Max Weber and "The Iron Cage" - by Joseph Belbruno What is collapsing around us is the settlement that had

seen the industrial workin g class integrated as the engine of capitalist growth through the institutional in strument of the money wage. What is evaporating, vanishing before our very eyes is the relevance and legitimacy of Labor parties that still cling to the reduction o f living labour to dead objectified labour, and therefore the representation of th e economic system as an impartial objective mechanism or machinery dependent on th e rational organization of labor and therefore on the neutrality of the State-Plan i n co-ordinating the functioning of the system through the maintenance of legalit y and of the competitive level playing field. The fine-tuning of Keynesian memory ha s been blown away smashed in the eclipse of the Great Moderation. The central ba nks the ultimate Keynesian technocratic refuge of the bourgeoisie that had celeb rated the stamping out of inflation, the coming of price stability, now find thems elves roasting in the inferno of financial instability fuelled diabolically by the attempt to recycle the immense profits accumulated on the blood and sweat of Ch inese workers, helplessly tyrannized by the most brutal dictatorship in size and truculence the earth has ever known, that swelled the financial bubble that bur st so spectacularly barely three years ago.

Capitalism is in agony, and so is its science: we are here to administer its extre me 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 Democra cy: the ideology of Labor. For labor is precisely what we must fight. We must refuse to work. And we must refuse the labor that the capitalist employer gives to us. It is true: the employer gives labor! By accepting to work, we accept labor as defined by capital. We rebel therefore principally against the Labor parties: our party wi ll be called the Party Against Labor. Let us see why by returning to Max Weber, an d only later to Keynes.

A specifically bourgeois economic ethic had grown up. With the consciousness of standing in the fullness 176 of God's grace and being visibly blessed by Him, the bourgeois business man, as long as he remained within the bounds of formal correctness, as long as his mora l conduct was spotless and the use to which he put his wealth was not objectiona ble, could follow his pecuniary interests as he would and feel that he was fulfi lling a duty in doing so. The power of religious asceticism provided him in addi tion with sober, conscientious, and unusually industrious workmen, who clung to their 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 t he bourgeois era as a specifically bourgeois economic ethic must fail, and for rea sons that are both instructive and politically useful to us us the party against labor.

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

ous reality that, far from being sober, workmen, who clung to their work as to a al proletariat that was herded into vast Manchester and beyond resembled an army d any Charles Dickens novel and you will reality Weber is here.

conscientious, and unusually industrious life purpose willed by God, the industri urban centres in England from London to returning from a horrific war. Just rea understand perfectly well how far from

Webers judgement is not just wrong but deprecable and contemptible in the extreme . His sociological and theoretical work is motivated by the interests of his own class, the bourgeoisie: and this is precisely why it is not sufficient to say h ow wrong he was: it is very important to get inside the mind of one of the sharpes t and perspicacious and encyclopaedic political minds the bourgeoisie has ever p roduced. It is symptomatic of his espousal of the point of view of his class tha t Weber should put the cart before the horse both analytically (as we are about to see) and historically by seeking to camouflage as a religious belief a calling th e vile and horrific practices of a class that to this day seeks to glorify and r ationalize its brutality in the name of scientific objectivity.

Right from the beginning of his monograph, Webers quote from Benjamin Franklin to the effect that time is money brilliantly illustrates his misapprehension and wil lful obfuscation: it was not because people believed through their religious faith that time is money that a protestant work ethic developed. Instead, it was precis ely because time had already become money that the bourgeoisie developed a religio us apology for the enforcement of their bourgeois economic ethic on the rest of so ciety. (Cf. on this, the superb study by EP Thompson on Time and Work Discipline in the Industrial Revolution - http://www.4shared.com/document/s3K-9DQB/14564783E-P-Thompson-Tempo-Di.htm .) What Weber was attempting to do with the central th esis of the Ethik was nothing less than to rewrite the truculent history of the rise of his class in Europe and to cover it in sanctimonious ascetic self-righte ousness.

