Michael Lowy
Published in New Politics Winter 2007 Vol:XI-2 Whole #: 42
MICHAEL LÖWY, a French citizen born in Brazil, is the Research
Director In Sociology at CNRS (National Center for Scientific Research)
and also a lecturer at the Ecole des Hautes, Etudes en Sciences
Sociales. His latest book was The Theory of Revolution in the Young Marx (Haymarket, 2003).
In spite of their undeniable differences,
Marx and Weber have much in common in their understanding of modern
capitalism: they both perceive it as a system where "the individuals are
ruled by abstractions (Marx), where the impersonal and "thing-like" (
Versachlicht)
relations replace the personal relations of dependence, and where the
accumulation of capital becomes an end in itself, largely irrational.
Their analysis of capitalism cannot be separated from a
critical position, explicit in Marx, more ambivalent in Weber. But the
content and inspiration of the criticism are very different. And, above
all, while Marx wagers on the possibility of overcoming capitalism
thanks to a socialist revolution, Weber is rather a fatalist and
resigned observer, studying a mode of production and administration that
seems to him inevitable.
The anti-capitalist critique is one of the main
force-fields which run across Marx's work from the beginning to the end,
giving it its coherence. This does not prevent the existence of a
certain evolution: while the
Communist Manifesto (1848) insists on the historically progressive role of the bourgeoisie,
Capital (1867)
is more inclined to denounce the ignominies of the system. The usual
opposition between an "ethical" young Marx and a "scientific" one of the
mature years is unable to account for this development.
Marx's anti-capitalism is based on certain values or criteria, generally implicit:
a) universal ethical values: freedom, equality, justice,
self-accomplishment. The combination among these various human values
builds a coherent whole, which one could name
revolutionary humanism, that functions as the main guiding principle for the ethical condemnation of the capitalist system.
Moral indignation against the infamies of capitalism is obvious in all chapters of
Capital:
it is an essential dimension of what gives such an impressive power to
the book. As Lucien Goldmann wrote, Marx does not "mix" value and fact
judgements, but develops a dialectical analysis where explanation,
comprehension and evaluation are rigorously inseparable.[1]
b) the viewpoint of the proletariat, victim of the system
and its potential gravedigger. As Marx clearly asserted in his preface
to
Capital, this class perspective is at the root of his
critique of bourgeois political economy. It is from this social
viewpoint that values as "justice" are reinterpreted: their concrete
meaning is not the same according to the situation and the interests of
different classes.
c) the possibility of an emancipated future, of a
post-capitalist society, of a communist utopia. It is on the light of
the hypothesis -- or the wager, according to Lucien Goldmann -- of a
free association of producers that the negative features of capitalism
appear in all their enormity.
d) the existence, in the past, of more egalitarian, or
democratic, social and cultural forms, destroyed by capitalist
"progress." This argument, of Romantic origin, is present for instance
in all Marx and Engels' writings on primitive communism, a form of
communitarian life without commodity, State, or private property and
without patriarchal oppression of women.
The existence of these values does not mean that Marx holds
a Kantian perspective, opposing a transcendental ideal to the existing
reality: his critique is
immanent, in so far as it is developed
in the name of a real social force opposed to capitalism -- the working
class -- and in the name of the contradiction between the
potentialities created by the rise of productive forces and the
limitations imposed by the bourgeois productive relations.
Marx's anti-capitalist critique is organized around five
fundamental issues: the injustice of exploitation, the loss of liberty
through alienation, venal (mercantile) quantification, irrationality,
and modern barbarism. Let us examine briefly these issues, emphasizing
the less known ones:
1) The injustice of exploitation. The capitalist system is
based, independently of this or that economic policy, on the workers'
unpaid surplus labour, source, as "surplus value," of all the forms of
rent and profit. The extreme manifestations of this social injustice are
the exploitation of children, starvation wages, inhuman labor hours,
and miserable life conditions for the proletarians. But whatever the
worker's condition at this or that historical moment, the system itself
is intrinsically unjust, because it is parasitic and exploits the labor
force of the direct producers. This argument takes a central place in
Capital and was essential in the formation of the Marxist labor movement.
