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Max Weber and "The Iron Cage" - by Joseph Belbruno

What is collapsing around us is the settlement that had seen the industrial working class integrated as the engine of capitalist growth through the institutional instrument of the money wage. What is evaporating, vanishing before our very eyesis the relevance and legitimacy of Labor parties that still cling to the reduction f living labour to dead objectified labour, and therefore the representation of the economic system as an impartial objective mechanism or machinery dependent on the rational organization of labor and therefore on the neutrality of the State-Plan co-ordinating the functioning of the system through the maintenance of legality and of the competitive level playing field. The fine-tuning of Keynesian memory hs been blown away smashed in the eclipse of the Great Moderation. The central banks the ultimate Keynesian technocratic refuge of the bourgeoisie that had celebrated the stamping out of inflation, the coming of price stability, now find themselves roasting in the inferno of financial instability fuelled diabolically by theattempt to recycle the immense profits accumulated on the blood and sweat of Chinese workers, helplessly tyrannized by the most brutal dictatorship in size andtruculence the earth has ever known, that swelled the financial bubble that burst so spectacularly barely three years ago.

Capitalism is in agony, and so is its science: we are here to administer its extreme unction and perhaps to draft its post mortem. What dies with this stage of ca

pitalism (Minsky spoke of different capitalisms) is the ideology of Social Democracy: the ideology of Labor. For labor is precisely what we must fight. We must refusto work. And we must refuse the labor that the capitalist employer gives to us. Itis true: the employer gives labor! By accepting to work, we accept labor as definedby capital. We rebel therefore principally against the Labor parties: our party will be called the Party Against Labor. Let us see why by returning to Max Weber, and only later to Keynes.

A specifically bourgeois economic ethic had grown up. With the consciousness ofstanding in the fullness

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of God's grace and being visibly blessed by Him, the bourgeois business man, aslong as he remained within the bounds of formal correctness, as long as his moral conduct was spotless and the use to which he put his wealth was not objectionable, could follow his pecuniary interests as he would and feel that he was fulfilling a duty in doing so. The power of religious asceticism provided him in addition with sober, conscientious, and unusually industrious workmen, who clung totheir work as to a life purpose willed by God.

Webers attempt to locate the spirit of capitalism and therefore great part of the h

istorical origins of capitalism in the protestant work ethic at the beginning of the bourgeois era as a specifically bourgeois economic ethic must fail, and for reasons that are both instructive and politically useful to us us the party againstlabor.

Not only is there a problem with historical periodisation. The timing of the protestant ethic does not accord with the rise of agrarian and then industrial capitalism in England and Northern Europe in the early 1600s. Not only is it a horrend

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Since asceticism undertook to remodel the world and to work out its ideals in the world, material goods have gained an increasing and finally an inexorable power over the lives of men as at no previous period in history.

To-day the spirit of religious asceticismwhether finally, who knows?has escaped from the cage. But victorious capitalism, since it rests on mechanical

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foundations, needs its support no longer.

Note how Weber is talking merely of a supporting role for the protestant work ethic in the origins of capitalism. But did the bourgeoisie really need this ethos except as pure ideology? The question is worth exploring because it may well be that the history of asceticism may still lead us to a specifically bourgeois economic ethic interpreted in a sense very different from Webers. Perhaps the biggest objection to Webers formulation of the problem is that he seeks to present the workethic as an attribute not just of the bourgeoisie but also of the working class!

The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so. For when asceticism was carried out of monastic cells into everyday life, and began to dominateworldly morality, it did its part in building the tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order. This order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which to-day determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force. Perhaps it will so determine them until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt. (p181)

Again, Weber is confusing consumerism with the urge to work and save. Even at its apex, the protestant work ethic had to do with working and saving and investing

not at all with spending and consuming! In his ill-advised attempt to implicate workers in the work ethic, Weber conveniently forgets the ideological function of thaethic right from the beginning! Nor does Weber even attempt to explain how andwhy the work ethic transformed itself from an autonomous motivational calling to amechanical foundation, to an iron cage (stahlhartes Gehause, steel-hard casing) inwhich individuals are more inmates of industrial capitalism than free agents or entrepreneurs. Weber has fallen victim here to the very late romanticism an echo of te Freiheit (free will) of German Idealism whose eclipse and demise Nietzsche hadannounced and certified with unprecedented and perhaps since unequalled clairvoyance.

God is dead! Nietzsches famous pronouncement - means also this: not merely that ves and Webers calling (Beruf) or ascetic ideal have been killed, have died, anostalgically to lament. Nietzsches phrase God is dead means above all the discovery, the realization that the centrality of human consciousness, of the Ego, the Ich-heit, the individual and his Individualitat that all these lofty idols have beeestroyed and an-nihilated (hence, nihilism) by the rise of precisely that rational organization of free labour, that rational Sozialismus that Weber identified!

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There is no Ent-zauberung (dis-enchantment) for Nietzsche as there is for Weber!(Cf. K. Lowiths study, Max Weber and Karl Marx.) Nietzsche shows as conclusively as is humanly possible that the freedom of the individual was a ruse from its JudaeoChristian beginnings through the astute theology of German Idealism, to the Nihilism of the late nineteenth century that presaged the cataclysms of the twentieth!And it is as revealing as it is surprising that Weber himself who more than anyother social theoretician and scientist documented and theorized the Rationalisierung should ultimately fall back on the notions of ethos and calling to explain socal developments such as the rise of the bourgeoisie and capitalism that will inexorably lead to the (precisely!) an-nihilation of faith and calling and ethos andr en-casement, their im-prisonment in the mechanical foundations of the society ofcapital!

Once again, the question for us as for Weber should be NOT how the belief that time is money gave rise to capitalist industry, but rather how the reality of industrial capitalism the wage relation, or the organization of free labour under regular discipline ensured the reduction of the experience of time into the fetishistiaccumulation of capital!

We need to isolate from asceticism, therefore, those elements that support strat

egically the interests of the bourgeoisie from those that support the interestsof the working class. - Remembering all the while, of course, that ideologies donot always work to the advantage of those who devise them. Indeed, it is precisely the history and critique of the concept of the Arbeit, the notion of Labour from its early monastic version as labor to its Hobbesian and British empiricist version as labour Power in Classical Political Economy, to the dialectical Askesisof German Idealism, and finally to the Neoclassical version as the calculus of Lust und Leid (Pleasure and Pain) that will reveal to us the separate, even superficially opposed (!), yet cognate philosophical and conceptual origins of both bourgeois and socialist ideologies.

We need to find what Goethe called a Kontignation (Latin, contignatio, meaningarchitrave making different concepts con-tiguous), a passage-way that leads us frbers genial political and sociological analyses to Keyness politico-economic science. This is what we will do in our next intervention.