Culture: Politics of the Stars

By Alex Moni-Sauri

Astrology and Other Forms of Mysticism Experience an Upsurge.

Capitalist society sells us a world of myth: the myth of meritocracy, of the American Dream, of bourgeois democracy, of an equal relationship between ruling and working classes. New generations increasingly embrace astrology, tarot, and other forms of mysticism in a rejection of the institutional, patriarchal religions of their parents and grandparents. But if mysticism from below is the answer to mysticism from above, political terrain gets complicated.

The Spiritual Marketplace

There’s a spiritual revival underway in the US, and market growth to prove it. A January article from Harper’s Bazaar titled “How Millennials and Gen Z turned astrology into a billion-dollar industry” reports that astrology, tarot, palm readings, and other mystical services are worth $2.2 billion globally, and growing an average of 0.5 percent each year. According to trend-forecasting agency WGSN, “62 percent of Gen Z and 63 percent of millennials say their zodiac sign accurately represents their personality traits, with many also leveraging astrology to help make life decisions – from dating to career direction and even finances.”

People have long looked to the stars for reflections of reality. In The Human Cosmos: Civilization and the Stars, journalist Jo Marchant tracks this ancient relationship with the sky from early cave art in Lascaux, France and “eclipse-obsessed Babylonians” to the birth of Christianity and modern science. She argues that “our innate relationship with the stars shaped who we are – our religious beliefs, power structures, scientific advances and even our biology. But over the last few centuries we have separated ourselves from the universe that surrounds us. And that disconnect comes at a cost.”

63 percent of millennials say their zodiac sign accurately represents their personality traits”

Life under capitalism is marked by alienation: from our resources and labor, our communities and leisure, the earth and the stars. The desire for an integrated existence between humanity and the world around us – with access to nutritious food, clean water, clean air, and healthy spaces – appears across a spectrum of earth-based spirituality and lifestyle movements as well as celestial divination practices.

Millennials and Gen Z, (the generations responsible for this spiritual boom), grew up during a significant recession with accelerating climate change and endless war, experiencing the chronic failure of our institutions to serve the public good or ensure the basic means to life. Young people today are seeking the same things people have sought in religion for centuries (a sense of purpose, community, guidance, etc.) and are finding alternatives to the patriarchal monotheistic religions so enmeshed in US politics and consumer culture as to seem baked-in. This is especially true in queer spaces, in which the inclusive and affirming language of love and light stands in contrast to tired screeds about sexual morality, gender roles, and the denial of trans people’s right to exist.

Postmodern Rejection of Science

It’s part of the broader postmodern reaction against a stiff mechanistic view of reality and codified hierarchies of mind over body, logic over feeling, Man over nature, and other binary simplifications on the theme.

Marchant expresses this reaction strongly and often in The Human Cosmos:

Science has been wildly successful … But it has also dissolved much of the meaning that [early] cultures found in life. Earth has been knocked from the center of existence to the suburbs; life reframed as a random accident; and God dismissed altogether, now that everything can be explained by physical laws. Far from having a meaningful role in the cosmic order, we’re “chemical scum,” as physicist Stephen Hawking put it, on the surface of a medium-sized planet orbiting an unremarkable star.

Her argument here reveals a popular straw man: the identification of science itself, in its attempt to objectively measure the world, as the force that has degraded meaning and stripped our cultures of soul. This obscures the totalizing force of global capital, which dictates the scope, focus, and application of scientific research, and which alienates us from purpose and meaning in our lives so thoroughly it can be hard to see a way forward.

Marxists should engage with the desires propelling this wave of spiritualism: connection to each other, purpose in our lives, a sense of wonder and awe, clarity, agency, and a path forward.

It’s true that the ideological revolution toward science was initially a byproduct of capitalism; its need to develop the productive forces of society drove the scientific advances of the Enlightenment, revolutionizing our tools and methods as well as the skills and techniques of workers. This was a source of increasing wealth for society when capitalism was still a progressive system. But capitalism is no longer developing conditions for human wealth. On the contrary – with each new day, conditions for human life on this planet deteriorate. Does this mean science is to blame?

