4

Webers Political Conclusions

Assuming that precisely this possibility were to be an inescapable fate who
could help smiling at the anxiety of our litterateurs lest future social and political
developments might bestow on us too much 'individualism' or democracy' or
the like or that 'true freedom would not emerge until the present
anarchy' in our economic production and the party machinations'
in our parliaments had been eliminated in favour of social order and
an organic structure - which means in favor of the pacifsm of
social impotence under the wing of the one quite defnitely inescapable
power that of the bureaucracy in the state and the economy!"#$%&
The laughable incomprehension of the nature of the matter by the literati, the
decadent liberal intelligentsia (an orientation that persists to the present day!), is to
believe that the capitalist economy is anarchical and that parliamentary politics
is Machiavellian that the problem that besets society is too much
individualism or democracy, and that only social order will restore true
freedom. Yet it is precisely this yearning for a lost paradise of true freedom
the Schumpeterian Individualitat of the entrepreneurial spirit (Freedom)
reconciled with the scientifc rationality of Economics (Truth) -, this
unwillingness to grapple with the anarchy of capitalism and the
machinations of politics that constitutes the pacifsm of social impotence (the
Nietzschean Ohn-Macht); it is the unwillingness to tackle the inescapable fate of
confict that will condemn us to one defnitely inescapable power, that of the
bureaucracy in the state and the economy!
Weber gives ample proof in this passage of how well he has understood
Nietzsches pitiless De-struktion of the Vollendung, the com-pletion of
Western values in science, philosophy and morality. Schumpeters vain attempt to
reconcile the Individualitat of the Unternehmergeist with the scientifcity of the
Economics is defnitely overcome. Not only is it not possible to retain any
scientifc analysis of the Economy that can quantify its confict and reduce
it to the rational individual choice of the market; not only can there be no
development of the capitalist economy due to the subjectivity of the
entrepreneur because development originates from a system of needs and
wants that curtails and conditions any subjectivity; but it is also the very
confict over the provision for needs and wants liberated by capitalism with the
formation of free labor organized as a class that now fnally subsumes scientifc
activity itself to that confict by means of the rational organization of free
labor.
In other words, far from being the outcome of the unstoppable expansion of the sphere of
empirical science to the realm of social life and of the Economics in particular, the
Rationalisierung theorized by Nietzsche (philosophically) and Weber (sociologically)
engenders the subsumption of the scientifc process to the explosive, uncontainable
confict and antagonism between the system of needs and wants aimed at the care for
external goods (the iron cage) and the ability of the capitalist mode of production to
guide and govern it through a program of development and growth that preserves
and reproduces the existing capitalist social relations of production. Any rational
evaluation of capitalism in the sense of empirical science as understood by Schumpeter
in the Theorie and by the Economics is therefore quite impossible! Scientifc rationality
itself is now subsumed to the confict that capitalism generates as a motor of its own
development.
It is this triptych of the relationship between social confict from the
democratization of labor, its rational and scientifc organization in the direction
of capitalist development, and the political governance needed to mediate
the efects of growth-through-crisis that concerns Weber in the all-important
period between 1917 and 1919 and that covers the lectures on Politik als Beruf and
Wissenschaft als Beruf and then the series of papers on Parlament und Regierung.
A lifeless machine is congealed [crystallized] spirit 'geronnener (eist)*
+t is only this fact that gives the machine the power to force men to serve
it and thus to rule and determine their daily working lives as in fact happens
in factories* ,his same congealed spirit is however also embodied in that
living machine which is represented by bureaucratic organisation with its
specialisation of trained technical work its delimitation of areas of
responsibility its regulations and its graduated hierarchy of relations
of obedience* -ombined with the dead machine it is in the process
of manufacturing the housing of that future serfdom to which perhaps
men may have to submit powerlessly .ust like the slaves in the
ancient state of /gypt if they consider that the ultimate and only value
by which the conduct of their afairs is to be decided is good administration
and provision for their needs by ofcials (that is good in the pure' technical
sense of rational administration! 0ureaucracy achieves this after all
incomparably better than any other structure of rule* "#12&
It is the very freedom of labor that allows workers to organize as a class and
that permits therefore the organization of confict in a rational manner by
the living machine of private capitalist and state bureaucracy, that is to say,
under the regular discipline of the factory, - of the factory as lifeless machine
with its congealed spirit of the system of wants and needs! The lifeless
machine of capitalist production possesses a congealed spirit, and the
machinery of bureaucracy is a living machine that stands in the closest
relation to both capitalist enterprise and state administration. No
rationality is possible without the free expression of social antagonism over
the wage relation. The reality of Western economy and society against
Schumpeters misunderstanding of Webers Rationalisierung as empirical
science replacing the teleological rationality of metaphysics, against Werner
Sombarts interpretation of modern capitalism as economic rationality, soon
to be repudiated by Weber in the Vorbermerkungen of 1920 is that capitalism is
the rational organization of free labor!
Indeed, it would not even be possible to speak of true freedom, of
Individualitat, of individualism and democracy and the Rights of Man without
the imponent push of the confict that capitalism has organized under the
regular discipline of the factory. It is a piece of cruel self-deception to think
that even the most conservative amongst us, even those of us most opposed to
freedom and democracy, could carry on living at all today without these
achievements from the age of the Rights of Man, that is, the American and
French Revolutions and the Enlightenment, which have led through the
liberation of labor, through free labor and its autonomous market
demand, to the kind of rational organization of free labor, of social confict
and antagonism embodied by the all-powerful trend toward bureaucratization
that is to say, the provision of the most basic needs and wants of social life, to
the socialization that is the necessary pre-condition of bureaucracy.
It is vital to discern how Weber traces a strict link between freedom and
democracy, and therefore the Demokratisierung, through to the liberation of
labor, its constitution as a class that can press its autonomous market
demands in terms of the care for external goods, of its needs and wants
all the way to the Vergesellschaftung, the socialization of these conficting needs
and wants as a result of the need for capital rationally to organize this free
labor in the pursuit of rationally calculable proft (in opposition to the romantic
Gemeinschaft theorized by Tonnies as an echo to Kants ungesellige Geselligkeit)
that is, of its own private form of bureaucratization in opposition to, and therefore
separate from, the State bureaucracy to which it is yet most closely related. As
we will soon see in section 6, here Weber, because of his reifed notion of
labor, falls back into and retraces the conceptual Schematismus of the Neo-
Kantian sociological Forms theorized by Simmel, distinct from their content
not in terms of historical-materialist experience but only in terms of
durability (the Forms being Kantian concepts or categories that have
epistemological and scientifc validity whilst their content is purely variable
and historically contingent or aleatory). The same distinction applies to the
Rationalisierung and to bureaucratization. Not until the Vorbermerkungen will
Weber seek to deal explicitly and coherently with these matters.
+n view of the fundamental fact that the advance of bureaucratisation
is unstoppable there is only one possible set of questions to be
asked about future forms of political organisation3 "#& how is it at all
possible to salvage any remnants of 'individual' freedom of movement
in any sense given this all-powerful trend towards bureaucratisation!
+t is after all a piece of cruel self-deception to think that even the
most conservative amongst us could carry on living at all today without
these achievements from the age of the '4ights of 5an'* 6owever
let us put this question to one side for now for there is another
which is directly relevant to our present concerns3 "7& +n view of the
growing indispensability and hence increasing power of state o8cialdom
which is our concern here how can there be any guarantee
that forces exist which can impose limits on the enormous crushing
power of this constantly growing stratum of society and control it
e9ectively! 6ow is democracy even in this restricted sense to be at all possible!
"#$%&
Therefore, in view of the growing indispensability and hence increasing power of
state ofcialdom [bureaucracy] that has been brought about by this growing
socialization, the second question is what limits can be imposed on this
enormous, crushing power so as to be able and this is the frst question - to
salvage any remnants of individual freedom of movement in any sense at all! These
two questions have to do crucially with the future forms of political organization.
The attempt to control growth in such a manner that the explosive push of the
system of needs and wants and its ineluctable confict can be mustered and
then channeled into the preservation and reproduction of existing capitalist
social relations of production the proft motive engenders an increasing
power of State bureaucracy, a growth of control, that becomes inexorably
more indispensable in terms of gauging and monitoring the rationally
calculable functioning of the system both the needs and wants and the
proft motive -, but at the same time grows ever less capable to decide
legitimately the direction of the system! The control of growth required
for the preservation of existing relations of production the rational conduct of
capitalist business - engenders a growth of control designed to maintain
these relations of production that tends to stife and smother the very confict
that the system of needs and wants rationally organized as free labor with an
autonomous market demand inevitably and irrepressibly generates. The result
is exactly the same as Weber had apprehended for rational Socialism. The
living machine cannot exorcise the congealed spirit of the lifeless machine: - only
the leading Spirit can guide and govern it.
:et this too is not the only question of concern to us
here for there is ";& a third question the most important of all which
arises from any consideration of what is not performed by bureaucracy
as such* +t is clear that its e9ectiveness has strict internal limits
both in the management of public political a9airs and in the private
economic sphere* ,he leading spirit the entrepreneur in the one
case the politician in the other is something di9erent from an
o8cial* <ot necessarily in form but certainly in substance* ,he
entrepreneur too sits in an 'o8ce'* An army commander does the
same*"#=>&? +n the sphere of the state the same applies to the leading
politician*
,he leading minister is formally an o8cial with a pensionable salary*
This is the Organisationsfrage for Weber, the point at which the Problematik of
rational Socialism coincides with that of capitalism: how can the present confict-
ridden system of needs and wants the congealed spirit of the lifeless machine
which under capitalism takes institutional shape as the rational organization
of free labor as a class that is represented by the social democratic workers
parties of the whole of Europe be reconciled with that rationality? If indeed the
system is founded on an irrational iron cage of care for external goods,
how can its irrational confict, its needs and wants, its freedom, be reconciled
with the rational conduct of capitalist business for proftability, its science?
Indeed, how is it at all possible to conduct business for proftability rationally
when the system of needs and wants expressed through the autonomous
market demand of free labor is not itself rational? This is the point at which
the content of the presumed rationality of the overall system of capitalist
production must be enucleated, discovered and explained. And the content
itself cannot be rational merely in the sense of calculable. Either we fnd a
substantive rationality or else Webers Rationalisierung is sheer mechanical
violence whose increasing power, its growing control stands in the way of,
obtrudes and represses, those most basic needs of social life, those needs and
wants that make it indispensable!
This is where the efectiveness [of bureaucracy, state and capitalist] has strict internal limits,
both in the management of public, political afairs and in the private economic sphere in that
there are things that are not performed by bureaucracy! The bureaucracy can only
measure and monitor and perhaps even repair the existing system. But it
cannot determine either the modalities of its own growth nor those of the
system whose operation it is supposed to measure and monitor: its growing
power grows the more oppressive and repressive the more it requires the
responsibility of the leitender Geist. The leitender Geist can only become the
ultimate safety-valve of the system by assuming the responsibility for the
decisions that must be made to guide and govern and direct the system. The
leader is the expression of a particular, specifc, historical institutional
expression of the confict and antagonism of the capitalist rational organization
of free labor under the regular discipline of the factory. The leader is the
culmination of social antagonism and its ultimate legitimation.
This shows yet again how defcient was Schumpeters attempt to explain the
phenomenon of capitalist development purely in terms of the subjective
Individualitat of the entrepreneur able to trans-form the wants and provisions
of capitalist society, rather than in terms of the confict intrinsic to these wants
and provisions and its rational organization! The leader is not diferent or
separate from the bureaucratic machine: the leader represents merely the
moment of decision, the function of responsibility for the entire system. But
the concentration of legitimacy in the fgure of the leader serves merely to
display disastrously, catastrophically the inability of the living machine of
bureaucracy to live up to its indispensability. As the legitimacy of the leitender
Geist declines so does the efectuality of the State administration and so does
the systemic risk of the entire system grow.