2) The loss of liberty through alienation, reification,
commodity fetishism. In the capitalist mode of production, the
individuals -- and in particular the laborers -- are submitted to the
domination of their own products, which take the form of autonomous
fetishes (idols) and escape their control. This issue is extensively
dealt with in Marx's early writings, but also in the famous chapter on
commodity fetishism in
Capital.[2]
At the heart of Marx's analysis of alienation is the idea
that capitalism is a sort of disenchanted "religion," where commodities
replace divinity: "The more the workers estranges himself in his labour,
the more the estranged, objective world he has created becomes
powerful, while he becomes impoverished . . . The same happens in
religion. The more man puts things in God, the less he keeps in himself .
. .[3] The concept of fetishism itself refers to the history of
religion, to the primitive forms of idolatry, which already contain the
principle of all religious phenomena.
It is not by chance that liberation theologians, such as
Hugo Assmann, Franz Hinkelammert and Enrique Dussel, extensively quote
from Marx's writings against capitalist alienation and commodity
fetishism in their denunciation of the "market idolatry."[4]
3) The venal (mercantile) quantification of social life.
Capitalism, regulated by exchange value, the calculation of profits and
the accumulation of capital, tends to dissolve and destroy all
qualitative values: use values, ethical values, human relations, human
feelings. Having replaces Being, and only subsists the monetary payment
-- the
cash nexus according to the famous expression of Carlyle which Marx takes up -- and the " icy waters of egoistic calculation" (
Communist Manifesto).
Now, the struggle against quantification and Mammonism -- another term used by Carlyle -- is one of the key
loci
of Romanticism.[5] Like the Romantic critics of the modern bourgeois
civilization, Marx believed that capitalism has introduced, in this
respect, a profound degradation of social relations, and an ethical
regression in relation to pre-capitalist societies:
At last, the time has come in which all that human beings had
considered as inalienable has become the object of exchange, of traffic,
and may be alienated. It is a time when the very things which before
were conveyed, but never bartered; given, but never sold; conquered, but
never purchased -- virtue, love, opinion, science, conscience etc. --
when, in short, everything has finally become tradable. It is a time of
generalized corruption, universal venality or, to speak in terms of
political economy, the time when anything, moral or physical, receives a
venal value, and may be taken to market to be appraised for its
appropriate value.[6]
The power of money is
one of the most brutal expressions of this capitalist quantification: it
distorts all "human and natural qualities," by submitting them to the
monetary measure: "The quantity of money becomes more and more the
unique and powerful property of the human being; at the same time that
it reduces all being to its abstraction, it reduces itself in its own
movement to a quantitative being."[7]
4) The irrational nature of the system. The periodical
crises of overproduction that shake the capitalist system reveal its
irrationality -- "absurdity" is the term used in the
Manifesto: the
existence of "too many means of subsistence" while the majority of the
population lacks the necessary minimum. This global irrationality is not
contradictory, of course, with a partial and local rationality, at the
level of the production management of each factory..
5) Modern barbarism. To some extent, capitalism is the
bearer of historical progress, particularly by the exponential
development of the productive forces, creating therefore the material
conditions for a new society, a world of freedom and solidarity. But, at
the same time, it is also a force of social regression, in so far as it
"makes of each economic progress a public calamity."[8] Considering
some of the most sinister manifestations of capitalism such as the poor
laws or the workhouses -- those "workers Bastilles" -- Marx wrote in
1847 the following surprising and prophetic passage, which seems to
announce the Frankfurt School: "Barbarism re-appears, but this time it
is created inside civilization itself and is an integral part of it.
This is the leprous barbarism, barbarism as the leper of
civilization."[9]
All these criticisms are intimately linked: they refer to
each other, they presuppose each other, and they are combined in a
global anti-capitalist vision, which is one of the distinctive features
of Marx as a communist thinker.
