Michael Löwy

IN SPITE OF THEIR UNDENIABLE DIFFERENCES, Marx and Weber have much in

common in their understanding of modern capitalism: they both perceive it as
a system where "the individuals are ruled by abstractions (Marx), where the
impersonal and "thing-like" (Versachlicht) relations replace the personal
relations of dependence, and where the accumulation of capital becomes an
end in itself, largely irrational.

Their analysis of capitalism cannot be separated from a critical position,

explicit in Marx, more ambivalent in Weber. But the content and inspiration of
the criticism are very different. And, above all, while Marx wagers on the
possibility of overcoming capitalism thanks to a socialist revolution, Weber is
rather a fatalist and resigned observer, studying a mode of production and
administration that seems to him inevitable.

The anti-capitalist critique is one of the main force-fields which run across
Marx's work from the beginning to the end, giving it its coherence. This does
not prevent the existence of a certain evolution: while the Communist
Manifesto (1848) insists on the historically progressive role of the
bourgeoisie, Capital (1867) is more inclined to denounce the ignominies of
the system. The usual opposition between an "ethical" young Marx and a
"scientific" one of the mature years is unable to account for this development.

Marx's anti-capitalism is based on certain values or criteria, generally

implicit:

a) universal ethical values: freedom, equality, justice,

self-accomplishment. The combination among these various human values
builds a coherent whole, which one could name revolutionary humanism, that
functions as the main guiding principle for the ethical condemnation of the
capitalist system.

Moral indignation against the infamies of capitalism is obvious in all

chapters of Capital: it is an essential dimension of what gives such an
impressive power to the book. As Lucien Goldmann wrote, Marx does not
"mix" value and fact judgements, but develops a dialectical analysis where
explanation, comprehension and evaluation are rigorously inseparable.1
 b) the viewpoint of the proletariat, victim of the system and its potential
gravedigger. As Marx clearly asserted in his preface to Capital, this class
perspective is at the root of his critique of bourgeois political economy. It is
from this social viewpoint that values as "justice" are reinterpreted: their
concrete meaning is not the same according to the situation and the interests
of different classes.

c) the possibility of an emancipated future, of a post-capitalist society, of a

communist utopia. It is on the light of the hypothesis -- or the wager,
according to Lucien Goldmann -- of a free association of producers that the
negative features of capitalism appear in all their enormity.

d) the existence, in the past, of more egalitarian, or democratic, social and

cultural forms, destroyed by capitalist "progress." This argument, of Romantic
origin, is present for instance in all Marx and Engels' writings on primitive
communism, a form of communitarian life without commodity, State, or
private property and without patriarchal oppression of women.

The existence of these values does not mean that Marx holds a Kantian
perspective, opposing a transcendental ideal to the existing reality: his
critique is immanent, in so far as it is developed in the name of a real social
force opposed to capitalism -- the working class -- and in the name of the
contradiction between the potentialities created by the rise of productive
forces and the limitations imposed by the bourgeois productive relations.

Marx's anti-capitalist critique is organized around five fundamental issues:

the injustice of exploitation, the loss of liberty through alienation, venal
(mercantile) quantification, irrationality, and modern barbarism. Let us
examine briefly these issues, emphasizing the less known ones:

1) The injustice of exploitation. The capitalist system is based,

independently of this or that economic policy, on the workers' unpaid surplus
labour, source, as "surplus value," of all the forms of rent and profit. The
extreme manifestations of this social injustice are the exploitation of children,
starvation wages, inhuman labor hours, and miserable life conditions for the
proletarians. But whatever the worker's condition at this or that historical
moment, the system itself is intrinsically unjust, because it is parasitic and
exploits the labor force of the direct producers. This argument takes a central
place in Capital and was essential in the formation of the Marxist labor
movement.

2) The loss of liberty through alienation, reification, commodity fetishism.

In the capitalist mode of production, the individuals -- and in particular the
laborers -- are submitted to the domination of their own products, which take
the form of autonomous fetishes (idols) and escape their control. This issue is
extensively dealt with in Marx's early writings, but also in the famous chapter
on commodity fetishism in Capital.2

At the heart of Marx's analysis of alienation is the idea that capitalism is a

sort of disenchanted "religion," where commodities replace divinity: "The
more the workers estranges himself in his labour, the more the estranged,
objective world he has created becomes powerful, while he becomes
impoverished . . . The same happens in religion. The more man puts things in
God, the less he keeps in himself . . . 3 The concept of fetishism itself refers to
the history of religion, to the primitive forms of idolatry, which already contain
the principle of all religious phenomena.