The Parlamentarisierung is supposed to facilitate and allow the control of the
controllers (Ciceros paradox quis custodiet ipsos custodes?) so as to
preserve the autonomy of market demand and the remnants of individual
freedom of expression in any sense at all. But this presupposes that (a) the
confict inherent to the iron cage is itself inescapable a fate; (b) that the
growth of control is occasioned blindly and irrationally by the system of needs
and wants that there are no other reasons outside of the iron cage for the
socialization of production and the increasing power of bureaucracy; and (c)
that the very possibility of governance under capitalism through the
Parlamentarisierung does not itself allow for an alternative form of governance
that, apart from the leitender Geist and its responsibility for decisions, cannot
resolve the confict between wants and provision a confict that, far from being
an inescapable fate, Weber himself had traced back to its historical origins!
The question of the alternative must then be posed.
In other words, is there not an inter esse that is fnally expressed, however
distortedly, by the growth of control engendered by the need to control
growth? Is the growth of control not itself the pro-duct of that need to control
growth within the bounds set by the capitalist rationality of proftability?
And does this rationality, this proftability not rest on the rational
organization of free labor under the regular discipline of the factory and not on
autonomous market demand? Clearly the problem here is that Webers iron
cage itself needs to be reviewed, its inescapability questioned, its creation
and maintenance by the spirit of capitalism traced to its historical origins. The
very possibility of conducting capitalist business for rational and systematic
proftability, through the rational organization of free labor under the regular
discipline of the factory needs to be examined. Only then will we be able to
assess realistically Webers plans for Parlamentarisierung und
Demokratisierung, that is to say, for the successful and lasting integration of
free labor organized as a class within the machine of State and private capitalist
bureaucracy under the legitimate and legal parliamentary oversight of the
leitender Geist as the ultimate expression of the political will of the Herrenvolk.
5
The bellum civium from Marx to Weber or, the Ghost of Needs in the
Machine of Labor
But the question still remains of what modern industrial labour means and of
how it leads necessarily inescapably to concentration, to socialization
and thence to what this last inevitably means, namely, bureaucratization.
This is an all-important chain of historical and theoretical transitions or passages
that must be traced carefully. Even as late as Parlament und Regierung, however,
Weber fails to do this, preferring instead to leave the whole chain of historical
connections entirely open.
The ultimate foundation of social life is the system of needs and wants. The
ultimate aim and purpose of society is to satisfy these needs and wants that are
ineluctably individual. Not only is the individual and self-interest the
foundation of human society, not only is the satisfaction of needs and wants
their provision the essential aim of social life. But also the efcient
satisfaction of these needs and wants depends on the rational and systematic
organization of free labor. And this free labor is understood as operari, as
mere, sheer labor power or force a homogeneous and measurable quantity
that does not itself create anything, pro-duce any goods, but rather
consumes and utilizes the external world so as to satisfy and provide for
its wants wants that are deemed to be as insatiable as the Schopenhauerian
Will. In Schopenhauer, the Ding an sich is still present in the entity of the Will
whose objectifcation is the body. Therefore the external world exists as well,
though only as representation that can be com-prehended scientifcally by the
Understanding (Verstand) in accordance with the Principle of Sufcient Reason.
In the Schopenhauerian version of the negatives Denken the world is still a
Wirk-lichkeit, a work-likeness, an actu-ality in which the human operari is
conditioned by scientifc logico-mathematical laws just as it was in Kant,
whose greatest merit for Schopenhauer consisted precisely in this separation of
thing-in-itself from phenomena.
Except that Schopenhauer efects a re-versal (Um-kehrung) of Kants
metaphysics: the external world therefore is not an inscrutable Ob-ject, an
unknowable reality of noumena op-posed (Gegen-stand, ob-ject) to the Will,
of which we can only register phenomena. But because it is now the subjective
side, the Will, that is the thing-in-itself from which the phenomena, the
objectifcations originate, the scientifcity of experimental observations, of
phenomena, is guaranteed by the unity of their re-presentation (Vorstellung) as
subject-object in the Will a unity that overcomes the infamous Kantian
antinomies of thought due to inscrutability of the ob-jective (gegen-standliche)
thing-in-itself. In this Welt-anschauung, esse est percipi to be is to be perceived,
the representations (Vorstellungen) are reality (Wirklichkeit) itself and no
longer mere phenomena (blosse Erscheinungen). In this sense, Lukacss critique of
Kants formalism, of the antinomies of bourgeois thought, and his
theorization of the proletariat as the individual subject-object of history is fully
comprehensible only through the screen of Schopenhauers reversal of Kant.
The separation of noumenon and phenomenon also disappears in Machism;
but this time it is the thing-in-itself that is entirely eliminated in favour of the
simple mathematical con-nection between phenomena or sensations
(Empfndungen) in an experimental relationship that is predictable and regular.
Like Neo-Kantism, Machs phenomenology, the Empfndungen or sensations,
efectively instrumentalise science reducing it to the state of a mere tool, to
its success or, in the phrase of one of the founders of the marginalist revolution,
Stanley Jevons, to a set of predictions and regularities. (Cf. for this, the
opening chapters of Erkenntnis und Irrtum.) There is here a virulent and total
rejection of any reality or substance that may lie behind phenomena, of
any meta-physics. Science is sheer certainty achieved in the simplest
relations capable of being described and calculated with mathematical precision.
+n connection with the discussion about the admissibility or
possibility of introducing psychological factors into economics
there stood the question of a standard of value* ,his question became
essential as soon as the theorists saw the excellent ob.ective
measure of labour vanish* /ven before @mith people had discussed
the question of a standard of exchange value and it had been recogniAed
that there could be no standard that was unchangeable in
itself* All the classical writers taught this while the old supporters
of the theory of value in use as e*g* @ay insisted on equating the
exchange value of a commodity simply with the quantity of goods
which it was possible to obtain for it in the market* +t was however
simply considered impossible to measure the value in use
although in practice everybody defnitely compares values of commodities
with each other* ,he psychological theory of value now
seemed to demand such a standard of value in use also in economic
theory* Against this doubts were raised whether it was substantially
possible to measure 'quantities of intensity' and in particular whether
valuations of di9erent people could actually be compared* Yet
# -f* 0Bhm0awerk'/xkurs' +C in the third edition of the "ositive #heory
6+@,D4+-AE @-6DDE A<F 5A4(+<AE G,+E+,: #%;
there is really no need for such a comparison and in measuring the
valuations of one person it is quite possible to proceed merely from
facts that can be observed if we start from the following formulation:
The value of a quantity of a commodity for somebody is measured
by that quantity of another commodity which makes the
choice between both a matter of indiference to the economic
individual.
(Fisher Mathematical Investigations into the Theory of
Prices, !"#$.% ,his method of basing the measurement of values
on acts of choice of the individuals gained more and more adherents
"Hareto 0oninsegni and others&* :et it is possible to overcome
the di8culties of the problem also in a di9erent way*#
,he primary fact with which the theory of marginal utility is
concerned and in which its fundamental achievement consists and
on which everything else is based is the proof that in spite of
appearances to the contrary the factor of wants and as a result from
this the utility character of commodities determine all individual
occurrences in the economy* &t 'rst it was necessary to deal with
the old antinomy of values the opposition between utility and
value. This had already been done. The distinctions between categories
of want and the incitement of want between the total value
of a store and the value of partial quantities of which the store held
by the economic individual is composed help to overcome this
opposition. (n this lies the importance of the conception of )marginal
utility).$ ,hus all facts relating to the determination of prices
could be explained with the help of the basic principle* +t is true
however that there never had been any doubt that those facts on
which the 'demand side' of the problem of price is based could
be explained with its help and this had usually been considered as
self-evident* 0ut it was only the theory of marginal utility which
based the 'supply side' of the problem on it and conceived costs as
phenomena of value* +n this respect the decisive achievementI
mostly overlooked by the criticsIlay in the proof that the esti-
!#* +,-.-/(, 0-,T1(.+ &.0 /+T2-0
mation of commodities according to their costs which is so predominant
in economic life is merely an expedient abbreviation of
the real correlation that this correlation is explained with the help
of the element of value in use that the calculations of the entrepreneur
are merely the reJection of valuations on the part of the
consumers and that in cases in which somebody estimates a
commodity according to the value in use of commodities which he
can obtain for it in the market3sub4ective e5change value3the
)e5changeability) and with it the sub4ective e5change value is
based on alternative estimates of the value in use. This led to a
uniform explanation of all occurrences in the e5change economy
with the help of one single principle and in particular also to a
classi'cation of the relation between costs and prices.#
"@chumpeter $conomic %octrines and &ethodology&
For Weber as for Nietzsche, there cannot be any separation (Trennung) in the
Marxian sense between labor and the means of production because there was
never any union between them! The human operari is entirely instrumental to its
goal the provision for want. There is and there can be no Gattungswesen, no
species-conscious being, no original union of workers with tools because, if
anything and quite to the contrary, the nature of human wants and the scarcity
of their provision ensure that there is confict between and among workers, let
alone between workers and capitalists! Human beings are irreducibly and
ontologically things-in-themselves; they are Wills or, as Nietzsche describes
them, instincts of freedom that can co-operate or col-laborate to the extent
that their needs, their iron necessities and their wants are provided for
and satisfed.
This is the Hobbesian status naturae, the bellum omnium contra omnes, the state of
nature in which homo homini lupus obtains and that Schopenhauer postulates in
Book Four of Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, after his pitiless critique of Kantian
ethics in the Grundprobleme der Ethik, of the moral theology of the Categorical
Imperative. In the negatives Denken initiated by Schopenhauer in response to the
Hegelian dialectic, the instrumental operari, the Arbeit, the labor itself does
not have utility because it is the objectifcation of the Will to Life with its
unfathomable Wants, with its evanescent World. Only the World is wealth;
only consumption goods have utility for the Will. They and they alone
ultimately measure or value or price the marginal utility of the means of
production not in an objective or substantive sense, but merely from the
viewpoint (Gesichtspunkt), from the per-spective of the individual choice.
Utility is an entirely subjective and inscrutable entity that can be measured as
Value, that can be given social signifcance or a social Form that can be
reifed only through the social osmosis of the market pricing mechanism
where individual Wills clash or com-pete for the same scarce consumer
goods. The Askesis, Webers ascetic renunciation of the world or Entsagung, is
emphatically not attained through the pursuit of labor as an end in itself, but
rather through the deferral of consumption and the application of the Arbeit to
the construction of tools (means of production, or capital) that are more
roundabout and therefore increase the productivity of labor by saving it.
And the higher Value derived from producing with more roundabout methods
of production can be calculated not just in an instantaneous or timeless
analytical dimension but even in a temporal one, in terms of time preference,
even as a projection toward the future!
In this view (Anschauung), in this perspective (Welt-anschauung), labor
can have no utility because it has no intrinsic value. Instead, labor is
efort (Kampf), it is the objectifcation of the Will, it is the operari, it is
Pain (Leid) without Pleasure (Lust): labor is dis-utility! And the
marginal utility of the consumption goods produced to provide for the
workers wants the wage - must be equivalent to the marginal dis-utility of
labor if the production of consumption goods is to be optimal! Neoclassical
theory from Gossen onwards begins with the notion that human living activity is
toil, it is efort, it is pain and want (Bedarf) in search of provision
(Deckung), as Bohm-Bawerk styles them in the Positive Theorie. It follows from this
perspective that human living activity is conceptually separated from its
object, from its environment which supplies it (human operari) with the
means of production. And consequently human living labour is seen from the
outset as pure and utter destitution, as poverty, as want. Accordingly, all
means of production cannot serve as means for the expression or objectifcation
of human living labour but rather as labour-saving devices! We should note the
diference between Jeremy Benthams Utilitarian or hedonistic calculus of
pleasure and pain and the strict nexus established by Schopenhauer between
operari as Arbeit (labor) and A-skesis as release from Pain, as
renunciation of the World and therefore the identifcation of labor with
want and pain. This nexus is entirely missing in Bentham just as it is in JS Mill
who espoused the Labor Theory of Value as the last great representative of
Classical Political Economy. But it is this Schopenhauerian nexus that is vital to
the early development of the theory of marginal utility.
