie wissen das nicht, aber sie tun es," usually translated as "they know not what they are doing, but they are doing it."

Really I need to check the German translation of the Bible. The internet doesn't show a lot of discussion of this.

But now, I gotta hop on the clock.

2 comments:

Esch said...

“They know it not, but they do it” is both more literal and better.

Cleric Mikhailovich de Troi said...

As a translation of the Marx, you mean.