Okay, so before I go on brandying about like some sort of know-it-all, let me just say I lack the specific knowledge to simply dismiss Weber, nor could he simply be dismissed even if I wanted. Most of my information and interpretation of Weber is derived of secondary sources. The amount of Weber’s own text I have read is severely limited to the introduction to his Protestant Ethic… I am a little too harsh on Weber here, which is too bad, since my main motivation is to counter Weber’s seeming dismisal of Marx as en economic determinist -which I feel is not too badly presented here. Why am I so fixated on this determinism business?
Weber, and much of ‘Weberian’ sociology tends to dismiss, marginalize, or neuter Marx on the grounds that his analysis presents the subject as having no agency, of society unfolding according to purely objective laws operating ‘behind our backs’; that these laws determine for us how we respond and behave. This, of course, is a gross simplification of Marx -where the model is neither all object or all subject/all structure all agent. Of course, these dualities are a little outmoded, but in Marx’s day incorporating dialectic thinking into the analysis of a society (at least in terms of political economy) was quite a step. Nevertheless, since one ‘don’t need to read him’ dismissal of Marx is the charge of economic determinism, I wrote a formal piece for social theory class about four months ago that fits in nicely with the last two posts on the Preface. It is longer than the recent posts. We’ll be back to quick posts tomorrow.
Tomorrow I hope to finish up the ‘Preface to the first Edition’. I am not sure yet if I will discuss the second preface. Or, if so, in what depth.
Alan Swingewood cautions all who would weigh on ‘Weber v. Marx’, “Only if Marxism is defined as a one-factor theory of social change can Weber’s study be regarded as its opposite and refutation” (Swingewood: 96). In other words, neither Marxist political economy nor Weber’s sociology has all its causal eggs in one basket; to treat either as single factor vulgarizes one or both. Certainly Weber no more believes his Protestant ethic the singular springboard of capitalism than Marx assumes all action and thought materially determined. Nevertheless, a conundrum prevents us from wiping clean this slate, for while Swingewood’s caveat is warranted, the fact remains that Weber structured elements of his sociology as a reaction to what he perceived as Marx’s economic determinism.[1] While Weber brings much of value to sociological thought, the elements of his sociology which purport to “correct” the passive role of the subject in Marx must be dealt with head on, for in many respects they are the very vulgarizations against which Swingewood warns, and Marxist thought works against. This essay proposes three things: First, a passive subject is contrary to the essence of Marxist thought. Second, Weber’s ‘iron cage’ vis-à-vis industrial capitalism’s ‘rational goal-oriented action’ is not unlike Marx’s critique of capitalism as an alienating social construct that by its very nature objectifies and disfigures the human subject. Last, in trying to prove the active role of the subject in social change, Weber, as presented by Swingewood, conflates subjective human activity with an objective conception of culture, crudely predicates material development upon this reification, and in so doing embraces both structure and super-structure as fetishes; thereby re-enslaving his ‘liberated’ subject to the probabilistic directivity of both.
I
That is to say, of all social factors this particular over-arching one seems at present to influence us most. Weber makes clear he holds no naïve assumptions regarding the influential strength of a society’s prevailing mode of production. Indeed, Weber’s metaphor of modernity as an iron box, ‘rational capitalism’s’ tendency toward rational goal-oriented action, implies concern and criticism of meaningful action transformed into habitual response; naught but the “application of systematic and precise modes of calculation and available means in pursuit of specific goals and ends” (Swingewood: 103). Rationalized capitalism denudes the human; makes an increasingly calculating and determinable creature out of what is an intrinsically indeterminable (self-determining) and active subject. “For Weber, action governed by rational norms is always more predictable in its possible effects…” (Swingewood: 93).
Faced with the awesome breadth, complexity, and power of social production, particularly a mode which seems to make of society an ‘iron box,’ it is perhaps an innate response to try and assert for the subject a degree of autonomy from/within the process. Indeed, the very notions of individuality and freedom (however cynically expressed) underpinning capitalism’s development demand it. Given this, it is no surprise Weber places a portion of his intellectual weight against crude concepts of historical materialism; as well he should. Swingewood’s Weber is correct in asserting, “…the view that capitalism necessarily develops through the workings of objective, economic laws determined by material forces…effectively render…human action irrelevant…to the status of total passivity” (Swingewood: 97). Historical materialism, as Swingewood’s Weber conceives and critiques, is no more than an extension of rational goal-orientated action into the past. It is a rational conception of history which erases entirely the agency of the human subject in shaping what becomes. Historical materialism is tantamount to the iron box slamming shut so that when society looks back it cannot see beyond to a time when the cage did not exist. This thread is compelling, but Swingewood’s Weber commits two errors: First in characterizing crude historical materialism as Marxist, and via an accidentally objectified subject in Weber’s attempted demonstration of the active role of the subject over history’s course vis-à-vis religion.