It is not by chance that liberation theologians, such as Hugo Assmann,

Franz Hinkelammert and Enrique Dussel, extensively quote from Marx's
writings against capitalist alienation and commodity fetishism in their
denunciation of the "market idolatry."4

3) The venal (mercantile) quantification of social life. Capitalism, regulated

by exchange value, the calculation of profits and the accumulation of capital,
tends to dissolve and destroy all qualitative values: use values, ethical values,
human relations, human feelings. Having replaces Being, and only subsists
the monetary payment -- the cash nexus according to the famous expression
of Carlyle which Marx takes up -- and the « icy waters of egoistic calculation"
(Communist Manifesto).

Now, the struggle against quantification and Mammonism -- another term

used by Carlyle -- is one of the key loci of Romanticism.5 Like the Romantic
critics of the modern bourgeois civilization, Marx believed that capitalism has
introduced, in this respect, a profound degradation of social relations, and an
ethical regression in relation to pre-capitalist societies:

At last, the time has come in which all that human beings had
considered as inalienable has become the object of exchange, of
traffic, and may be alienated. It is a time when the very things
which before were conveyed, but never bartered; given, but never
sold; conquered, but never purchased -- virtue, love, opinion,
science, conscience etc. -- when, in short, everything has finally
become tradable. It is a time of generalized corruption, universal
venality or, to speak in terms of political economy, the time when
anything, moral or physical, receives a venal value, and may be
taken to market to be appraised for its appropriate value.6

THE POWER OF MONEY is one of the most brutal expressions of this

capitalist quantification: it distorts all "human and natural qualities," by
submitting them to the monetary measure: "The quantity of money becomes
more and more the unique and powerful property of the human being; at the
same time that it reduces all being to its abstraction, it reduces itself in its
own movement to a quantitative being."7

4) The irrational nature of the system. The periodical crises of

overproduction that shake the capitalist system reveal its irrationality --
"absurdity" is the term used in the Manifesto: the existence of "too many
means of subsistence" while the majority of the population lacks the
necessary minimum. This global irrationality is not contradictory, of course,
with a partial and local rationality, at the level of the production management
of each factory..

5) Modern barbarism. To some extent, capitalism is the bearer of historical

progress, particularly by the exponential development of the productive
forces, creating therefore the material conditions for a new society, a world of
freedom and solidarity. But, at the same time, it is also a force of social
regression, in so far as it "makes of each economic progress a public
calamity."8 Considering some of the most sinister manifestations of capitalism
such as the poor laws or the workhouses -- those "workers Bastilles" -- Marx
wrote in 1847 the following surprising and prophetic passage, which seems to
announce the Frankfurt School: "Barbarism re-appears, but this time it is
created inside civilization itself and is an integral part of it. This is the leprous
barbarism, barbarism as the leper of civilization."9

All these criticisms are intimately linked: they refer to each other, they
presuppose each other, and they are combined in a global anti-capitalist
vision, which is one of the distinctive features of Marx as a communist
thinker.

On two other issues -- which are today of the greatest topicality -- Marx's
anti-capitalist critique is more ambiguous or insufficient:

6) The colonial and/or imperialist expansion of capitalism, the violent and

cruel domination of the colonized people, their forced submission to the
imperatives of capitalist production and the accumulation of capital. One can
perceive in Marx a certain evolution in this respect: if, in the Manifesto, he
seems to celebrate as a progress the submission of the "peasant" or
"barbarian" (sic) nations to the bourgeois civilization, in his writings on the
British colonization of India the somber aspect of the Western domination is
taken into account -- but still considered as a necessary evil.

It is only in Capital, particularly in the chapter on primitive accumulation of

capital, that one finds a really radical critique of the horrors of colonial
expansion: the submission or extermination of the indigenous people, the
wars of conquest, the slave trade. These "horrifying barbarisms and
atrocities" -- which according to Marx, quoting M.W. Howitt, "have no parallel
in any other era of universal history, in any other race, however savage,
brutal, pitiless and shameless" -- are not simply presented as the cost of
historical progress, but clearly denounced as an "infamy."10

7) The Manifesto rejoices with the domination of nature made possible by

the expansion of capitalist civilization. It is only later, particularly in Capital,
that the aggression of the capitalist mode of production against the natural
environment is taken into consideration. In a well known passage, Marx
suggests a parallel between the exhaustion of labor and of land by the
destructive logic of capital:

Each progress of the capitalist agriculture is not only a progress in

the art of exploiting the worker, but also in the art of plundering the
 soil; each short term progress in fertility is a progress in the long
term destruction of the basis of this fertility. ( . . ) Capitalist
production thus only develops . . . but at the same time exhausting
the two springs from which flow all wealth: the land and the
laborer.