Postmodernism, in its rejection of Enlightenment ideas, claims that objectivity does not exist. It presents all of human knowledge – theory, history, and empirical science – as subjective narratives to be combined or discarded at will.

This atmosphere of ethereal, selectable truth is deeply unmooring; the supremacy of singular, individual experience is isolating and lonely. Worse, such a framework will not allow us to use the scientific achievements that have outgrown capitalism today to reorganize the world. The skills, technology, and resources exist to produce enough food for every human on earth, to guarantee affordable housing and dignified work without destroying the planet. The question is how to make this a reality: how to use scientific advancement in the service of humanity and the planet rather than private profit. Such a question calls for collectively developing a scientific understanding of the world around us – and how to change it.

Borne Back into the Past

Political consciousness in the US today is marked by a fixation on origins and the idealized past. Theorist Wendy Brown argues that the end of the twentieth century, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, saw liberals and Marxists alike losing faith in the future, rejecting “a historiography bound to a notion of progress,” but not replacing it with a new framework for understanding where we came from and where we’re going.

For liberals, this has meant a hyper-fixation on the moral failings of the past (think the New York Times’ “1619 Project”) without diagnosing the contemporary architects of despair, poverty, and war – i.e. defense contractors, finance capital, landlordism, and the politicians that benefit from the capitalist system.

As historian Matthew Karp writes in History as End: Politics of the Past:

Such a critique of capitalism quickly becomes a prisoner of its own heredity. A more creative historical politics would move in the opposite direction, recognizing that the power of American capitalism does not reside in a genetic code written four hundred years ago. What would it mean, when we look at US history, to follow William James in seeking the fruits, not the roots?

Taken at face value, (or passively absorbed through cultural osmosis), astrology would seem to hold that our personality traits, behaviors, and motivations are fixed and unchanging across time; that there is a predetermined moral arc to the unfolding of events; and that the hidden forces influencing reality are primarily immaterial and metaphysical, unbound by time or historical context. This works for a zeitgeist obsessed with origins and original sin. Ultra-personalized daily horoscopes and birth charts fit beside other categories of self as people search for identity in an uncertain world. And in the face of compounding, planet-sized crises, ideologies that deny or devalue material reality can offer a sense of relief, clarity, and control.

Spiritual influencers make a doctor’s salary by monetizing stories about how they manifested the life of their dreams, and how you can too – if you do the proper inner work, cleanse yourself of toxins, and embrace your shadow selves. Like many strains of New Age thought, it becomes an isolated and isolating project of self-optimization that bestows all power and responsibility onto the individual: reality exists in your own thoughts, which you’re free to alter at will. It points away from the collective nature of our power structures, away from developing class consciousness, and away from class politics entirely.

Politics of the Stars: Left and Right

That’s not to say these ideas don’t have political impact – in fact, they have representatives. Marianne Williamson, self-help author and celebrity spiritual adviser who ran for President in 2020, recently announced her 2024 Presidential campaign. In 2020, her New Age language about the “dark psychic force of collectivized hatred” and her intention to “harness love for political purposes” felt kooky and unserious in a heated political context. Now, this language has become so familiar and so generalized that it might not stand out at all – and could make her more appealing to younger voters.

Other figures on the liberal left are integrating New Age language and ideas into their platforms and political messaging, like social justice astrologer Chani Nicholas. In an LA Times interview from 2018, Nicholas links the rise in popularity of both astrology and socialism to the collective yearning “to return to something.” She points to “a rejection of things that don’t work,” and looks to the past: “Socialism isn’t new, and astrology definitely isn’t new, and earthly spirituality or living in accordance with the earth’s rituals isn’t new, it’s ancient. I think we’re yearning for something that technology cannot give us, that capitalism cannot give us.”

Indeed. The re-popularization of socialist ideas and the growth of DSA in recent years points to a consciousness looking for alternatives. But the US left is weak, DSA has stagnated, and confusion about class politics obscures a clear path forward. When DSA working groups start integrating the language of astrology into their political graphics and messaging, or when popular astrologers make Instagram reels tying the collapse of the Silicon Valley Bank to Pluto entering its final stage of Capricorn, clarity about our wordly causes of suffering and the material solutions available to us becomes even more elusive.