But there are also analytical reasons why Weber is as wrong as can be. Protestan tism could never serve as a specifically bourgeois economic ethic for the very sim ple reason that it is founded entirely on labour: it is therefore at bottom a prof oundly socialistic faith or belief or ethos whose highest theoretical economic exp ression is to be found in the Classical Political Economy that reached its apex with David Ricardo after which it gave way to the Neoclassical (or marginalist) Revolution which, as we will argue here, represents much more intimately a specif ically bourgeois economic theory and ethic. In disposing of the labour theory of value, the Marx of the bourgeoisie, Eugen Bohm-Bawerk, the chief artificer of the Austrian School, was both blunt and devastating: if value and interest are solely attributable to labour and to the theft of labour time, then competition for workers between capitalists should ensure that there is no profit left at all!

Weber himself acknowledges the inadequacy of the protestant work ethic as an expla nation for the mature stages of capitalism:

In Baxter's view the care for external goods should only lie on the shoulders of the saint like a light cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment. But fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron cage.

Since asceticism undertook to remodel the world and to work out its ideals in th e world, material goods have gained an increasing and finally an inexorable powe r over the lives of men as at no previous period in history. To-day the spirit of religious asceticismwhether finally, who knows?has escaped fr om the cage. But victorious capitalism, since it rests on mechanical 181 foundations, needs its support no longer.

Note how Weber is talking merely of a supporting role for the protestant work ethi c in the origins of capitalism. But did the bourgeoisie really need this ethos exc ept as pure ideology? The question is worth exploring because it may well be tha t the history of asceticism may still lead us to a specifically bourgeois economi c ethic interpreted in a sense very different from Webers. Perhaps the biggest obj ection to Webers formulation of the problem is that he seeks to present the work ethic 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 asceti cism was carried out of monastic cells into everyday life, and began to dominate worldly morality, it did its part in building the tremendous cosmos of the mode rn economic order. This order is now bound to the technical and economic conditi ons of machine production which to-day determine the lives of all the individual s who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with econo mic acquisition, with irresistible force. Perhaps it will so determine them unti l the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt. (p181)

Again, Weber is confusing consumerism with the urge to work and save. Even at it s 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 wo rkers in the work ethic, Weber conveniently forgets the ideological function of that ethic right from the beginning! Nor does Weber even attempt to explain how and why the work ethic transformed itself from an autonomous motivational calling to a mechanical foundation, to an iron cage (stahlhartes Gehause, steel-hard casing) in which individuals are more inmates of industrial capitalism than free agents or ent repreneurs. Weber has fallen victim here to the very late romanticism an echo of th e Freiheit (free will) of German Idealism whose eclipse and demise Nietzsche had announced and certified with unprecedented and perhaps since unequalled clairvo yance.

God is dead! Nietzsches famous pronouncement - means also this: not merely that valu es and Webers calling (Beruf) or ascetic ideal have been killed, have died, as Webe nostalgically to lament. Nietzsches phrase God is dead means above all the discove ry, the realization that the centrality of human consciousness, of the Ego, the Ic h-heit, the individual and his Individualitat that all these lofty idols have been d estroyed and an-nihilated (hence, nihilism) by the rise of precisely that rationa l organization of free labour, that rational Sozialismus that Weber identified!

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 a s 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 Nihili sm 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 any other social theoretician and scientist documented and theorized the Rationalisie rung should ultimately fall back on the notions of ethos and calling to explain soci al developments such as the rise of the bourgeoisie and capitalism that will ine xorably lead to the (precisely!) an-nihilation of faith and calling and ethos and thei r en-casement, their im-prisonment in the mechanical foundations of the society of capital!

Once again, the question for us as for Weber should be NOT how the belief that ti me is money gave rise to capitalist industry, but rather how the reality of indus trial capitalism the wage relation, or the organization of free labour under regu lar discipline ensured the reduction of the experience of time into the fetishistic accumulation 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 interests of the working class. - Remembering all the while, of course, that ideologies do not always work to the advantage of those who devise them. Indeed, it is precis ely the history and critique of the concept of the Arbeit, the notion of Labour fr om its early monastic version as labor to its Hobbesian and British empiricist v ersion as labour Power in Classical Political Economy, to the dialectical Askesis of German Idealism, and finally to the Neoclassical version as the calculus of L ust und Leid (Pleasure and Pain) that will reveal to us the separate, even super ficially opposed (!), yet cognate philosophical and conceptual origins of both b ourgeois and socialist ideologies.

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