One can see here the expression of a really dialectical view of progress -- also
suggested by the ironical way the word is used -- which could be the starting
point for a systematic ecological thinking, but this was not to be developed by
Marx

QUITE DIFFERENT is Max Weber's approach. His attitude towards capitalism is

much more ambivalent and contradictory. One could say that he is divided
between his identity as a bourgeois which fully supports German capitalism
and its imperial power, and his statute as an intellectual, sensitive to the
arguments of the Romantic anti-capitalist Zivilisationskritik so influential
among the German academic mandarins at the beginning of the 20th century.
From this viewpoint, he could be compared to another split -- if not
schizophrenic -- German bourgeois/intellectual: Walther Rathenau, Prussian
and Jew, capitalist entrepreneur and sharp critic of the mechanical civilization.

Rejecting any socialist idea, Weber does not hesitate, on some occasions,
to use apologetic arguments in defense of capitalism. This is particularly
obvious in his description, in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism,
of the origins of capitalism as the result of Protestant work ethic, i.e. the
combination of hard work, methodic economic activity, frugal life and the
reinvestment of savings: a description which is very close to the idealized
self-image of the bourgeois! Usually he seems to lean towards a resigned
acceptance of bourgeois civilization, not as desirable, but as inevitable.
However, in some key texts, which had a very significant impact on 20th
century thought, he gives free rein to a insightful, pessimistic and radical
critique of the paradoxes of capitalist rationality. According to the sociologist
Derek Sayer, "to a certain extent his critique of capitalism, as a life negating
force, is sharper than Marx's."11 This is an exaggerated assessment, but it is
true that some of Weber's arguments touch at the foundations of the modern
industrial/capitalist civilization.

Obviously, the issues raised by Weber are quite different from those of
Marx. Weber ignores exploitation, is not interested in economic crisis, has
little sympathy for the struggles of the proletariat, and does not question
colonial expansion. However, influenced by the Romantic or Nietzschean
Kulturpessimismus, he perceives a deep contradiction between the
requirements of the formal modern rationality -- of which bureaucracy and
private enterprise are concrete manifestations -- and those of the acting
subject's autonomy. Distancing himself from Enlightenment's rationalist
tradition, he is sensitive to the contradictions and limits of modern rationality,
as it expresses itself in capitalist economy and state administration: its formal
and instrumental character and its tendency to produce effects that lead to
the reversal of the emancipatory aspirations of modernity. The search for
calculation and efficiency at any price leads to the bureaucratization and
reification of human activities. This diagnosis of modernity's crisis will be, to a
large extent, taken over by the Frankfurt School in its first period (Adorno,
Horkheimer, Marcuse).

What is striking in Weber's pessimistic/resigned assessment of modernity

is its refusal of the illusions of progress which were so powerful in the
European consciousness at the beginning of the 20th century. Here is, for
instance, what he said in one of his last public interventions in 1919: "It is not
the flowering of Summer that is waiting for us, but a polar night, icy, somber
and rude."12 This pessimism is inseparable from a critical view of the nature
itself of capitalism and its dynamics of rationalization/modernization.

One can distinguish two aspects -- intimately linked between them -- in

Weber's critique of the substance itself of the capitalist system:

1) The inversion between means and ends. For the spirit of capitalism, of
which Benjamin Franklin is an ideal- typical figure -- almost chemically pure!
-- to win money, to gather more and more money (to accumulate capital
would say Marx) is the supreme good and the ultimate aim in life:

The pursuit of riches is fully stripped of all pleasurable, and surely

all hedonistic aspects. Accordingly, this striving becomes
understood completely as an end in itself -- to such an extent that it
appears as fully outside the normal course of affairs and simply
irrational, at least when viewed from the perspective of the
'happiness' or 'utility' of the single individual. Here, people are
oriented to acquisition as the purpose of life: acquisition is no
longer viewed as a means to the end of satisfying the substantive
needs of life. Those people in possession of spontaneous
(unbefangene) dispositions experience this situation as an
absolutely meaningless reversal of 'natural' conditions (as we would
say today). Yet, this reversal constitutes just as surely a guiding
principle of [modern] capitalism as incomprehension of this new
situation characterizes all who remain untouched by [modern]
capitalism's tentacles."13

Supreme expression of modern aim- oriented rationality -- Weber's

Zweckrationalität or, according to the Frankfurt School, instrumental
rationality -- capitalist economy reveals itself, from the viewpoint of the
"substantive needs of life." or of human happiness, as "simply irrational" or
"absolutely meaningless."14 Weber returns several times to this issue in The
Protestant Ethic, always insisting on the irrationality -- his emphasis -- of the
logic of capitalist accumulation: a comparison between the spirit of capitalism
and economic traditionalism -- for whom business is simply "indispensable to
life" -- "renders obvious the irrationality, from the viewpoint of one's personal
happiness, of this way of organizing life: people live for their business rather
than the reverse."15

Of course Weber believes that this "absurd" and "irrational" system has
its own formidable rationality: his remarks show nevertheless a deep critical
distance towards the spirit of capitalism. Obviously two forms of rationality
are in conflict here: one, the Zweckrationalität, purely formal and
instrumental, whose only aim is, in capitalism, production for production,
accumulation for accumulation, money for money; the other, more
substantial, which corresponds to the -- pre-capitalist -- "natural conditions,"
and refers to values (Wertrationalität) such as: people's happiness, the
satisfaction of their needs.