II
Weber fails to understand the role of the subject in Marxism, and completely ignores one of Marx’s key concepts, namely fetishism. As will be discussed below, Weber himself washes into fetishism in his attempt to free, in the world of ideas, the subject from economic determinism. However, it must first be noted that, regarding the historical role of the human agent, little difference exists between Swingewood’s Weber, “change is always through the actions of human agents… (who) accept or reject the prevailing system of ideas…” (Swingewood: 97), and Marx, “The materialistic doctrine concerning the changing of circumstances and education forgets that circumstances are changed by men and that the educator himself must be educated” (Marx in Fromm: 22). Despite Weber’s view that Marx’s historical materialism renders passive the human subject, makes her or him a mere object acted upon by historical material forces, Marx clearly conceives of society as the product of the subject, of human idea and action vis-à-vis labor and production. “The whole of what is called world history is nothing but the creation of man by human labor, and the emergence of nature for man; he therefore has the evident and irrefutable proof of his self-clarification, of his own origins” (Marx in Fromm: 26), or as Fromm interprets, “Man gives birth to himself in the process of history…”(Fromm: 15), “in the course of history; he develops himself; he transforms himself, he is the product of history; since he makes history, he is his own product” (Fromm: 26). While it is tempting to view the language of labor and production as evidence of economic determinism, it must be remembered that labor and production are for Marx inherently human, subjective categories, and that it is a particular mode of production, namely capitalism, which effaces labor’s subjective character; rationalizes this subjective activity and makes it nothing more than an economic category, labor-power, a peculiar commodity in a circuit of valorization and exchange. “The way in which men produce their means of subsistence…is a definite form of expressing their life….As individuals express their life, so they are. What they are…coincides with their production, both what they produce and with how they produce” (Marx in Fromm: 10). I am a farmer because I grow grain. I am a teacher because I teach. I am a father because I produce/adopt offspring. These are not economic categories but human roles in which function subjective actors generating/entertaining ideas in their brains and realizing these ideas in the world of things: “We presuppose labor in a form in which it is an exclusively human characteristic. A spider conducts operations which resemble those of the weaver, and a bee would put many a human architect to shame by the construction of its honeycomb cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is that the architect builds the cell in his mind before he constructs it in wax” (Marx: 284).
III
Contrary to the picture Swingewood’s Weber offers us of Marx’s systemic conception of meaning, the social whole conferring historical meaning on individual actions (Swingewood: 94), Marx’s concept of the ‘social whole’ is predicated on the very notion of inter-subjectivity Weber sought to promote. Marx conceives both structure and superstructure as the product of human hands and brains; that society, including and especially society’s mode of production, is and can only be socially constructed by interacting human subjects agreeing (explicitly or implicitly) to construct it in such a manner. In Marx’s thought, something as powerful as money only possesses that power because humans themselves endow it. With respect to economic forces or a mode of production, they rule over us as subjects, determine us as individuals and a social whole, objectify our subjective essence only to the extent that we as agents allow them to do so. The notion that humanity can only be determined by material forces is, in Marx’s words, a form of fetishism, “It is nothing but the definite social relation between men themselves which assumes…the fantastic form of a relation between things….to find an analogy we must take flight into…religion. There the products of the human brain appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own, which enter into relations both with each other and with the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men’s hands. I call this the fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labor (recall society itself is a product of labor) as soon as they are produced as commodities” (Marx: 165, parenthesis mine).
Weber confuses a particular Marxist critique of the capitalist mode of production, the critique that capitalist society constructs itself as a sea of commodities determined by production and exchange, with Marx’s entire notion of historical materialism, which is, as discussed above, more nuanced than Swingewood’s Weber admits.[2] Marx’s fetishism and Weber’s iron cage both carry this notion of the subject objectified, of a person tainted by habituated behavior courtesy of social constructs. However, while Weber’s iron box is exclusive to modern, “rationalized capitalism”, Marx’s concept of fetishism is not so limited in scope. Marx sees both material and ideal as potential iron cages, fetishes, things created by us and allowed to exist as forces beyond our control, “Thus, at the level of material production…we find the same situation that we find in religion at the ideological level, namely the inversion of subject into object and vice versa” (Marx: 990), or “As in religion man is governed by the products of his own brain, so in capitalist production he is governed by the products of his own hands” (Marx in Fromm: 51).
It now becomes clear that Weber’s attempt to assert subjective autonomy from the ‘fateful’ forces of social production by demonstrating that “ideal elements, such as religious ideas, are not mechanically linked to the economic structure but actively shape the ways in which individuals carry out their ordinary day-to-day activities” (Swingewood: 95) is ill conceived. Instead of proving the active subject as creator of its mode of production (a fact presupposed by Marx), he merely demonstrates that an ideal fetish, “religious belief…gave a direction to practical conduct and held the individual to it” (Weber in Swingewood: 99 parenthesis mine), and that this ideal fetish correlated at a specific point in time with the construction of a material one. The Protestant ethic, if such a thing can be defined, is naught but a cultural object created by subjects into a thing with the appearance of autonomy. Weber’s liberation of the subject vis-à-vis the Protestant ethic as capitalist progenitor is impotent. If we take Simmel at his word, “The real tragedy of culture is…the tendency to turn the creative subject into an object, to reify the products of human culture and effectively eliminate purposive human action” (Simmel in Swingewood: 103), we see the counterpunch Weber mounts against “Marxist” historical materialism is less a Cassandra and more an Agamemnon.
Works Cited
Fromm, Eric. (1961). Marx’s Concept of Man. Frederick Ungar Publishing:
New York.
Marx, Karl (1976). Capital Volume 1. (Ben Fowkes, Trans.). Penguin Books:
London.
Swingewood, Alan. (2000). A short History of Sociological Thought 3rd. Ed. Palgrave Macmillan:
London.
Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. (Talcott Parsons, Trans.). Unwin University Books:
London.
Works Referenced
Marx, Karl (1976). Capital Volume 2. (Ben Fowkes, Trans.). Penguin Books:
London.
Marx, Karl (1976). Capital Volume 3. (Ben Fowkes, Trans.). Penguin Books:
London.
[1] Of course, given Weber’s rather imprecise economics in which all forms of accumulation are capitalism (Weber: 17-27), one is forced to wonder upon which of Marx’s works his critique is based.
[2] “…the very aim of Marx is to liberate man from the pressure of economic needs, so that he can be fully human” (Fromm: 5).