What this means is that human living labour itself is already considered, for one,
as a tool, as an instrument whose productivity can be measured in terms of
units of output per unit of time. And for another, it is seen as an activity or a
labour power that, just like Schopenhauers Will to Life and its objectifcation,
the Body, is purely abstract, mere potentiality, utter possibility, sheer pro-
ject not bound to a particular, specifc mode of expression or activity. In
practice, it is the latter view of living labor the assumption that living labor is
only mere potentiality - that serves as the premise that leads inexorably to the
former conclusion that is, that living labor is only a tool, a homogeneous
force, Marxs abstract labor! Weber's entire understanding of "free labour",
discussed here earlier, is the sociological equivalent of this decadence and
nihilism of European thought not, pace Lukacs or Marcuse, a destruction of
Reason, because , as Nietzsche showed quite conclusively, Reason itself is the
summum bonum of Western metaphysics that culminates in nihilism. In this
perspective, this abstract labour is sheer, naked, destitute poverty, barren
misery potential that can only become actual if, and only to the extent and
manner that, it is allowed by the laws of supply and demand to come into
contact as a tool with the means of production that are the endowment and
possession of the capitalist. For the Neoclassics, then, labour and workers are
by defnition the factor of production that is in want or need, that sufers
toil and pain and dis-utility and that needs capital (the means of
production as labour-saving tools) in order to satisfy its wants that are made
immediate, urgent in contrast with the capitalist owner who can defer
consumption by the very fact that it does not now have provisions for its
subsistence and reproduction and survival!
The culmination of this blatant nihilism implicit in the Weltanschauung of the
negatives Denken can be found in the principal theoretical works of the most
prestigious member of the early Austrian School, none other than the bourgeois
Marx himself Eugen Bohm-Bawerk. Here is how his greatest pupil, Joseph
Schumpeter, summarises his work in a manner that needs little commentary from
us to be placed in the context of our discussion and that in connection with
interest, that is the most fundamental aspect of proft as the most
unabashedly natural claim by the bourgeoisie over social wealth (in the form of
what Marx called fructiferous capital):
+n #22K there appeared 0Bhm-0awerk's critical work
which established not only the untenable but also the
superfcial character of the existing explanations of
interest and opened a new era for the theory of
interest* ,his book and the one entitled "ositive
#heorie' which followed four years later trained
numerous theorists of interest and hardly a single one
remained una9ected by them* Df all the works on the
theory of marginal utility these two volumes had the
deepest and widest e9ect* Le fnd the traces of their
inJuence in the way in which almost all theorists of
interest phrased their questions and proceeded to
answer them*
,here are signs of this inJuence even in those writers
who re.ected the concrete solution of the problem of
interest as o9ered by 0Bhm-0awerk* ,his solution is
based on the fundamental idea that the phenomenon of
interest can be explained by a discrepancy between the
values of present and future consumer goods* ,his
discrepancy rests on three facts3 frst on the di9erence
between the present and the future level of supplies
available for the members of the economy secondly
on the fact that a future satisfaction of wants stands
much less vividly before people's eyes than an equal
but present satisfaction* +n consequence economic
activity reacts less strongly to the prospect of future
satisfaction than to that of present en.oyment and the
individual members of the economy are in certain
circumstances willing to buy present en.oyment with
one that is greater in itself but lies in the future* The
discrepancy between present and future values
is thirdly based on the fact that the possession
of goods ready to be en4oyed makes it
unnecessary for the economic individuals to
provide for their subsistence by
6+@,D4+-AE @-6DDE A<F 5A4(+<AE G,+E+,: #%%
producing for the moment e.g. by a primitive
search for food.
The possession of such goods enables them to
choose some
methods of production which are more pro'table
but are more
time6consuming: the possession of goods ready to
be enjoyed in
the present guarantees, as it were, the possession
of more such
goods in the future.
+n this 'third reason' for the phenomenon of interest there
are
contained two elements3 Mirst the establishment of a
technical fact
which so far had been unknown to the theorists namely
that the
prolongation of the period of production the adoption of
'detours'
of production makes it possible to obtain a greater return
which
is more than proportionate to the time employed*
@econdly the
thesis that this technical fact is also an independent cause
of an
increase in value of consumption goods which are in
existence at
any given time*
(nterest as form of income then originates in the
price struggle
between the capitalists on the one side who must
be considered
as merchants who ofer goods which are ready for
consumption
and landlords and workers on the other. 7ecause the
latter value
present goods more highly and because the possible
use of present
stocks of consumer goods for a more pro'table
e5tension of the
period of production is practically unlimited the
price struggle is
always decided in favour of the capitalists. (n
consequence landlords
and workers receive their future product only with a
deduction
as it were with a discount for the present.
,he achievement which this formulation contains was
epoch-making
and a great deal of the theoretical work of the last twenty
years has been devoted to a discussion of it and to its
criticism*
"@chumpeter $conomic %octrines and &ethodology*&
The blunt brutality of Schumpeters illations conclusions drawn from utterly
ludicrous premises need not detain us long here. But we should draw attention
to two features that will be relevant to our discussion of Webers theory of the
origins of capitalism in Part Two. The frst is that Bohm-Bawerks theory of the
greater productivity of more roundabout methods of production (a feat of
metaphysical fantasy unequalled in the sorry history of the Economics a
bedtime story to make children laugh) is yet another version of the
Schopenhauerian renunciation (Entsagung), the refusal of the pain (Leid)
of the Will to Life in its abulic, incessant and insatiable search for pleasure
(Lust) that can never be satis-fed, least of all at the moment of its ful-flment
(Schopenhauer)! Bohm-Bawerk is clearly intimating under the pretence of
economic theory that the capitalist is rewarded with higher productivity of
the tools (capital) he possesses by virtue of his ascetic renunciation or deferral
of immediate consumption in order to devote his labor and existing capital to
the construction of more roundabout methods of production that will yield
higher productivity and therefore proft when they are utilized. As we will see
in Part Two, Weber argues in the Ethik that it is the Protestant calling (Beruf) of
labor as an end in itself that makes up the spirit of capitalism and constitutes
a specifcally bourgeois economic ethic. We can see already from the quotation
above that in fact it is Neoclassical Theory that provides such a specifcally
bourgeois economic ethic because it lays emphasis of the source of Value on the
renunciation of immediate consumption by the capitalist through the
preference of more roundabout means of production (capital) rather than
Webers devotion to or calling for labor as an end in itself which, of
course, is much closer to the Labor Theory of Value of Classical Political
Economy.
The second point follows practically from the frst, and that is that once again, as
we argued earlier and as Weber realized, the entire concept of interest or proft
is evidently founded in Neoclassical Theory on the idea of a price struggle
between capitalists and workers that, given the premises of this theory, is
always decided in favour of the capitalists.
************
Webers inexorable separation (inexorable because for him there is no
existential basis whatsoever for conceiving of a union of the worker with the
means of production except on the basis of individual ownership of the latter) -
the inescapability of bureaucratic rule over modern industrial labour
anticipates fatidically the philosophical synthesis operated by Heidegger only
eight years later in 1927 with the publication of his epoch-making Sein und Zeit.
Heideggers ontology of human Da-sein, of human being as possibility, is a
philosophical refection of the politically-enforced separation (Trennung) that
Weber deems inescapable and that Heidegger will misconstrue philosophisch for
phenomenological inauthenticity (Un-eigentlichkeit) or averageness or
quotidianity (Alltaglichkeit) and existential estrangement (Verfall). Pathetic
(like Schopenhauers sym-pathy derided by Nietzsche as the perspective of
the herd, like Romain Rollands oceanic feeling refuted by Freud in Die
Unbehagen der Kultur) will be Lukacss plaintive longing for the enchantment of
totality, his late-romantic vision of the proletariat as the individual subject-
object of history and quasi-religious invocation of class consciousness just as
equally pathetic will remain Heideggers appeals to authenticity in the face of
the Vorhandenheit (instrumentality) of Technik.
(The proximity of the two thinkers is reviewed by L. Goldmann in Lukacs et
Heidegger. It may be enlightening to quote fully here Webers avuncular chiding
of Lukacs for his exuberant Marxist concepts of totality and class
consciousness, not less than that of individual subject-object of history. Weber
decries [ Economy and Society, at p.930]
that kind of pseudo-scientifc operation with the concepts
of class and class interests which is so frequent these days and which has
found its most classic expression in the assertion ((ehauptung of a
talented author that the individual may be in error about his interests
but that the class is infallible.)
For the Nietzschean Weber, these literati with their romantic fantasies fail to
grasp the irreducible and overriding irreconcilability of human individual needs
and wants, the total absence of any social syn-thesis, the complete lack of any
inter esse in human Da-sein. Life is confict; it is struggle; it is Will to Power.
This much Weber has learned from Schopenhauer and Nietzsche combined. But
this ineluctable, physio-logical human confict can and does allow for human co-
operation in a purely instrumental sense, to achieve practical purposes that satisfy
individual needs and wants. Social institutions, both symbolic and political,
can lead to the socialization of the instincts through compromises that
channel human instincts of freedom toward the construction of an ontogeny of
thought that stretches from the notions of consciousness and ego-ity (Ich-
heit), to those of logic and mathematics, and then to science, individuality,
society and the State.
This ontogeny of thought is what allows Weber to reconcile Nietzsches true
perspectivism and phenomenalism with Neo-Kantian epistemology and
Machian philosophy of science. Kants transcendental idealism remained
fundamentally subjective. The ontological universality of Pure Reason is
implicitly questioned in the Critique of Judgement (as Arendt argues in Lectures on
Kants Political Philosophy, though not, pace Heidegger, in the First Critique even if
the limitations of Pure Reason are already apparent there) and made to retreat to
the Leibnizian sphere of intuition and aesthetics, as Heidegger would argue later
in the Kantbuch. (A useful discussion of this point is in H-G Gadamers Les
Chemins de Heidegger, p.64, essay on Kant et le tournant hermeneutique.) Neo-
Kantism is the unwilling avowal of this retreat of Reason, of the defnitive
abandonment of the summum bonum of German Idealism of unifying
metaphysics with epistemology a surrender presaged already by Kant in the
Opus Postumum and the subject of the dramatic clash at Davos between
Heidegger and Cassirer. In the Neo-Kantian Lebensphilosophie, the Form rescues
the content of knowledge, Practical Reason saves experience, and the Norm
justifes the conduct. The Natur-wissenschaften and the Geistes-wissenschaften will
never be united again: the irretrievable separation of the Subject from the
Object is fnally conceded. The social sciences must turn to the Unicum of the
Soul which can ex-press and externalize its spirit through the
Schematismus, through the symbolic and social forms. This is the essence of
socialization that mani-fests itself in all areas of human life even to the extent
that these Forms acquire a life of their own, until they become a crystallized
Spirit (geronnener Geist the phrase is Simmels, in Philosophische Kultur, before
Weber adopted it) that dominates the lives of individual souls. The intellectual
path of Lukacs from Die Seele und die Formen (adopting Simmels schema of
Soul and Forms from the Philosophische Kultur) to the elaboration of the
concept of reifcation out of the Marxian fetishism of commodities in
Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein describes faithfully and fatefully this firtation
of Marxism with the Vollendung of German Idealism:
At the time then it was 5arx the sociologist that attracted me and + saw him
through spectacles tinged by @immel and 5ax Leber* + resumed my studies of
5arx during Lorld Lar + but this time + was led to do so by my general
philosophical interests and under the inJuence of 6egel rather than any
contemporary thinkers* "from #%$= Hreface p*ix&
Indeed, Marx himself acknowledged this firtation with Hegel (in the Preface
to Kapital) and then coined the phrase crystallized labor-time [blosse Gerinnung
von Arbeitszeit, Vol.1, Kapital] to indicate the socially necessary labor time that
is embodied in the means of production used by living labor to valorize
commodities in the process of production. Marx sought thereby to circumvent
the obvious inconsistency that it is impossible for market prices, which are
subjectively allocated according to demand, to determine what is socially
necessary labor-time. It is something with which the most discerning Marxists
have struggled since the publication of Volume Three of Das Kapital. The fnest
among them have sought to reconcile the inconsistency by appealing precisely to
this crystallization of labor-time through the reifcation of human living
labor that the fetishism of commodities engenders through the market
mechanism. (See especially Lukacss chapter on Reifcation in Geschichte and
the fnal chapter on Marxism: Scienza o Rivoluzione? in L. Collettis Ideologia e
Societa.) The insuperable objection to this version of Marxs critique is that if
value is sheer mystifcation and fetishism, then it is absolutely impossible
for it to determine the quantitative allocation of social resources for production!