On two other issues -- which are today of the greatest
topicality -- Marx's anti-capitalist critique is more ambiguous or
insufficient:
6) The colonial and/or imperialist expansion of capitalism,
the violent and cruel domination of the colonized people, their forced
submission to the imperatives of capitalist production and the
accumulation of capital. One can perceive in Marx a certain evolution in
this respect: if, in the
Manifesto, he seems to celebrate as a
progress the submission of the "peasant" or "barbarian" (sic) nations
to the bourgeois civilization, in his writings on the British
colonization of India the somber aspect of the Western domination is
taken into account -- but still considered as a necessary evil.
It is only in
Capital, particularly in the chapter
on primitive accumulation of capital, that one finds a really radical
critique of the horrors of colonial expansion: the submission or
extermination of the indigenous people, the wars of conquest, the slave
trade. These "horrifying barbarisms and atrocities" -- which according
to Marx, quoting M.W. Howitt, "have no parallel in any other era of
universal history, in any other race, however savage, brutal, pitiless
and shameless" -- are not simply presented as the cost of historical
progress, but clearly denounced as an "infamy."[10]
7) The
Manifesto rejoices with the domination of
nature made possible by the expansion of capitalist civilization. It is
only later, particularly in
Capital, that the aggression of the
capitalist mode of production against the natural environment is taken
into consideration. In a well known passage, Marx suggests a parallel
between the exhaustion of labor and of land by the destructive logic of
capital:
Each progress of the capitalist agriculture is not only a progress
in the art of exploiting the worker, but also in the art of plundering
the soil; each short term progress in fertility is a progress in the
long term destruction of the basis of this fertility. ( . . ) Capitalist
production thus only develops . . . but at the same time exhausting the
two springs from which flow all wealth: the land and the laborer.
One can see here the expression of a really dialectical view of
progress -- also suggested by the ironical way the word is used -- which
could be the starting point for a systematic ecological thinking, but
this was not to be developed by Marx
Quite different is Max
Weber's approach. His attitude towards capitalism is much more
ambivalent and contradictory. One could say that he is divided between
his identity as a bourgeois which fully supports German capitalism and
its imperial power, and his statute as an intellectual, sensitive to the
arguments of the Romantic anti-capitalist
Zivilisationskritik so
influential among the German academic mandarins at the beginning of the
20th century. From this viewpoint, he could be compared to another
split -- if not schizophrenic -- German bourgeois/intellectual: Walther
Rathenau, Prussian and Jew, capitalist entrepreneur and sharp critic of
the mechanical civilization.
Rejecting any socialist idea, Weber does not hesitate, on
some occasions, to use apologetic arguments in defense of capitalism.
This is particularly obvious in his description, in
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, of
the origins of capitalism as the result of Protestant work ethic, i.e.
the combination of hard work, methodic economic activity, frugal life
and the reinvestment of savings: a description which is very close to
the idealized self-image of the bourgeois! Usually he seems to lean
towards a resigned acceptance of bourgeois civilization, not as
desirable, but as inevitable. However, in some key texts, which had a
very significant impact on 20th century thought, he gives free rein to a
insightful, pessimistic and radical critique of the paradoxes of
capitalist rationality.
According to the sociologist Derek Sayer, "to a
certain extent his critique of capitalism, as a life negating force, is
sharper than Marx's."[11] This is an exaggerated assessment, but it is
true that some of Weber's arguments touch at the foundations of the
modern industrial/capitalist civilization.
Obviously, the issues raised by Weber are quite different
from those of Marx. Weber ignores exploitation, is not interested in
economic crisis, has little sympathy for the struggles of the
proletariat, and does not question colonial expansion. However,
influenced by the Romantic or Nietzschean
Kulturpessimismus, he
perceives a deep contradiction between the requirements of the formal
modern rationality -- of which bureaucracy and private enterprise are
concrete manifestations -- and those of the acting subject's autonomy.