But New Age ideas don’t only drift left – take the spectacle of the QAnon “shaman” parading through the Capitol on January 6 for one infamous example. While much of the spiritual content is couched in the language of wellness and divinity, it’s a landscape riddled with paranoia, conspiratorial thinking, and exploitation.

Matthew Remski, Derek Beres, and Julian Walker document this phenomenon on the podcast “Conspirituality,” in which they trace the wellness-to-alt-right pipeline and unpack the sociopolitical conditions driving a new wave of moral panic:

At best, the conspirituality movement attacks public health efforts in times of crisis. At worst, it fronts and recruits for the fever-dream of QAnon. As the alt-right and New Age horseshoe toward each other in a blur of disinformation, clear discourse and good intentions get smothered. In the process, spiritual beliefs that have nurtured creativity and meaning are transforming into memes of a quickly-globalizing paranoia.

And it’s not new. Connections between mysticism and fascist ideology are well documented, as in the spiritual movements of early twentieth century Europe which lent spiritual weight to ideas of racial purity and Aryan superiority. The conditions of that period were similar to today: imperialist war, economic chaos, and deteriorating faith in democracy or progress.

Marxism and Astrology: What’s the Right Approach?

Now in our third year of the pandemic, we’re still battling the effects of prolonged isolation and rampant disinformation about science and public health. With the mainstreaming of conspiratorial thinking and the political entrenchment of QAnon lore – amidst escalating attacks on LGBT+ rights, pushed by pundits invoking fascist motifs of endangered children and Satanic abuse – Marxists should take an earnest, compassionate look into what’s driving so many to embrace astrology and mysticism. We should draw out fatalist, reactionary narratives woven between ideals of divinity and wellness, and expose the political figures and movements tapping these spiritual currents to stoke cultural division and push repressive legislation.

But it should be done without dismissiveness, or lead-footed assertions of certainty about existential questions that have captured the human imagination since the dawn of time. Instead of citing one-liners about “the opium of the masses” or “the metaphysics of dunces,” (Marx and Adorno, respectively), Marxists should engage with the shared desires propelling this wave of spiritualism: connection to each other and the world around us; purpose and meaning in our lives; a sense of wonder and awe; clarity, agency, and a path forward.

Astrology is both descriptive and interpretive; it offers reflections of ourselves that make people feel seen; it foregrounds interdependence with one another, with our planet and our universe. It’s a theory of existence and a system of interpretation that expands the window of perspective beyond a human frame. As with any form of spirituality, asking it to be proven to a scientific standard is missing the point; it’s a creative act. It’s about storytelling.

If we don’t connect with these impulses, we know the alt-right will. In an essay for Verso called “Acid fascism: Past and present ties between occultism and the far right,” author Phil Jones writes:

Mystics, of course, cannot see the future. But they can, like other political actors, will it into being with their ideas and actions. Questions about truth become musings on an elite cabal; ‘toxins’ offer a ready metaphor for immigrants, and followers are urged to become “spiritual leaders.” The purveyors of these ideas promise a gnostic awakening, the ability to transcend an unsatisfying existence of ignorance and misery.

The antidote to such an existence lies in the key contribution of Marxism: scientific socialism. In contrast to the wishful thinking of early utopian socialists, Marx and Engels developed their understanding of capitalism and the power of the working class to end it on the basis of systematic analysis. Both the crisis-driven anarchy of the markets and the process of working-class struggle can be studied from a scientific perspective.

Marxism gives us a framework and language to understand the world that reflects our lived experience; it has answers for brutality, injustice, and systemic corruption; it illuminates our agency in shaping the world we want to live in, and locates our power concretely in collective action. Its method of analysis, rooted firmly in material reality, allows us to experience confusion and uncertainty without moral panic. It assumes a position of openness to new possibilities and shifting unknowns, approaching the past as a guide for the future instead of dooming blueprint or fixed genetic code.

What would it mean to seek the fruits, not the roots? It’s hard to imagine worlds we haven’t seen yet; our job as Marxists is to insist on possibility and fight for a future we deserve. Imagine the possibilities – for scientific research and development, for holistic health and wellness, for enriching and nurturing spiritual practices – of a world that isn’t bound to the soulless objectives of capital.