Nor is it possible for us to discern a way to evade this fetishism! Lukacs himself
confesses to the overriding subjectivism of this framework (p.xviii) and indeed
to its afnity with Webers own brand of Neo-Kantian rationalization (as we
will see later) and Heideggers phenomenological account of inauthenticity
and totality in Sein und Zeit (p.xxii).
It is not an accident then if Karl Lowith focused on the convergence of the
concepts of rationalization in Weber and of alienation in Marx in his
appositely titled early work on Max Weber and Karl Marx. This complex web of
sociological forms characterizes also Webers entire methodology from the ideal
type (Simmels Form) as a sociological form to the hermeneutic Verstehen of
social phenomena (clearly drawn from Dilthey) that allows the liberation of
social science from its normative content (wert-frei, value-free science).
Indeed, we will argue that Webers entire sociology and Wissenschaftslehre is
founded on these Simmelian sociological Forms that allow him as they do
Schumpeter in the Theorie and the Austrian School generally, especially von Mises
who had links with Weber to conceive of the Rationalisierung in terms of its
instrumental purpose (Zweck-rationalitat what we may call mathesis) and
therefore scientifcity that can be distinguished from its Norm or Value
(Wert-rationalitat). (The distinction between causa efciens and causa fnalis actually
belongs to the great German jurist Rudolf von Jhering and pertains to political
theory and the sociology of law [see his Der Zweck im Recht, trans. as Law as a
Means to an End]. Weber seems to have adopted it without apparent
acknowledgement. Similarly, Webers theory of the State as a monopoly on the
use of physical force is derived from Jherings jurisprudence. We will discuss
these themes in Part Three.)
Once more, we are back full circle to Simmels Neo-Kantian dualism of Soul
(value, norm) and Forms (instrumental purpose). But in pursuing this schema,
Weber moves very far from Nietzsches much more consistent and sophisticated
philosophical Entwurf and original version of the Rationalisierung. Weber is more
ecumenical than Nietzsche in highlighting the irrational elements of Kultur
in which Ratio and iron cage are crystallizations or Forms of the Spirit or
Soul. Such a neat, formalistic Kantian Schematismus would have seemed
absurd to Nietzsche part of that moral theology of German Idealism and of
the German Historical School of Law, of the Historismus that he vehemently
denounced, and indeed part of the emanationism that Weber himself had
rebufed when reviewing the older German Historical School in his Roscher
und Knies, - but one into which he was forced by his espousal of the
methodological individualism of the Austrian School and the judicial
positivism of Kelsen and the Marburg School.
In this specifc and important regard, insufcient attention has been paid to the
actual practical convergence of the Austrian School and the German Historical
School that seemed so bitterly divided over the Methodenstreit in the fnal decades
of the twentieth century with the famous diatribe between Karl Menger and
Gustav Schmoller. In reality, notwithstanding the apparent unbridgeable divide
between the quest for scientifc laws expressible even in mathematical form of
the Austrian School and the resolute opposition to such generalities from the
Historical School, the fact remains that both Schools had a common aim: - and
that is the practical efectuality of scientifc research! If one takes a closer look
at the Welt-anschauung of the Schools, one will notice immediately that the
Machism of the Austrian School was aimed at establishing the simplest
mathematical relationships between events even at microeconomic level
(regarding the price behavior of frms and individuals, for instance) that could
serve as guidance for overall government policy and, not least, as essential
strategic ideological tools in the fght against the spreading socialist ideologies.
Despite Machs insistence on the dis-interestedness of scientifc research in
Erkenntnis und Irrtum, the fact remains that Machism looks at phenomena as
sensations that is to say, as the be all and end all of cosmic reality thereby
abolishing this reality, this meta-physics, in such a way that the regular and
predictable relationships (Jevons) that can be found between sense-
impressions (Empfndungen) are taken to exhaust the entire uni-verse of
science. It follows from this that Machism would regard the present social
relations of production (capitalist ones) as the only truly scientifc ones! Any
deviation of social behavior from the scientifc laws based on the present
social relations imposed by capital would be seen as aberrant and erroneous
(hence the title to Machs main work Knowledge and Error)! (The best
epistemological account of the methodology of the Austrian School remains
Friedrich Hayeks The Counter-Revolution of Science.)
Seen from the standpoint of the German Historical School, the practical outcome
of its theoretical and methodological position would be absolutely identical, in
the sense that its exclusive focus on historical research (Dilthey), on the close
concentration on individual events (Geschehen) in Thucydidean fashion
(Marx satirises Thukydides-Roscher in chapter 9 of Kapital, Volume 1) would
be concerned with identifying current practices that could be put to practical
efective use on the part of German industry! The practical industrial activities
and membership of the leaders of the School chief among them, Gustav
Schmoller himself with his infuential Verein fur Sozialpolitik testify to this
supporting role of the German Historical School in the sociological service of
German industry. Here it is the interestedness of the Historismus of the
German School that converges with the apparent Machian dis-interestedness
of the Austrian School which, in efect, amounts to the afrmation of the status
quo and indeed to its elevation to epistemological and ontological status!
It is most important to note at this juncture that the Austrian and German
Schools, however heated their controversy over the methodology of the
social sciences in the Methodenstreit, constituted powerful forces in the
concerted efort by capitalist bourgeois interests across Europe to counter the
emergence of socialist parties and their ideologies in the name of an overall
methodological subjectivism that displaced the entire focus of Political
Economy from Labour to individual Utility and therefore from the dramatic
transformation and concentration of the labour process (Taylorism and Fordism),
of the composition of the working class (from the skilled [Gelernte] to the mass
worker), and that of capital (the rise of large cartels and corporations vertically
and horizontally integrated) in what has been generally described as the Second
Industrial Revolution (see Alfred Chandler Jnrs The Visible Hand), to a vision of
the liberal free and competitive market that championed the Planlosigkeit
(spontaneous plan-lessness, anarchical freedom) of bourgeois civil society
(Fergusons and Hegels burgerliche Gesellschaft) against the regimentation of the
planned, organized economy advanced by the Sozialismus. It is the
abandonment of all metaphysical illusions the better to conceal the greater
illusion of marginal utility - that will allow the conceptual fusion by the
German ruling elites in the period to World War Two and beyond of the German
Historical Schools focus on individual, specifc interventionist projects of German
industrial domination in Europe, on one hand, and of the Austrian Schools
elevation of individual consumer choices in the liberalist free market
mechanism on the other. (Not for nothing the Austrians were dubbed in
Germany Manchester mercantilists! [cf. Schumpeters last chapter in Economic
Doctrines.]) In this context, Nietzsches own philosophical Entwurf, together with
the spread of Machism in science that subtended both the Austrian (Menger,
Bohm-Bawerk, Mises and Schumpeter, then Hayek) and the Lausanne (Walras
and Pareto) Schools, must be seen as one co-ordinated and massive intellectual
counter-attack by capital against the emergent working class whose political
expression will culminate with the overarching intellectual vision of Max Weber.
(For an initial outline of these arguments, see M. Cacciaris Sul Problema
dellOrganizzazione in Pensiero Negativo e Razionalizzazione.)
It is a fact beyond doubt that Webers own overriding concern with the political
efectuality of the Parlamentarisierung was never dictated by a genuine concern
for the corresponding Demokratisierung of German politics, but rather by the need
to smoothe and invigorate the political and economic Staatsmacht of the
German capitalist Nationaloekonomie. Webers scornful jibes at the literati and
their romantic fantasies can be retorted with some justice against his own
petty-bourgeois nostalgic lamentations about the steel-hard casing of the
care for external goods, at his ethereal conceptions of a crystallised Spirit of
modern industrial work (to be examined below), and the Ent-seelung (out-
souling, desecration) of political life through the massifcation of political
parties (in Politik als Beruf), and the Ent-zauberung (dis-enchantment) of
human experience through its instrumental rationalization. Above all, as we
will see, it is that central notion of free labor that contains in its denotation of
autonomous market demand guiding and determining the proftability that
is the benchmark of the rational conduct of capitalist business it is this notion
of free labor that hides Webers ultimate allegiance to the Spontaneitat of human
needs and wants intended as the autonomous consumerist market demand
that we discussed earlier and the optimistic liberal understanding of market
competition that is the centerpiece of bourgeois liberalism.
Here Weber jettisons the initial Nietzschean Resolve (the notion of Gewissen or
conscience or responsibility expounded and championed against its opposite
schlechte Gewissen [bad conscience or bad faith, later to mimetise into
Heideggers Un-eigentlichkeit and Sartres mauvaise foi] - by Nietzsche at length in
the Genealogie) that he had espoused and proclaimed in his Inaugural Lecture at
Freiburg in the attempt to bridge the divide between the revolutionary and
technocratic appeal of Austrian Machian empiricism, which sanctions the validity
of scientifc methods in the study of social life, and the staid conservatism of
German Historical School historicism that seeks to preserve the aura of
subjectivity, of Hegelian Ver-geist-igung (embodiment of spirit, or divine
emanation), for human existence. (The most explicit elaboration of this
methodological individualism is in Friedrich Hayeks The Counter-revolution of
Science and in Schumpeters Economic Doctrine and Method.)
It is the machinery of the congealed spirit, whether lifeless (the care for
external goods, the wants and needs embodied in the labor process), or living
(rational bureaucratic rule) that Weber seeks to balance (the opposition he
vehemently emphasizes) with the Dezisionismus, the responsibility (Gewiss,
Verantwortung categories expounded by Nietzsche in his mature works), of the
leitender Geist. Even as late as 1918, Weber can still believe in the value-
neutrality of his parliamentary framework. But as we shall see, already in 1919
political developments inside Germany had shaken the self-assuredness of his
social-scientifc analysis and proposals. Two short years after his death, in 1922,
Carl Schmitt will publish his Politische Theologie in a direct challenge to Webers
philosophical and scientifc assumptions surrounding the Verfassungsfrage of the
Weimar Republic, and in 1927, Heideggers Sein und Zeit will serve as the epitaph
to Wilhelmine Zivilisation and to the Kultur of Weimar. The Nazi Catastrophe
was just around the corner, presaging the imminent obscuring of the world.
(The phrase obscurcissement du monde is taken from the French translation of
Heideggers lectures delivered in Paris in 1935, published originally as
Einfuhrung in die Metaphysik.)
********************
What in fact happens in factories is that the daily working lives of men are
determined by the congealed spirit of the lifeless machine. The means of
production are the lifeless machine: as such, they cannot have a will of their
own. Nevertheless, their function, shape and form - their technological
attributes are determined by the material needs and wants of the men who
in their operari, in the objectifcation of their needs and wants must utilize the
lifeless machine that therefore only appears to have the power to force them to
serve it, but in reality possesses this power only (!) because it is the resultant
objectifcation operated by the living machine of rational and systematic
bureaucratic rule of private capitalists or state administration - of their conficting
, opposed and irreconcilable self-interests as these are fltered scientifcally and
optimized, for the present and for the foreseeable future, by the market
mechanism! Only in this sense can a lifeless machine become a congealed
spirit or a crystallised spirit [geronnener Geist] (also translated as objectifed
mind by Gerth and Mills in From Max Weber).
Weber borrows this expression from Marx [Kapital] and Simmel [Philosophische
Kultur], but infuses it with Nietzschean meaning. Marx had intended (in The
German Ideology and in the Grundrisse, for instance) that machines embody the
social relations of production of a particular society; but in Weber machines
objectify the need-necessity of human instincts in confict with one another.
Whereas in Marx technology re-produces (refects and preserves) the existing
power relations between producers in a process that can be resolved or be super-
seded dialectically through the growing socialization (again, Simmels
notion, understood philosophisch here by Weber) of human needs and the
spreading inter-dependence of social labour, for Weber instead this
socialisation refects only the rationally calculable and efcient provision for
the antagonistic needs of workers and capitalists both within and across the class
divide.
