kelley wrote:
> yoshie, your latest is another batch of rubbish. as i said once: the
> entire basis of your and carrol's whine has been that you wanted him to
> write a book he never set out to write in the first place. that's just
> plain silliness. sillier than the dodge ball game you're now playing.
You know, never in my life have I wanted someone to write any book other than the one he/she wrote -- unless you include wishing that Jane Austen had written a complete novel instead of the fragment she left when she died. If I were 40 years younger I might read all these works of Weber. They sound like fun -- not as much fun as Austen, Pound, or Paretsky, but fun nevertheless.
But as it is I'm interested not in Weber but in the tradition of intelligent bourgeois opposition to the workers' movement, an opposition of which he is a fine example. During the three years when I was slowly becoming a marixt I belonged to a liberal community organization, and there was a young active sociologist there who was always spouting Weber in response to my as then wholly unformed inklings of historical materialism.
Anyhow, my only interest here is a positive one of establishing the uniqueness of capitalism as a mode of production and to separate marxism from the various deterministic theories of history (such as the commercialization model). Your posts only talk about Weber's ideas -- not about where those ideas come from or, most importantly yet, whether or not Weber himself recognized that ideas emerege from human action. Does he recognize that an understanding of capitalism is impossible from any other perspective than that of the working class? From what you have written, apparently not. He thinks understanding can come from intellectuals thinking in abstraction from practice.
Incidentally, what difference does it make to you what anyone thinks of Weber? Why is it important? Is there something in Weber that no one else provides and that is essential to building opposition to U.S. imperialism? Are there any crucial ideas in Weber that exist no place else? Can he tell me something about ancient Greece that I can't learn from Finley, de Ste. Croix, Wood, Starr, or Cornford?
In any case, my debate is not really with you but with other marxists who tend to slip into some version or other of ahistorical understanding of history. The assumption that capitalism "naturally" flows from preceding history, when accepted by marxists, tends also to encourage the belief that there can be a "science" of a socialist order just as there is a science of capitalism. That way leads to an oligarchic conception of socialism. Weber is important only insofar as he has an influence on marxist thought.
>
> but that quote woj spoke of does suit you:
> "No one knows who will live in this cage in the future, or whether at the
> end of this tremendous development entirely new prophets will arise, or
> there will be a great rebirth of old ideas and ideals, or, if neither,
> mechanized petrification, embellished with a sort of convulsive
> self-importance. For of the stage of this cultural development, it might
> well be truly said: "Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart;
> this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never
> before achieved."
Wojtek is unable to understand U.S. history and despairs of a mass democratic movement. For that reason he can no more than Mark Jones understand why a battle against racism is core to any progressive politics in the U.S. Hence his Platonic dismissal of practical politics. And since he already KNOWS all there is to know about politics he can only regard *all* discussion on lbo or elsewhere as pointless.
Carrol