Distancing himself from Enlightenment's rationalist tradition, he is
sensitive to the contradictions and limits of modern rationality, as it
expresses itself in capitalist economy and state administration: its
formal and instrumental character and its tendency to produce effects
that lead to the reversal of the emancipatory aspirations of modernity.
The search for calculation and efficiency at any price leads to the
bureaucratization and reification of human activities. This diagnosis of
modernity's crisis will be, to a large extent, taken over by the
Frankfurt School in its first period (Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse).
What is striking in Weber's pessimistic/resigned assessment
of modernity is its refusal of the illusions of progress which were so
powerful in the European consciousness at the beginning of the 20th
century. Here is, for instance, what he said in one of his last public
interventions in 1919: "It is not the flowering of Summer that is
waiting for us, but a polar night, icy, somber and rude."[12] This
pessimism is inseparable from a critical view of the nature itself of
capitalism and its dynamics of rationalization/modernization.
One can distinguish two aspects -- intimately linked
between them -- in Weber's critique of the substance itself of the
capitalist system:
1) The inversion between means and ends. For the spirit of
capitalism, of which Benjamin Franklin is an ideal- typical figure --
almost chemically pure! -- to win money, to gather more and more money
(to accumulate capital would say Marx) is the supreme good and the
ultimate aim in life:
The pursuit of riches is fully stripped of all pleasurable, and
surely all hedonistic aspects. Accordingly, this striving becomes
understood completely as an end in itself -- to such an extent that it
appears as fully outside the normal course of affairs and simply
irrational, at least when viewed from the perspective of the 'happiness'
or 'utility' of the single individual. Here, people are oriented to
acquisition as the purpose of life: acquisition is no longer viewed as a
means to the end of satisfying the substantive needs of life. Those
people in possession of spontaneous (unbefangene) dispositions
experience this situation as an absolutely meaningless reversal of
'natural' conditions (as we would say today). Yet, this reversal
constitutes just as surely a guiding principle of [modern] capitalism as
incomprehension of this new situation characterizes all who remain
untouched by [modern] capitalism's tentacles."[13]
Supreme expression of modern aim- oriented rationality -- Weber's
Zweckrationalität
or, according to the Frankfurt School, instrumental rationality --
capitalist economy reveals itself, from the viewpoint of the
"substantive needs of life." or of human happiness, as "simply
irrational" or "absolutely meaningless."[14] Weber returns several times
to this issue in
The Protestant Ethic, always insisting on the
irrationality
-- his emphasis -- of the logic of capitalist accumulation: a
comparison between the spirit of capitalism and economic traditionalism
-- for whom business is simply "indispensable to life" -- "renders
obvious the
irrationality, from the viewpoint of one's personal
happiness, of this way of organizing life: people live for their
business rather than the reverse."[15]
Of course Weber believes that this "absurd" and
"irrational" system has its own formidable rationality: his remarks show
nevertheless a deep critical distance towards the spirit of capitalism.
Obviously two forms of rationality are in conflict here: one, the
Zweckrationalität,
purely formal and instrumental, whose only aim is, in capitalism,
production for production, accumulation for accumulation, money for
money; the other, more substantial, which corresponds to the --
pre-capitalist -- "natural conditions," and refers to values (
Wertrationalität) such as: people's happiness, the satisfaction of their needs.
This definition of capitalism as irrational is not without
certain affinities with Marx' ideas. The subordination of the aim -- the
human being -- to the means -- the enterprise, money, commodity -- is
an argument that comes very near to the Marxist concept of alienation.
Weber was conscious of this similarity, and refers to it in his 1918
conference on Socialism: "All this [the impersonal functioning of
capital] is what socialism defines as the 'domination of things over the
human beings.' which means: the means over the aim (the satisfaction of
the needs)."[16] This explains, by the way, why Lukacs' theory of
reification in
History and Class Consciousness (1923) is based on both Marx and Weber.