In Marx the means of production embody the political command of the capitalist
who seeks to divide the ineluctable interdependent interaction the inter
esse of social labor into the false homogeneity of individual labors
remunerated in accordance with an extrinsic quantitative metre (dead
objectifed labor) in the form of the wage. The capitalist exploits politically the
ineluctable sociality of the labor process in the attempt to reproduce its
artifcial separation both from the means of production and from labor
interaction. The mystique of capitalism is the legitimation of this act of violence
the reduction of living labor to mere abstraction both collectively from the
means of production and individually from the sociality of human labor. For
Marx therefore the congealment, the crystallization of labor-time consists
precisely in the political continuity of this capitalist design, this project of
domination over living labor through dead labor or crystallized labor. For
Marx, in other words, the crystallization of labor-time, the reifcation of
human experience has little to do with mysticism or fetishism but purely
with sheer and abject political violence!
Marxs crystallized labor corresponds to this congealment of living labour into
labor power or labor time (Marx refers specifcally to Arbeits-zeit) or dead
objectifed labor imposed coercively and enforced in the factory by the
authoritarian command of the capitalist over workers in the labor process. The
antagonism of the wage relation over the distribution of surplus value the ratio
between the necessary portion of the working day and its surplus portion
that constitutes the exploitation of workers is mediated by the means of
production that embody or crystallize the socially necessary labor time or
value that went into their original production. The means of production
therefore are not mere lifeless machines but embody or crystallize value
that is extracted by the capitalist in the process of production and that is to be
realized later by means of the sale of goods on the market.
And yet Marxs analysis will converge with Webers once Marx (and the
Weberian Lukacs) try to fnd a scientifc proof of exploitation in the very
possibility of socially quantifying this crystallized labor-time in the concept
of surplus value or theft of labor-time, which is a contradiction in terms as
far as Marxs critique of political economy and of capitalism goes for the
simple reason that reifcation is a political practice that can in no way shape or
form or manner be transmuted into the measurable value content of
produced commodities Marxs socially necessary labor time! Diferently put,
if, as Marx himself avows, it is the market that decides ultimately what labor-
time is socially necessary and what is not, then clearly it is not the production
process (Marxs process of valorization) that determines value, but rather the
process of realization of value through the sale of goods, which is entirely
dependent on the subjective valuations of autonomous or spontaneous
market demand in blatant contradiction of Marxs thesis! And if, conversely,
market demand is itself determined by the amount of value (of crystallized
labor-time) in possession of market agents or purchasers in the form of
monetary media, then these monetary media and the amount of value they
represent must themselves have been determined by the amount of value
already produced in the production process! And here we have the perfect circulus
vitiosus exposed by Bohm-Bawerk!
The thought process by which Marx passes erroneously from the reifcation of
the experience of the labor process by individual workers to its reifcation as
labor time that is quantifable in terms of output per unit of time
(productivity) is usefully illustrated by Lukacs in his exposition of Reifcation
in the Geschichte:
+f we follow the path taken by labour in its development from the handicrafts via
cooperation and manufacture to machine industry we can see a continuous trend
towards greater rationalisation the progressive elimination of the qualitative
human and individual attributes of the worker* Dn the one hand the process of
labour is progressively broken down into abstract rational specialised operations
so that the worker loses contact with the fnished product and his work is reduced
to the mechanical repetition of a specialised set of actions* Dn the other hand
the period of time necessary for work to be accomplished "which forms the basis
of rational calculation& is converted as mechanisation and rationalisation are
intensifed from a merely empirical average fgure to an ob.ectively calculable
work-stint that confronts the worker as a fxed and established reality* Lith the
modern 'psychological' analysis of the work-process "in ,aylorism& this rational
mechanisation extends right into the worker's soul?
,hus time sheds its qualitative variable Jowing natureN it freeAes into an exactly
delimited quantifable continuum flled with quantifable 'things' "the reifed
mechanically ob.ectifed 'performance' of the worker wholly separated from his
total human personality3 in short it becomes space* "(uO pp*2%-%>&
It is entirely evident here what atrocious non sequitur Lukacs has committed!
Simply because time [Lukacs should say the workers experience of time] sheds
its qualitativenature under the capitalist command of the regular discipline
of the factory for workers, this does not even remotely mean that therefore
timefreezes into an exactly delimited, quantifable continuum flled with
quantifable things[whereby] it becomes space! It does not and cannot do so!
Time remains time! And the material products of living labor do not thereby
become quantifable things in terms of value! No matter how much a
capitalist may oppress a worker, time does not freeze, it does not congeal or
crystallize! Nor does it become space! Yet this is precisely the mistake that Marx
himself makes in his conceptualisation of value as socially necessary labor-
time, as crystallized labor-time. Lukacs quotes directly from Marxs Kapital:
,hrough the subordination of man to the machine the situation arises in which
men are e9aced by their labourN in which the pendulum of the clock has becomes
as accurate a measure of the relative activity of two workers as it is of the speed
of two locomotives* ,herefore we should not say that one man's hour is worth
another man's hour but rather that one man during an hour is worth .ust as
much as another man during an hour* ,ime is everything man is nothingN he is at
the most the incarnation of time* Puality no longer matters* Puantity alone
decides everything3 hour for hour day for day ****
Marx needed this notion of crystallized labor-time to serve a dual purpose: -
frst, to enable him to claim that he had successfully quantifed value and
therefore to establish his labor theory of value on a scientifc footing; but,
second, he needed it also to be able to retain the political and social
foundations of capitalist social relations of production as historical phenomena
that were not immutable (sub specie aeternitatis) but subject to human action. The
seeming oxymoron of historical materialism encapsulates this constant search
by Marx for a way to reconcile science and politics or history. Given that this is
equivalent to squaring a circle, it is not surprising that Marx failed in the
attempt.
Marx was certainly sufciently intelligent and competent in economic theory to
realize that the quantity of things produced in the capitalist process of
production has nothing to do with the value of that production which is
determined instead by the extent to which that production is done by employing
socially necessary labor-time. (Contrast this with how Lukacs instead is clearly
all at sea when dealing with matters that are not immediately philosophical as
is evinced by the remarkable diference between the clearly incompetent
discussions in Reifcation of economic matters [especially Marginal Utility
Theory] as against the sure mastery of his philosophical critique in the section on
The Antinomies of Bourgeois Thought.) Nor can it be doubted seriously that
Marx was aware of the impossibility of reducing objectively, physically,
heterogeneous labor to a homogeneous substance: indeed, he counted this, the
discovery of the Doppelcharakter of the commodity labor power (its being at
once living labor that valorizes capital and labor power that is exchanged on
the market), as perhaps his greatest achievement.
It is just as certain, as Colletti has noted, that for Marx value was a social
hieroglyph that, like God or the soul, has no material existence and yet is
objective in that it conditions and guides human action. But, and here is the
crux, this theory of value is inconsistent with the notion of market competition.
One of two things: - either market competition is regarded by Marx as an
autonomous and spontaneous sphere of activity not enforced politically by one
class against another, in which case it is an aporetic concept because
competition invariably ends up destroying competition (!); or else market
competition is a sphere of activity that is politically enforced, in which case, eo
ipso, there can be no competition as a reality a se stante (that can stand on its own)
and that allows value to be determined independently of politically-enforced rules!
Yet Marx worked precisely on the grim assumption of the Law of Value, that
capitalist society reproduces itself through the operation of the self-regulating
market, especially its pessimistic feature competition (the dira necessitas).
Consequently, he had to persevere with his inconsistent theoretical framework
because to have done otherwise, to have accepted that value is an entirely political
category and that the capitalist economy is operated by concrete and identifable
social institutions would have meant for him to be lowered once again into the
kingdom of shadows, into the shadowy world of the Political, into the
interpretation of capitalism as a set of specifc historical institutions, something
he despised and spurned because he identifed it mistakenly with the
ideological, superstructural public sphere of liberalism founded on the
optimistic features of the market (commutative and distributive justice).
But the fact that Marx retained the pessimistic features of market competition
so as to prove scientifcally his determination of value as socially necessary
labor time meant that essentially he replicated the fallacious notion of a
homogeneous substance called Value that forms the subject-matter of the
Economics both in its Classical and Neoclassical versions! From Smith to Weber,
and including Marx, the Economics refuses to see the capitalist economy as a
network of political institutions but sees it instead as an unplanned, anarchic
mechanism that can reproduce itself, that can be in equilibrium only if its
participants can discipline or police one another in the act of exchanging goods
by virtue of their very egoism, of their self-interest. Competition is construed
therefore as a jumble of conficting and opposing forces, as a system of
conficting needs and wants, tugging in diferent directions, that annul or
balance one another and, by so doing, yield an equi-librium of prices consistent
with the real value of the goods sold on the market. The pessimistic matrix
of this conception of competition, common to both Marx and Weber, is quite
obviously to be found in Hobbess political theory and its scientifc progeny,
Newtonian mechanics. It is nothing other than the Hobbesian scientifc hypothesis
of the state of nature with its war of all against all reproposed in bourgeois
garb as the political convention of the contractual laws of competition that could
legitimize the newly-founded science of Economics and, above all, its Political
homologation in the philosophy of Liberalism of the State of Law or
Rechtsstaat!
(The classic exposition of this ignis fatuus of economic doctrine and ideology is in
Karl Polanyis The Great Transformation. Of course, Marx falls into this scientistic
trap in Das Kapital, but generally not in the Grundrisse which are therefore much
to be preferred as the exposition of Marxs overall theory of capitalism.
Incredibly, in Natural Law and Revolution, now in Theory and Practice,
Habermas argues that it was Marxs fnding of the theft of labor time in the
pure exchange categories of bourgeois law that discredit[ed] so enduringly for
Marxism both the idea of legality and the intention of Natural Law as such that
ever since the link between Natural Law and revolution has been dissolved!
Habermas, who is almost entirely innocent of economic theoretical training,
cannot see that indeed it is that side of Marxs theory and of Socialism that
believes in the fable of the theft of labor time that then must necessarily believe,
vi rerum [by force of things!], in the legitimacy of legal categories that draw
Habermass analysis back into the orbit of Arendts liberalist and jusnaturalist
rendition of the historical reality of revolutions! Habermas manages therewith
to undo the valid critique of Arendts On Revolution that he had expounded in his
essay Die Geschichte von den zwei Revolutionen. See also Part Four discussion of
these themes.)
Given the necessary failure of this critique of capitalism to prove in
quantitative terms in terms of value as a quantity, of surplus value as
theft of labor time the existence of exploitation, it is evident that Marx and
Lukacs must then turn to the political analysis of capitalist social relations of
production: but here, ironically, because they are forced to move on the same
conceptual grounds as bourgeois political economy, they can ofer no greater
objection to capitalism than the fact that it extends Weberian rationalization to
every aspect of social life even if this is only founded on an illusion!
0ut this implies that the principle of rational mechanisation and calculability
must embrace every aspect of life* -onsumer articles no longer appear as the
products of an organic process within a community "as for example in a village
community&*,hey now appear on the one hand as abstract members of a
species identical by defnition with its other members and on the other hand as
isolated ob.ects the possession or non-possession of which depends on rational
calculations* Dnly when the whole life of society is thus fragmented into the
isolated
acts of commodity exchange can the 'free' worker come into beingN at the same
time
his fate becomes the typical fate of the whole society?* Df course this isolation
and
fragmentation is only apparent? 6owever if this atomisation is only an illusion it
is
a necessary one* "Eukacs )eschichte pp*%#-7&
Neither Marx nor Lukacs understand the powerlessness (Ohnmacht) of a
critique that describes capitalism as a necessary illusion! If an illusion is
necessary, then it cannot be dispelled except by changing the conditions that
make it necessary. But Marx and Lukacs are clearly arguing here that it is the
illusion of commodity fetishism, and not the violence of capitalist command over
living labor, that constitutes the necessity the freezing, congealment, or
crystallization of labor-time into value of capitalist production! This
explains why Lukacs in the Geschichte comes so close to sharing Webers analysis
of capitalism almost word for word! (See pp.95f where Lukacs quotes Weber at
length from Parlament und Regierung, without hint of criticism!)
