>"these peculiarities of Western capitalism have derived their
>significance in the last analysis only from their association with
>the organization of labour. Even what is generally called
>commercialization, the development of negotiable securities and the
>rationalization of speculation, the exchanges, etc is connected with
>it. For without the rational capitalistic organization of labour,
>all this, so far as it was possible at all, would have nothing like
>the same significance, above all for the social structure and all
>the specific problems of the modern Occident connected with it.
>Exact calculation--the basis of everything else--is only possible on
>the basis of free labour. (p 22. TPE)
The problem, however, is _how_ free labor came into being. That is why Carrol & I asked folks to read Ellen Wood, _The Origin of Capitalism_, NY: Monthly Review Press, 1999; _Democracy Against Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism_, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995; etc. Wood writes:
***** ...There have been various refinements of the basic commercialization model, from Max Weber to Fernand Braudel.[2] Weber certainly did not fail to see that a fully developed capitalism emerged only in very specific historical conditions and not in others. He was [unfortunately] more than willing to see some kind of capitalism in earlier times, even in classical antiquity....The [most important] point, however, is that he always tended to talk about the factors that _impeded_ the development of capitalism in other places -- their kinship forms, their forms of domination, their religious traditions, and so on -- as if the natural, _un_-impeded growth of towns and trade and the liberation of towns and burgher classes would by definition mean capitalism. Weber also, it should be added, shares with many others the assumption that the development of capitalism was a trans-European (or West European) process -- not only that certain general European circumstances were necessary conditions for capitalism but that all of Europe, for all its internal variations, followed essentially one historical path....
...It is important to notice, too, that even the _critique_ of modernity can have the same effect of naturalizing capitalism. This effect was already visible long before today's postmodernist fashions, for instance in the sociological theories of Weber, specifically his theory of rationalization. The process of rationalization -- the progress of reason and freedom associated with the Enlightenment -- had, according to Weber, liberated humanity from traditional constraints. But at the same time, rationalization had produced and disguised a new oppression, the "iron cage" of modern organizational forms. There is, of course, much to be said for acknowledging the two sides of "modernity," not only the advances it is said to represent but also the destructive possibilities inherent in its productive capacities, its technologies, and its organizational forms -- even in its universalistic values [Yoshie: recall Adorno & Horkheimer's criticism of Kant in _The Dialectic of the Enlightenment_; Walter Benjamin's _Illusions_; etc.]. But in an argument like Weber's, there is something more going on. Capitalism, like bureaucratic domination, is just a natural extension of the long-term progress of reason and freedom. It is worth noting, too, that in Weber we find something closely akin to the postmodernist ambivalence toward capitalism, in which lament is never very far away from celebration....
[2] I discuss at some length the ways in which Weber adheres to the commercialization model in _Democracy Against Capitalism_ (Cambridge: Cambridge Uiversity Press, 1995), chap. 5.
(_The Origin of Capitalism_, NY: Monthly Review Press, 1999, pp. 16-7, 115) *****
At 8:51 PM +0000 12/7/00, Justin Schwartz wrote:
>>Also, you neglect that Weber
>>thought that Z-R was a very mixed blessing, leading ulrimately to the "iron
>>cage" in which he thinks we moderns are caught. --jks
>>(((((((((((
>>CB: What's Weber's solution to the problem ?
>
>The problem that we are caught in an iron cage of bureaucratic,
>instrumentally ratiobal societies? He doesn't have a solution. Live
>with it, he says. Suffer. --jks
Weber was a liberal pessimist (as well as nationalist). Ellen Wood, in essence, argues that the acceptance of the commercialization model -- even in its more refined forms, like Weber's -- as the explanation of the origin of capitalism tends to be tied up with the equation of modernity with capitalist modernity as well as naturalization of capitalism -- hence Weber's resignation in the face of the "Iron Cage." For he could not see why modernity could be exist otherwise, that is, without capitalism.
Moreover, the acceptance of the commercialization model tends to reproduce asceticism even in critiques of asceticism (like Weber's remarks upon Puritanism). It is no coincidence that Weber draws upon Werner Sombart in his analysis of capitalism; recall that for Sombart, the origins of capitalism lie in love and luxury among the aristocracy & in towns. While Weber differs from & criticizes Sombart, their shared acceptance of the commercialization model inclines both of them to ascetic attitudes of their own.
Yoshie