2) The submission to an all powerful mechanism, the
imprisonment in a system which oneself has created. This issue is
intimately related to the former one, but it emphasizes the loss of
freedom, the decline of individual autonomy. The
locus classicus of this criticism is to be found in the last paragraphs of
The Protestant Ethic,
doubtless the most famous and influential passage of Weber's work --
and one of the rare moments where he permitted himself what he calls
"value and faith judgements."
First of all Weber considers, with a resigned nostalgia,
that the triumph of the modern capitalist spirit requires the
"renunciation of the Faustian multi- dimensionality of the human
species." The acknowledgment of the rise of the bourgeois era has, for
Goethe -- as for Weber -- the meaning of a " farewell to an era of full
and beautiful humanity."[17]
On the other hand, capitalist rationality creates a more and more constraining and coercive context: "The Puritan
wanted to be a person with a vocational calling; today we are
forced to
be." The modern -- capitalist -- economic order, with its technical
conditions of mechanical and machine production, "determines the style
of life of all individuals born into it,
not only those
directly engaged in earning a living." This constraint, Weber compares
it with a sort of prison, or "iron cage," where the system of rational
production encloses the individuals: "According to Baxter [a Puritan
preacher -- ML] the concern for material goods should lie upon the
shoulders of his saints like 'a lightweight coat that could be thrown
off at any time.' Yet fate allowed a steel-hard casing (
stahlhartes Gehäuse) to be forged from this coat."[18]
The expression became famous. It strikes by its tragic
resignation, but also by its critical dimension. There are different
interpretations or translations for the words
sthahlhartes Gehäuse: for
some it is a "casing" for others a "shell" or a "cell." But it is
probable that Weber borrowed the image of an "iron cage of despair" from
the English Puritan poet Bunyan.[19] In any case, it seems to describe,
in the
Protestant Ethic, the reified structures of capitalist economy as a sort of steel-hard prison -- rigid, cold and pitiless.
Weber's pessimism leads him to fear the end of all values
and ideals, and the advent, under the aegis of modern capitalism, of a
"mechanized ossification, embellished with a sort of rigidly compelled
sense of self-importance."[20] He foresees the process of reification as
extending, from the economic sphere, to all areas of social life:
politics, law, culture.
Well before the Frankfurt School, Karl Löwith had already
grasped, in his brilliant 1932 essay on Weber and Marx, the "dialectics
of reason" at work in the Weberian critique of capitalism, and its
affinity with the Marxian one:
The peculiar irrationality formed within the process of
rationalization (…) also appears to Weber in terms of this relation
between means and ends, which for him is the basis for the concepts of
rationality and freedom -- namely, in terms of a reversal of this
relation. (…) Means as ends make themselves independent and thus lose
their original 'meaning' or purpose, that is, they lose their original
purposive rationality oriented to man and his needs. This reversal marks
the whole of modern civilization, whose arrangements, institutions and
activities are so 'rationalized,' that whereas humanity once established
itself within them, now it is they which enclose and determine humanity
like an 'iron cage.' Human conduct, from which these institutions
originally arose, must now in turn adapt to its own creation which has
escaped the control of the creator.
Weber himself declared that here lies the real problem of
culture -- rationalization towards the irrational -- and that he and
Marx agreed in the definition of this problem but differed in its
evaluation. (…) This paradoxical inversion -- this 'tragedy of culture,'
as Simmel has termed it -- becomes most clearly evident when it occurs
in exactly the type of activity whose innermost intention is that it be
specifically rational, namely, in economically rational
activity. And precisely here it becomes plainly apparent that, and how,
behavior which is purely purposive-rational in intention turns
inexorably into its own opposite in the process of its
rationalization.[21]
To conclude: what
Weber, unlike Marx, did not grasp, is the domination, over human
activities, of exchange value. The mechanisms of valorization and the
automatisms inscribed in the commodity exchange lead to a monitarization
of social relations. The sociologue from Heidelberg does not conceive
the possibility of replacing the alienated logic of self-valorizing
value by a democratic control of production.[22]