Lukacss incomprehension of the utterly reactionary pathos of his artisanal
nostalgia the village community! - against specialization is quite breath-
taking. In this regard, Webers contemptuous dismissal of the socialist charge
of separation against capitalist rationalization and mechanization is entirely
understandable and condivisible. Amidst the mystique surrounding this late-
romantic Lukacsian notion of reifcation (which has spawned lamentably an
entire industry of useless philosophes), Lukacs himself does have time to perceive
the necessity of crisis in capitalism. Yet he interprets it uncritically as merely a
moment in which the anarchy of capitalist production leads to the collapse
of the system: it is an echo of the infamous Zusammenbruchstheorie the theory
of fnal collapse that will preoccupy and distract the political strategy of the
Linkskommunismus at the turn of the last century. Lukacs therefore completely
misunderstands the strategic importance of Webers own analysis of the
Rationalisierung in the precise context of drawing up a specifc political project of
trans-formation of bourgeois political institutions around the Verfassungsfrage, the
new Constitution of the Weimar Republic. (And so does Hannah Arendt, whose
On Revolution is a paean to the revolutionary Spontaneitat of the
Linkskommunismus promulgated by the heroine of her youth, Rosa Luxemburg.)
Despite his fallacious belief in a homogeneous entity called labor, Weber
understood, having learned from Schumpeter, what Lukacs totally ignored: the
inevitability of crisis as a decisive moment of the utilization of class confict in
the Entwicklung creative destruction, trans-crescence, growth-through-
crisis of capitalist industry and society. (The etymological nexus between
crisis and critique and decision is drawn in fn. 155 of R. Kosellecks Kritik
und Krisis.)
The chief result of our study of Webers theory of rationalization so far is that it
is not and cannot be scientifc because its unit of measurement relies on the
homogeneity of labor. Weber ignores the fact that living labor is not and cannot
be homogeneous for at least three reasons: the frst is that it is impossible to
divide social labor into individual labors; the second is that the maker of a pro-
duct should never be mistaken with the product itself - nor indeed, as Nietzsche
argued in BGE, with its ownership! And the third reason is that, in any case, even
if individual labor ismeasured in terms of output by means of sheer
violence, as in the capitalist labor process, that output is not homogeneous
across product industries (as even the greatest bourgeois economic theoreticians
concede see Chamberlin and Robinson and Srafa on imperfect competition)
so that it cannot serve as a "measure" on which this output can be "priced" for
market exchange! It is for this reason that both Weber and Marx rely ultimately
on the fction of the self-regulating market (the law of supply and demand) to
determine the exchange value (the prices) of output and to provide the social
synthesis, or the co-ordination necessary for the reproduction of the society
of capital. (Hayeks entire lifework was dedicated to this conundrum of how a
mass of atomized individuals can reproduce a society through the market.
That the paramount and insurmountable problem, the impasse, of the Economics is
precisely the co-ordination of economic activity is also cleverly perceived,
acknowledged and intelligently discussed by Brian Loasby in Equilibrium and
Evolution. Our own discussion of these matters will be the subject of a
forthcoming study called Catallaxy: The Bourgeois Utopia of Equilibrium.)
Marxs inability to determine value and prices independently of the market
mechanism induced him to seek the objectifcation of value in the fetishism
of commodities which served the same purpose as Webers rationalization
that of measuring the social synthesis, which is what Lukacs translated into the
concept of reifcation. Just as with Webers rationalization, the Marxian
concept of commodity fetishism or the Lukacsian equivalent of reifcation
simply cannot account for the social synthesis. Marx and Lukacs understand
that if this social synthesis is objectively valid if, in other words, it is possible
to measure value independently of political institutions, of violence -, then
capitalism would be made scientifcally legitimate and the only objection to
it would rest with its efciency as a mode of production of social wealth. If, on
the contrary, this social synthesis is achieved through a necessary illusion
(fetishism of commodities, reifcation, formalism), then we have a contradiction
because no illusion, let alone a necessary fction, which is an oxymoron! -
can keep a social system in reproduction! (We dealt before with Lukacss
description of necessary illusion which is an oxymoron because illusions
cannot be necessary and necessity cannot be illusory.)
Lukacs perceives this problem when he asserts, albeit still from the viewpoint of
the opposition of fragmented alienated labor against the (lost!) totality of
artisanal labor, that the limit to reifcation is its formalism (in HCC, p.101).
Habermas understands Lukacss statement to mean that workers are aware that
the reifcation of labor time is an illusion, however necessary it may be
objectively and that therefore the bourgeoisie cannot be the individual
subject-object of history. As if history required anything like individual
subject-objects for exploitation to occur! (Nietzsche would have a ft if he ever
read Lukacs!) Quite obviously, Lukacss analysis does not deal with the problem
because, as Habermas rightly notes, this formalism can be overcome only
philosophically through class consciousness, which entails opposing one
illusion with another, because it is hard to see how the necessary illusion of
reifcation could ever become un-necessary! (The old Frankfurt School realized
this, only to preserve the idolatry of [Instrumental] Reason). [See Habermas,
Theory of Communicative Action, Vol.1.]
The only way to lend validity to Lukacss position is to refect that the
formalism of reifcation, of the mythical law of value, will defeat capitalism for
the precise reason that what makes it possible is a reality of antagonism, of
capitalist command over living labor that ensures the abstraction of living
labor. In other words, there is no real or necessary illusion behind reifcation
but the naked blunt violence of the capitalist the discipline of the factory. This
is why formalism is the limit of capitalism: - because rationalization is not an
objective (Weber) or merely ideological (Marx-Lukacs, then Heidegger-
Marcuse) phenomenon, but rather (with Nietzsches invariance, the unreality
of values) an arbitrary one that responds to a strategy of command and
exploitation.
Lukacs does in fact, at the page reference cited by Habermas, seem to indicate
formalism as the internal limit of the wage relation in terms of the fact that
the market mechanism metamorphoses living labor into a thing but only
formally, only abstractly not in reality or necessarily and must
therefore succumb to the reality of class antagonism! It is true that both Marx
and Lukacs ultimately fall into this vicious circle of market competition leading
to abstract labor and then to value as a necessary illusion an operation
that is impossible because competition cannot automatically turn living
experience into a thing. Habermas, however, completely fails to see that this is
the real political problem and engages instead in a critique of Lukacs on the ground
that the reality of reifcation (which Lukacs has rendered identical with
Weberian rationalization because of his erroneous acceptance of market
competition) cannot be dispelled by a mythical class consciousness! By so
doing, Habermas demonstrates how little he has understood where the actual
problem with the wage relation and with Lukacss concept of reifcation (and
Marxs fetishism) really lies: - that is to say, in the impossibility of reifcation
or fetishism as a necessary illusion! Certainly not in Lukacss residual
Hegelian idealistic objectivism!
The oxymoron of necessary illusion to describe the fetishism of the
commodity and reifcation is the mirror-image of the Marxian notion of
historical materialism: on one side the phenomenon of value is an illusion,
that is, it is a subjective product of human history, whilst on the other side it is
necessary because it exemplifes the objective and material economic laws of
motion of society. Because Habermas accepts the scientifc basis of historial
materialism based on the mistaken distinction he draws between instrumental
action and interaction or refection, he can then accept this oxymoron as
indicating the historical necessity of the commodity form at a given stage of
the natural history of society! Here is the proof in his own words:
5arx did not adopt an epistemological perspective in developing his conception
of the history of the species as something that has to be comprehended
materialistically* <evertheless if social practice does not only accumulate the
successes of instrumental action but also through class antagonism produces
and reJects on ob4ective illusion then as part of this process the analysis of
history is possible only in a phenomenologically mediated "gebrochen& mode of
thought* ,he science of man itself is critique and must remain so* "OQ6+ ch*;
p*$7&
What this reveals, of course, is the ingrained transcendental objectivism
derived mainly from Neo-Kantian sources, chiefy Simmels social forms that
aficts Habermass own analytical framework! Here is Habermas again:
,o the degree that the commodity form becomes the form of ob4ectivity
and rules the relations of individuals to one another as well as their dealings with
external nature and with internal sub.ective nature the lifeworld has to become
reifed and individuals degraded R as Ssystems theoryT foresees R into an
SenvironmentT for a society that has become external to them that has
consolidated for them into an opaque system that has been abstracted from
them and become independent of them* Eukacs shares this perspective with
Leber as with 6orkheimerN but he is convinced that this development not only
can be stopped practically but for reasons that can be theoretically
demonstrated has to run up against internal limits3 S,his rationaliAation of the
world appears to be complete it seems to penetrate to the very depths of mans
physical and psychic natureN but it fnds its limit in the formal character of its own
rationalityT* '6-- p*#>#)
,he burden of proof that 5arx wanted to discharge in politico-economic terms
with a theory of crisis now falls upon a demonstration of the immanent limits to
rationaliAation a demonstration that has to be carried out in philosophical
termsT "6abermas ,-A Uol# p*;$#&*
Again, Habermas is wrong because the context in which Lukacs discusses this
limit to rationalization is precisely that of Marxs theory of capitalist crisis
induced both by antagonism in the labor process and by inter-capitalist
competition in the market! As a matter of fact, on p.102, very shortly after the
passage cited by Habermas, Lukacs goes on to cite Marx on this very point!
Fivision of labor within the workshop implies the undisputed authority of the
capitalist over men who are but parts of a mechanism that belongs to him* ,he
division of labor within society brings into contact independent commodity
producers who acknowledge no other authority than that of competition of the
coercion e*erted by the pressure of their mutual interestsT "5arx -apital +++
quoted in Eukacs 6-- p*#>7*&
Of course, neither Marx nor Lukacs will ever succeed in showing how the
market mechanism can function, how competition between capitalists can
ever provide the social synthesis for the reproduction of capitalist society in any
form whatsoever, least of all that of value! For this reason, they rely on the
notions of fetishism and reifcation, respectively, to provide the foundation
for that comprehensive irrationality constituted by the capitalist wage relation
which is why Lukacs can then fall prey to and swallow wholesale the formal
rationality of a Weber, albeit to denounce its formal limits! It is much simpler
for us, instead, to attribute the social synthesis of the society of capital to the
sheer violence of the wage relation, imposed through a network of capitalist
political and social institutions all of which answer ultimately to the stability of
money-wages and the price and monetary system. But this does not mean that
Habermas has identifed this real apory in Marxs and Lukacss theories the
aporetic notion of labor value as the foundation of the social synthesis of
capitalist reproduction through market competition! And this failure, we argue,
is a direct result of Habermass persistent wrong focus on the philosophical,
idealistic and Neo-Kantian theorization of the whole quaestio of reason and
rationalization as a discrepancy (Missverhaltnis) between laws of nature or
epistemology and laws of society or social theory, rather than on the political
antagonism of the wage relation!
Habermas is entirely right to chide Lukacss idealistic reconciliation of theory
and practice in the class consciousness of the individual subject-object of
history, namely the proletariat (p.364). But he completely misses the point that the
contra-diction in capitalist social relations is not predominantly one that
concerns communicative action or competence! Instead, it is one that is
intrinsic to the politics of the wage relation itself! Perhaps the worst that can be
said of Habermass meta-critique of Marx and Lukacs is that his own notion of
communicative action remains trapped in the voluntarism of consciousness,
of morality and aestheticism:
+t is characteristic of the pattern of rationaliAation in capitalist societies that the
complex of cognitive-instrumental rationality establishes itself at the cost of
practical rationalityN communicative relations are reifed* ,hus it makes sense to
ask whether the critique of the incomplete character of the rationaliAation that
appears as reifcation does not suggest taking a complementary relation between
cognitive-instrumental rationality on the one hand and moral-practical and
aesthetic-practical rationality on the other as a standard that is inherent in the
unabridged concept of practice that is to say in communicative 'p*;$K) action
itselfT ",-A Uol*# pp*;$;-K&*
It must be stressed that capitalism in its guise as social capital becomes as
much a mode of consumption as it is a mode of production. This is intuited
by Weber and then theorized by Keynes in terms of the money-wage as the
fundamental unit of measurement in capitalist industry. Capital must impose not
just its mode of production through the labor process and technologies used in
the production process; it must also impose and defne the mode of
consumption for workers so that their living labor may be rationally
calculable according to the law of value and the equalization of the rate of
proft! But careful! The mode of consumption closes the circle of the circulation
of capital, of valorization, - which does not mean that the foundation of
capitalism is not the wage relation, that is, the process of production frst and
foremost, the regular discipline of the factory. Consumption simply allows that
osmosis that makes antagonism measurable after the event, as realization of
what had preceded as valorization of capital, as proft and provides that
sphere of autonomy to workers (Webers free labor) through the market
and the welfare state or Sozialstaat that supplies the unit of measurement, the
money-wage acting as a social wage that ensures the reproduction of the
wage relation.
