> Sorry for a delay in my response, but I was away for a week.
nothing to apologise for. it's not as if we have to be efficient [place smiley thing here].
> Sociologists generally accept that certain pre-modern cultures promote
> behavioral patterns that are incompatible with the incentive system that
> prevail in an industrial society (cf. Marx Weber's "Protestant Ethic and
> the Spirit of Capitalism" or Thomas and Znaniecki's "Polish Peasant in
> Europe and America" that are now classics). Of course these are not
> culturalists rationalizations, but empirical statements that specify
> certain observable outcomes and conditions that produce them.
yes, certain cultural practices mitigate against an easy imposition of the 'incentive systems' or rather, motivational techniques, often those which are individualised where said cultural practices have a strong collectivist notion, of industrial production and so on.
but isn't this also true of those (let's call them) cultural practices which have been in evidence in (to use your designations) modern societies? an example would be the cultural codes, expectations, and practices built up around the so-called 'breadwinner's wage' (here called the basic wage introduced in 1907), of an income sufficient to support a wife and two children. one could say this is a patriarchal, hence pre-modern cultural residue, which it is in one sense, but importantly in another sense, it actually _created_ the modern notion of the nuclear family where this did not exist before in Australia with any significance. this basic wage was part of the incentive system of a particular moment in the history of Australian capitalism. the recent assaults by governments on the maritime union, in particular that of the wage levels of the maritime workers, ostensibly in order to introduce other kinds of incentive schemes (such as productivity targets, etc) was a challenge to this basic wage system -- a system which in any case has been declining since it was introduced, and the maritime sector is one of the last in which it still operated.
I use this example for a number of reasons: to show that the motivational techniques are not always the same, even in modern capitalism, that they can well be constitutive of a 'culture' which in other/later moments of capitalist production are deemed to be obstacles ('rigidities' is what they are usually called), and which, even though constitutive of the bases of the very modern patriarchal family, the defense of the basic wage is something that should be, as it was, strenuously defended, even whilst we might abhor the character of (those modern but not pre-modern) relations which this made possible.
> Moreover, your own position re. capitalism can be criticized along the same
> line. You tend to to treat capitalism as ex post facto rationalizations of
> bad fortunes, without specififying conditions under which it can produce
> those effects. You need that specification because capitalism can also
> produce beneficial effects (c.f. working class of Western Europe).
yes, capitalism has brought countless wonders and benefits -- I work on one now. I would say however that it's not a question of pre-modern versus modern cultures. I would also say that it's important to keep in mind that such benefits (for some) are premised on the misery of most, and that this shaped the ways in which the working classes of south-eastern Europe, and the specific patterns of their proletarianisation in those places compared to those of western Europe. the very mechanism of a 'surplus population' is critical for capitalism.
more importantly, it's not simply a question of an inability to adjust, or that is, I would not put it in these terms. for instance, the cultural conditions under which Australia was colonised and industrialised were thoroughly British. ie., the prime agricultural products were all those things that came in on the first boats: wheat and sheep in particular. similarly, those patterns of 'incentive' were ones derived from Britain and British culture. there is nothing specifically integral about wheat, sheep and (initially the lash and later) the basic wage which excludes the use of other products or other ways of getting workers to work. so, hypothetically, the new capitalism could have been more Jesuit in its choice of incentive schemes, something more in line with indigenous cultural practices, such as a wage that was paid to a community of elders rather than a male breadwinner. this would have made 'adjustment' (or proletarianisation) much smoother. the same might apply to Europe, where an expanding capitalism took with it not only the M-C-M' but also retooled the particular cultural practices and motifs of western Europe and applied them, or at least tried to, in other places. if capitalism had originated in pre-colonial Australia (odd I know but I'm being hypothetical), might we not be talking about a system of work in which the wage was a collective arrangement, a kind of team work system as the dominant form of incentive and motivation? it might also be that a certain resistance to capitalism, a certain 'maladjustment', was indistinguishable from a resistance to the imposition of a different set of cultural practices as the form in which capitalism was imposed or confronted.
the shorter version would be that there is nothing exclusive about particular kinds of cultural practices which makes them (hypothetically) rub up against capitalist development/proletarianisation/etc. the friction comes not from a distinction between pre-modern and modern cultures but between established cultural practices (including those associated with work in certain moments of capitalism) and newer forms of motivational techniques (and their attendant subjectivities, cultural presuppositions, etc). who gets to be in the surplus population, deemed to be maladjusters, can be simply a matter of the history of capitalist development, and which 'pre-modern' cultural forms were taken up as the basis for dominant (or what were called specifically capitalist) forms, and others then regarded as, or clearly operating as, obstacles.
that wasn't a short version was it?
Angela _________