Both Weber and Marx shared the idea of a substantial
irrationality of the capitalist system -- which is not contradictory
with its formal or partial
Footnotes
1. L. Goldmann, "Le Marxisme Est-il une Sociologie?" in Recherches Dialectiques (Paris: Gallimard) 1955.
2. It is true, as Ernest Mandel observed, that there is an evolution between the Manuscripts of 1844
and the economic writings of the later years: the passage from an
anthropological to an historical concept of alienation. See E. Mandel, La Formation de la Pensée Economique de Karl Marx (Paris: Maspero) 1967.
3. K. Marx, Manuscrits de 1844 (Paris: Ed. Sociales) 1962, pp. 57-58.
4. H. Assmann, F. Hinkelammert, A Idolatria do Mercado. Ensaios Sobre Economia e Teologia ( S.Paulo:
Editora Vozes) 1989. See also the fascinating text by Walter Benjamin
-- largely inspired by Weber -- "Kapitalismus als Religion," Gesammelte Schriften, (Suhrkamp Verlag) 1991, Band VI, pp. 100-103
5. See M. Löwy and Robert Sayre, Romanticism Against the Current of Modernity
(Durham, N.C.:Duke University Press) 2000. Carlyle is one of the
typical representatives of the Romantic/conservative critique of
capitalism.
6. Karl Marx, Misère de la philosophie (Paris: Ed. Sociales) 1947, p.33.
7. K. Marx, Manuscrits de 1844, pp. 101, 123.
8. K. Marx, Le Capital, Livre I (Paris: Garnier Flammarion) 1969, p.350.
9. K. Marx, "Arbeitslohn," 1847, Kleine ökonomische Schriften (Berlin: Dietz Verlag) 1955, p. 245.
10. K. Marx, Capital, pp. 557-558, 563.
11. D. Sayer, Capitalism and Modernism. An excursus on Marx and Weber (London: Routledge) 1991, p. 4.
12. M. Weber, Le savant et le politique, 1919 (Paris: C. Bourgeois) 1990, p. 184. In a comment on this phrase, Enzo Traverso writes: "Against the Fortschrittsoptimismus
of many of his contemporaries, both liberals and socialists, which
contemplated with satisfaction the march of history towards what they
considered as a natural and inevitable progress, his warning was of
pitiless clear-sightedness." See E. Traverso, L'histoire déchirée. Essai sur Auschwitz et les intellectuels, (Paris: Ed. du Cerf) 1997, p. 47.
13. M. Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, translated by Stephen Kalberg, (Los Angeles: Blackwell) 2002, p. 17 (slight correction by me ML).
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid. p. 31. See also p.37.
16. Max Weber, "Der Sozialismus," in Schriften für Sozialgeschichte und Politik (Reclam) 1997, p. 246.
17. M. Weber, The Protestant Ethic..., p. 123.
18. Ibid. p. 123
19. See. E. Tiryakian, "The Sociological Import of a Metaphor.
Tracking the Source of Max Weber's 'Iron Cage'," in P. Hamilton (ed.), Max Weber. Critical Assessment (London: Routledge, 1991) vol. I, 2. Pp. 109-120.
20. M. Weber, The Protestant Ethic..., p. 124.
21. Karl Löwith, Max Weber and Karl Marx (London: George Allen & Unwin) 1982, pp.47-48.
22. See on this Jean-Marie Vincent, Max Weber ou la democratie inachévée, (Paris: Ed. du Felin) 1998, pp. 141, 160-161.
23. Marx does not ignore the affinities between capitalist
accumulation and the Puritan ethics, although he does not give it the
same importance as Weber. In his Grundrisse he refers to the "connexion" (Zusammenang) between capitalism and English puritanism or Dutch Protestantism.
24. I developed this viewpoint in my paper "Figures of Weberian Marxism," in Theory and Society. Renewal and Critique in Social Theory, vol. 25.3, June, 1996, pp. 431-446.