This solves the conundrum of the afuent society, the seeming integration of
workers in the society of capital that Habermas correctly identifes as the
overriding theoretical concern of Western Marxism since Lukacs. This is the
apparent paradox (apparent even to Tocqueville [Democratie en Amerique, Livre IV,
chpts. 6 to 10] and Arendt [discussion in Negri, Insurgencies, ch on
Pol.Eman.inAm.Const., who does not see the point] to Marcuse and Baran and
Sweezy) of the apathy of workers in the face of material (consumption)
afuence the welfare state or Sozialstaat fully implemented under the New
Deal. Those who accept un-critically the notion of integration (see especially
Marcuses One-Dimensional Man or even the cultural pages in Baran and
Sweezys Monopoly Capital) have efectively forgotten Schumpeters great
discovery (adopted wholesale from Marx) that capitalism is crisis, that it is
based on antagonism. Crisis does not just mean a dysfunction in the
production of value or proft, as if these were quantities rather than social
relations that need special political intervention (regulation) to avoid crises.
Crisis is not something that happens occasionally or accidentally or
exogenously or by mistake because of failure to apply the correct economic
measures or policies. Crisis is instead the perennial, fundamental impossibility of
measuring social antagonism in monetary terms, which is due to the
incongruence between production and consumption derived from the
corresponding impossibility of making value in production equal value in
consumption. The problem is not that there is not enough proft
(overproduction) or not enough demand (underconsumption): the problem is
that proft and value can no longer be measured monetarily whenever the
political equilibria (the only equilibria that are possible) explode in a full-
blown crisis. (See below, quote from p.312.) That is why Joan Robinson, with
characteristic genial intuition, preferred to speak of tranquility rather than
equilibrium as a category of economic analysis (in The Accumulation of Capital).
The apathy and integration of workers is a direct result of the division of
social labor into individual labors remunerated or rewarded with individual
money-wages and the corresponding concentration of monetary social
resources in the central government which then uses the existing structure of
government administration to impose its constituted power. This is achieved
through various strategies that include various degrees of political violence,
from physical all the way to cultural and propagandistic violence. Thus, the
Sozialisierung that Weber considered to be a result of rationalization simply
cannot be explained unless we penetrate and enucleate explode this notion by
removing it from the feld of science and by re-interpreting the entire notion of
mathesis, of Kalkulation, of proft. Webers account (for it cannot be called a
theory) of the Rationalisierung yields, as we have seen, a notion of freedom
that is confned to rational-technical instruments connecting available means to
proposed ends that far from being scientifcally indicated by axiomatic
disciplines based on ideal types, fail to specify the conditions under which the
means are available and the ends are proposed. Ultimately, Weber has to
postulate the purposive rationality of human free will that arises not from its
idealistic universality (as in German Idealism and in jusnaturalism) but rather
from the very confict, as the resultant of the clash of wills that he (like
Nietzsche) sees as a universal condition.
**********
We saw in the Nietzschebuch how Nietzsche unleashes in the Goetzes-Dammerung a
pitiless tirade against the dialecticians Socrates and Plato who are guilty in his
eyes of seeking to suppress the self-interested speculation of the Sophists
against their championing of the purity of the philosophers quest for the dis-
interested and dis-passionate Truth. In the earliest clear statement of his own
novel quest for a thoroughgoing critique (Nietzsche saw himself as a fearless
critic) of the Will to Truth, Nietzsche describes in Uber den Wahrheit und Luge
how human beings abandon the Hobbesian bellum omnium of the state of nature
to form the status civilis and by so doing are prompted by con-venience by the
social con-ventum or social contract to enter into, precisely, con-ventions that
by their very symbolic conventionality in fact exclude the physio-logical
reality of individual needs by equalizing the unequal, by comparing the
incomparable. The Will to Truth consists just in this crystallization of human
reality into symbols such as language, logic and mathematics that
consequently come to replace and mask the intuitive reality of the
individuals representation (Vorstellung, also dissimulation) of his own
self-interest in the original state of nature. The merit of the Sophists for
Nietzsche is that their rhetorical pursuit of self-interest is a more genuine
expression of human reality than the pretended dis-interested dialectical
philosophical eforts of Socrates and his disciples. The Sophists know that the
Truth is a mere perspective and that what matters are the interests of
human beings of the body. Socrates and Plato instead absurdly believe in
the real world and thereby render it into a fable, into another world so per-
fect as to be unreal and unattainable the empyrean of Platonic Ideas. It is the
crystallization of human reality through the ontogeny of thought or the
perspective of the herd, the dictatorship of self-consciousness that Nietzsche
combats vigorously. Between poiesis and techne, Nietzsche prefers the
sensuousness, the immanence of the latter.
Ernst Mach begins his magnum opus, Erkenntnis und Irrtum, by emphasizing
exactly this distinction between the dis-interested pursuit of truth by the
scientist and the more mercenary eforts of the artisan interested only in
short-term and opportunistic material gains. This distinction or dichotomy
between the true pursuit or the pursuit of truth on the part of the
philosopher for the being of beings or ontology the Aristotelian prima
philosophia - as against the interested eforts of the Sophists for the utility of
beings, for applied philosophy, for mere practical science, is what
Heidegger condemns in the very opening pages of his imposing Metaphysical
Foundations of Logic:
,he philosopher has '#;)
taken upon himself the seriousness of the concept of fundamental
questioning* /verything routine everyday average "fallenness& is
the opposite of this endeavor* ,he sophist on the contrary as rationaliAer
and know-it-all appoints himself to work on human beings
persuades them they must worry about one another's
spiritual needs* "pp*#7-;&
?*
+n the direction of this basic problem the decisive determination
of human Fasein lies in the insight that that which we call the
understanding+of+being belongs to Fasein's ontological constitution*
6uman Fasein is a being with a kind of being to which it
belongs essentially to understand something like being* Le call
this the transcendence of Fasein primal transcendence "see the
second ma.or part of the lecture course&* +t is on the basis of transcendence
that Fasein comports itself to beings is always already
thrown onto beings as a whole* "p*#$&
?*
,his fundamental philosophical question about man remains
prior to every psychology anthropology and characterology but
also prior to all ethics and sociology* ,he fact that the aforementioned
appear wherever this question is more or less explicitly
alive and are even taken for essential in its stead only demonstrates
one thing3 that this question and with it the basic problem
of philosophy is not and never does become easily accessible* Mor
this reason also it is constantly threatened by sophistry* Lhat is
easier than in a comfortable and interesting way to interest a
human being in human beings to enumerate for him his complexes
potentials standpoints one-sidedness and failings and to
say this is philosophy! +t is crucial that the human being in this
sophistical sense become completely irrelevant in the rightly understood
fundamental philosophical question about man* Hhilosophy
never VbusiesV itself with man in this hustling sense in which
man can never take himself to be important enough* "p*#=&
?*
,hus also the result of a philosophical e9ort has a character fundamentally
di9erent from the acquisition of particular sciences* ,o
be sure philosophiAing-and it especially-must always proceed
through a rigorous conceptual knowledge and must remain in the
medium of that knowledge but this knowledge is grasped in its
genuine content only when in such knowledge the whole of existence
is seiAed by the root after which philosophy searches-in
and by freedom* "p*#2&
If we combine these seemingly opposing perspectives on the relationship
between knowledge and human interest, we will see that in all cases, from
Hobbes to Nietzsche and through to Mach and Heidegger, the essential feature of
the negatives Denken (negative thought) is the utter denial of any inter esse in
human being. From Nietzsches immanentist opposition to crystallized or
congealed [the term he uses is Starr-Werden, becoming fxed, translated as
crystallized] human con-ventions that dissimulate the antagonism of the
Hobbesian feral state of nature (cf. his 1873 piece, Uber Wahrheit und Luge), to the
Machian dis-interest in the applications of scientifc experimentation, to the
Heideggerian transcendental destitution of the concrete ontic existence of
man in all these cases we encounter the unbridgeable separation
(Trennung) of human beings from their being human, from the concrete
historical and material circum-stances and con-ditions of their species-
conscious or phylogenetic being (Marxs Gattungs-wesen).
(Hannah Arendt, in On Revolution and in The Human Condition, brilliantly
captures this Roman notion of homo, the bare human being of the status naturae,
as opposed to the juridical status of the persona [a theme developed later by
Giorgio Agamben in Homo Sacer]. But Arendt completely misses this entire
complex Hobbesian socio-theoretical framework of status naturae as the
necessary scientifc hypothesis [indeed, Euclidean! cf. Hobbess own Elements of
Philosophy] from which the free political con-vention of the status civilis can be
ana-lysed. In the process, she neglects Marxs own entire fundamental discussion
of the Gattungswesen, already in Kapital [and unbeknownst to her, the critical
discussions on technological development in the Fragment on Machinery of
the Grundrisse] which is light years more advanced than Socratess literally
archaic disquisitions on the soul to which she gives great priority! These
matters we will discuss at length when we examine specifcally Webers political
sociology in Part Four.)
Even Webers distinction between the Kalkulation of sober bourgeois capitalism
and the opportunistic nature of its historical predecessors is based on this
notion of the purity, of the spontaneity of modern capitalism in its
unfinching application of the Rationalisierung to the organization of free labor
under the regular discipline of the factory. For Weber, the Trennung, the
separation of human beings from the pro-duction or objectifcation of their
own existence is both the sine qua non of modern industrial work in the sense
that it constitutes the crystallized spirit of the care for external goods now
embodied by the lifeless machine and the nec plus ultra of capitalist industry
in the sense that only because of this separation and the confict that it
engenders between all economic agents is the full rationalization of production
on the part of the living machine of capitalist bureaucratic rule made possible.
Essentially, and quite instructively for us, Weber duplicates for his own theory of
capitalism the conditions of the state of nature, the war of all against all, that
Hobbes had hypothesized so as to be able to establish scientifcally the need for a
convention by human beings to erect a State-machine that would represent
rationally (!) their otherwise ir-reconcilable self-interests! It is the feral confict
of the war of all against all the Weberian care for external goods, the
hypothesized confict of the iron cage that allows the crystallization the
convention! of the spirit that is represented jointly by the lifeless machine
(the technology adopted to maximize rationally the provision for the care for
external goods) and the living machine, that is, the actual living Spirit
(Heideggers expression in his doctoral thesis on Duns Scotus) needed to guide
and govern the lifeless machine and the free labor that operates it.
Together, the lifeless machine and the living machine merely utilize
rationally the antagonism of self-interests: - this is not a re-conciliation but a
decision in extremis, ob metum mortis a decision at once free and unfree, an
ultima ratio, a reason made rational by its being ultimate. And here, as in
Hobbes and in Schumpeter, the problem poses itself of how the State-machine
can efectually re-present and then govern the self-interests of free labor involved
in the rational operation of the machine. What legitimacy can such a Regierung
have, and how can its legality take institutional, parliamentary form? The next
stage of the critical debate will involve the illiberal Hobbesian Carl Schmitt and
the liberal Kelsenian Weber.
************
Weber does the exact opposite of Marx and ends up therefore with the same
vicious circle! For Weber the machine is what allows the conficting wants and
needs of workers in their free status to converge in the purely instrumental
aim (the Zweck-rationalitat) to maximize the provision for and satisfaction of
these needs and wants! Far from dividing workers through capitalist
command, machinery actually concentrates free labor under the rational
bureaucratic rule and the regular discipline of the machine, of the
factory! It is this machine or factory that allows the congealed spirit of
irremediably, irreconcilably selfsh interests to be amalgamated or
associated (the Kantian ungeselle Geselligkeit, unsociable sociability) for the
sake of maximizing the autonomous or spontaneous market demand of (free)
labor! For Weber therefore this labor is naturaliter un-sociable, naturally un-
defned and pure potentiality sheer force (Kraft) or power (Macht) that
can be applied rationally as a physical quantity in the process of production.
Because this labor is naturally separate and its wants and needs
confictual, it is simply impossible for there to be any separation of something
that was never united! The only union, the only osmosis, the only
homologation of conficting self-interests and individual choices, of subjective
marginal utilities the only social synthesis is through the market and its
competitive measurement of the Value of all consumer goods and of labor itself
through the marginal utilities, the inscrutable (metaphysical!) individual
choices of each separate in-dividual!
We should note here how the German Historical School and other early
opponents of Neoclassical Theory objected to it on the ground that utility is a
homogeneous entity whereas in fact the motivations behind economic
action are quite evidently heterogeneous. The error that the Economics
commits (we call it "the Economics" rather than "economics" to emphasize that
the essence of "economics" is to serve as a strategy of political power) is to
presume that its "subject-matter" (its sub-iectum), its "quidditas" is actually a Sub-
stance, a homogeneous qualitas occulta - and it presumes as much because it starts
from the phenomenology of capitalist social relations of production which are
"co-ordinated and measured" by money. Every economist from Smith to Marx to
Jevons started from the fact that every "thing" that is exchanged in the market has
a "price" and that therefore all "things" on the market must have a homogeneous
"Value" - and that this "Value" must be the "subject-matter" of a "science of
Economics"! The fact that Neoclassical Theory never even bothered to question
this fundamental assumption on the ground that science is not concerned with
ultimate values or metaphysical substances illustrates wonderfully how
instrumental was Machs empiricist understanding of what constitutes science
in the development of marginal utility (see Schumpeters dismissive one-sided
account of these apories in the last chapter of his Economic Doctrines). One of the
constant objections to capitalist enterprise is precisely this that it reduces all
aspects of human social interaction to the homogeneous pursuit of proft.
Clearly, however, what these critics fail to do is to confront the central question
that we are addressing here that is, how such a reduction of the heterogeneity
of human activity to homogeneous and rationally calculable enterprise or
proft is at all possible! (We are performing perhaps a task similar to Kants
critique inquiring about how synthetic a priori judgements are possible, or
indeed, to adapt Nietzsches sardonic twist when he asked why are a priori
judgements necessary?, we should also ask: why are these categories necessary
for a capitalist strategy of command?!)
Here again Weber makes the colossal Neo-Kantian mistake of assuming that
there is a specifc form of human knowledge or action that is singularly
economic just as he conceded to Kelsen that there is a specifc dimension of
human enquiry and social activity that is legal! Weber simply mistakes what
are mere and highly contingent institutions of human groupings the
economy and value, the law, the State and power for hypostatic and
ineluctable forms of human knowledge that a social scientist or observer can
analyze in their epistemological specifcity and autonomy from other
disciplines and then apply scientifcally to specifc historical realities! The fact
that a great mind such as Webers never even posed itself the question as to how
and why utility could be adduced as the ectoplasm, the metaphysical
quidditas that could constitute the subject-matter of the Economics bears
witness to the ability of the social production of exchange value and its
politically-enforced transmutation into money, then money capital, and then
proft, to mystify human social relations as Marx took pains to emphasize,
though even he succumbed to the temptation of hypostatizing value.
The evident contra-diction for Weber is that it is impossible for any form of
human co-operation to be founded on the assumption of irreconcilable self-
interest, of inscrutable marginal utilities. Weber takes the standpoint of the
Neoclassical theory of Value. The means of production are mere technological
devices, mere labor-saving tools that serve purely to maximize the production
of goods with labor and land as the other technical factors of production.
The dead machine does not re-present or embody for Weber, as it does for
Marx, the attempt by the capitalist to divide or parcelise social labor, the
human phylogenetic common being, coercively into homogeneous individual
labors in competition with one another so as to extract surplus value from living
labor. Not at all! For there is no inter esse in living labor, no sociality, no
inter-action! For Weber, the dead or lifeless machine is congealed spirit
only because it allows individuals to maximize the satisfaction of their needs and
wants which remain at all times in confict with one another and cannot be
reconciled by the labor process which, for him, remains purely instrumental! The
machine with its crystallized spirit (indeed, because of it!) does not and
cannot reconcile the conficting self-interests of workers and capitalists within and
across the class divide: - for it remains a machine whose only spirit is the
crystallization or congealment of the confict inherent to the care for
external goods! The machine serves only to maximize rationally the
productivity of free labor in all its free confictuality and antagonism, in all
its strife. The process of production is not in the least antagonistic! The capitalist
replaces machinery to save labor not to command living labor. Production is
purely technical, which is why it is organized rationally by a living
machine, a bureaucracy (state or private capitalist). It is only in the market
that the confict between self-interests can be and is manifested openly in the
settling of the value of goods through the law of supply and demand. The
confict is not between workers and capitalists and not really in the process of
production whose rationality can be established scientifcally through the
Kalkulation of proftability, but between the self-interests of all economic
agents, between their limitless wants and the scarce provisions.
Lhat characterises our current situation is frstly the fact that the
private sector of the economy in con.unction with private bureaucratic
organisation and hence with the separation of the worker from
the means of operation ((etriebsmitteln' dominates an area that has
never exhibited these two characteristics together on such a scale at
any time in history namely the area of industrial production* @econdly
there is the fact that this process coincides with the introduction
of mechanical production within the factory and thus with a local
concentration of labour on one and the same premises with the fact
that the worker is tied to the machine and with common working
discipline throughout the machine-shop or pit* Above all else it is this
discipline which gives our present-day way of 'separating' the worker
from the means of work (,rbeitsmittel its special quality*
(t was life lived under these conditions this factory discipline, that
gave birth to modern socialism. 8ocialism of the most diverse kinds
has e5isted everywhere% at every period and in every country in the
world. The unique character of modern socialism could grow only
on this soil.
This sub4ection to working discipline is felt so acutely by the production
worker because in contrast to say a slave plantation or
enforced labour on a manorial farm (ronhof!, a modern production
plant functions on the basis of an e5traordinarily severe process of
selection ("uslese!. & modern manufacturer does not employ 4ust any
worker 4ust because he might work for a low wage. 4ather he installs
the man at the machine on piece-wages and says3 'All right now
workW + shall see how much you earn*' +f the man does not prove
himself capable of earning a certain minimum wage he is told3 'we
are sorry but you are not suited to this occupation we cannot use
you* 6e is expelled because the machine is not working to capacity
unless the man operating it knows how to utilise it fully* +t is the
same or similar everywhere* +n contrast to the use of slave labour
in antiquity where the lord was tied to whatever slaves he had "if
one of them died it was a capital loss for him& every modem industrial
frm rests on the principle of selection* -n the other hand this
selection is driven to an e5treme of intensity by competition between
entrepreneurs which ties the individual entrepreneur to certain
ma5imum
wages9 the inevitability (#wangslau$g%eit! of the workers: earnings
corresponds to the inevitability of discipline. "@ocialism in -LH p*72;*&
We can see how ultimately both Marx and Weber reason in identical terms! In
terms, that is, of the rational organization of free labor under the regular
discipline of the factory! It follows therefore that the crystallization of labor-
time (Marx) or of Spirit (the care for external goods or iron cage for Weber)
really and truly boil down to one and the same thing: - the regular discipline of
the factory. But this crystallization, which necessarily involves confict and
antagonism between workers and capitalists for Marx and between all economic
agents for Weber, requires for both theoreticians the flter of the market
mechanism to decide on the distribution of the goods produced in the factory
and on the selection of the workers and on the technologies to be used for
production! And this distribution or selection or market allocation of
resources responds for both Marx and Weber to the rational and systematic
Kalkulation or Rationalisierung made possible by the command over free labor
on the part of capitalists in the factory for the pursuit of proft!
The decisive impetus toward capitalism could come only from one
source namely
a mass market demand which again could arise only in a small proportion of
the luxury industries through the democrati;ation of the demand especially
along
the lines of production of substitutes for the luxury goods of the upper classes
")eneral $conomic -istory p*;#>&*
This is the ultimate meaning and signifcance of the Demokratisierung! The
rationalization operated by capitalist industry has engendered also as part of
the same process the emergence of rational Socialism! In other words, as we will
see in Part Two, for Weber the central problem of capitalism is the Problematik of
rational Socialism that is to say, Socialism not just as a problem external and
opposed to capitalism, but rather Socialism as a specifc set of problems intrinsic
to capitalist industry and society! Indeed, for both Marx (disapprovingly) and
Weber (approvingly) we have a democratic market society and an authoritarian
factory! How or whether to reconcile the two will be the greatest social problem of
the century leading up to our present.
Marxs living labor becomes violently alienated by capitalists through its
separation from its interaction, its Gattungswesen, and from the means of
production (Trennung) and ends up in the fetishism of commodities or
reifcation of living labor as crystallized labor time, as a homogeneous
quantity that can be divided and remunerated through the payment of
wages to individual workers commensurate with or equivalent to the labor-
time that is socially necessary for their reproduction. Of course, Marx
famously added to his defnition of what is socially necessary for the
reproduction of workers a social and cultural component. But this is simply
pathetic: - because it does not address the issue of what makes labor-time
socially necessary in the frst place, apart from capitalist coercion. It is this
crystallization of labor time that, according to Marx, allows the rationally
calculable allocation of social resources in market capitalism. As we have
shown, however, this rational allocation or Rationalisierung according to the
Law of Value or of the Equalisation of Proft is simply not possible because
living labor is inconsistent with its quantifcation or the crystallization of
labor time: it is an impossible trans-substantiation of realities that are toto
genere heterogeneous and utterly incommensurable.
Yet Marxs critique converges with Webers notion of the Rationalisierung, of the
organization of free labor under the regular discipline of the factory that is
dictated by the search for proftability on the part of capitalists who are
themselves constrained by the autonomous or spontaneous market demand
motivated by human needs or species-conscious being (Marx) or the iron
cage or stahl-hartes Gehause of self-interested individuals (Weber). Both Marx
and Weber think in terms of the regular discipline of formally free workers in the
factory in combination with the determination of Value through the social
osmosis or social synthesis of the market mechanism through the Law of Value
and the Equalisation of Proft. But whereas Marx insists on the determination of
value in the process of production through exploitation or the theft of labor
time by capitalists, Weber adheres to Neoclassical Theory in seeing the process
of production as part and parcel of the rational organization of free labor for
the sake of profts that arise from autonomous market demand based on the
ubiquitous confict between individual wants (the iron cage) over scarce
provisions.
We will discuss in Part Two whether it is possible to unify these approaches that
we may describe as theories of the mode of production in Marx, and of the
mode of consumption in Weber. Both approaches are circuitous (circuli
vitiosi) and metaphysical because they seek to quantify through the Law of
Value and the Equalisation of Proft what are unquantifable aspects of being
human: - living labor for Marx and individual utility for Weber. What Marx
sees as the violent exploitation of workers, the alienation of their living labor
on the part of capitalists in the process of production and the consequent
fetishism and reifcation of social reality, Weber sees as the Ent-zauberung of human
experience occasioned by the Rationalisierung of social life due to the universal
confict between individuals over their care for external goods. There can be no
co-operation, no Marxian Gattungswesen (species-conscious being) or
Lukacsian and Heideggerian totality, no Durkheimian solidarity, either
mechanical or organic, - there can be nothing that workers can be alienated from
(!) in Webers Nietzschean interpretation of the process of production. Nor,
therefore, can there be antagonism or confict intended as exploitation frst because
confict cannot be resolved with such teleological notions, and second because
confict is the very essence of the im-balance between want and provision: confict
is absolutely inevitable and ineluctable! It is life!
Here is Nietzsche:
?'E)ife itself is essentially appropriation in.ury conquest of the strange and
weak suppression severity obtrusion of peculiar forms incorporation and at
the least putting it mildest e5ploitation 'Ausbeutung)N -- but why should one
for ever use precisely these words on which for ages a disparaging purpose has
been stamped! /ven the organisation within which as was previously supposed
the individuals treat each other as equal--it takes place in every healthy
aristocracy -- must itself if it be a living and not a dying organisation do all that
towards other bodies which the individuals within it refrain from doing to each
other3 it will have to be the incarnated Lill to Hower it will endeavour to grow to
gain ground attract to itself and acquire ascendancy - not owing to any morality
or immorality but because it lives' and because life is precisely <ill to
=ower* "(eyond )ood and $vil Aphorism 71%*&
*******