This definition of capitalism as irrational is not without certain affinities with

Marx' ideas. The subordination of the aim -- the human being -- to the means
-- the enterprise, money, commodity -- is an argument that comes very near
to the Marxist concept of alienation. Weber was conscious of this similarity,
and refers to it in his 1918 conference on Socialism: "All this [the impersonal
functioning of capital] is what socialism defines as the 'domination of things
over the human beings.' which means: the means over the aim (the
satisfaction of the needs)."16 This explains, by the way, why Lukacs' theory of
reification in History and Class Consciousness (1923) is based on both Marx
and Weber.

2) The submission to an all powerful mechanism, the imprisonment in a

system which oneself has created. This issue is intimately related to the
former one, but it emphasizes the loss of freedom, the decline of individual
autonomy. The locus classicus of this criticism is to be found in the last
paragraphs of The Protestant Ethic, doubtless the most famous and influential
passage of Weber's work -- and one of the rare moments where he permitted
himself what he calls "value and faith judgements."

First of all Weber considers, with a resigned nostalgia, that the triumph of
the modern capitalist spirit requires the "renunciation of the Faustian multi-
dimensionality of the human species." The acknowledgment of the rise of the
bourgeois era has, for Goethe -- as for Weber -- the meaning of a « farewell
to an era of full and beautiful humanity."17

On the other hand, capitalist rationality creates a more and more

constraining and coercive context: "The Puritan wanted to be a person with a
vocational calling; today we are forced to be." The modern -- capitalist --
economic order, with its technical conditions of mechanical and machine
production, "determines the style of life of all individuals born into it, not only
those directly engaged in earning a living." This constraint, Weber compares it
with a sort of prison, or "iron cage," where the system of rational production
encloses the individuals: "According to Baxter [a Puritan preacher -- ML] the
concern for material goods should lie upon the shoulders of his saints like 'a
lightweight coat that could be thrown off at any time.' Yet fate allowed a
steel-hard casing (stahlhartes Gehäuse) to be forged from this coat."18

The expression became famous. It strikes by its tragic resignation, but

also by its critical dimension. There are different interpretations or translations
for the words sthahlhartes Gehäuse: for some it is a "casing" for others a
"shell" or a "cell." But it is probable that Weber borrowed the image of an
"iron cage of despair" from the English Puritan poet Bunyan.19 In any case, it
seems to describe, in the Protestant Ethic, the reified structures of capitalist
economy as a sort of steel-hard prison -- rigid, cold and pitiless.

Weber's pessimism leads him to fear the end of all values and ideals, and
the advent, under the aegis of modern capitalism, of a "mechanized
ossification, embellished with a sort of rigidly compelled sense of
self-importance."20 He foresees the process of reification as extending, from
the economic sphere, to all areas of social life: politics, law, culture.

Well before the Frankfurt School, Karl Löwith had already grasped, in his
brilliant 1932 essay on Weber and Marx, the "dialectics of reason" at work in
the Weberian critique of capitalism, and its affinity with the Marxian one:

The peculiar irrationality formed within the process of rationalization

(…) also appears to Weber in terms of this relation between means
and ends, which for him is the basis for the concepts of rationality
and freedom -- namely, in terms of a reversal of this relation. (…)
Means as ends make themselves independent and thus lose their
original 'meaning' or purpose, that is, they lose their original
purposive rationality oriented to man and his needs. This reversal
marks the whole of modern civilization, whose arrangements,
institutions and activities are so 'rationalized,' that whereas
humanity once established itself within them, now it is they which
enclose and determine humanity like an 'iron cage.' Human
conduct, from which these institutions originally arose, must now in
turn adapt to its own creation which has escaped the control of the
creator.

Weber himself declared that here lies the real problem of culture
-- rationalization towards the irrational -- and that he and Marx
agreed in the definition of this problem but differed in its evaluation.
(…) This paradoxical inversion -- this 'tragedy of culture,' as Simmel
has termed it -- becomes most clearly evident when it occurs in
exactly the type of activity whose innermost intention is that it be
specifically rational, namely, in economically rational activity. And
precisely here it becomes plainly apparent that, and how, behavior
which is purely purposive-rational in intention turns inexorably into
its own opposite in the process of its rationalization.21

TO CONCLUDE: what Weber, unlike Marx, did not grasp, is the domination,
over human activities, of exchange value. The mechanisms of valorization and
the automatisms inscribed in the commodity exchange lead to a
monitarization of social relations. The sociologue from Heidelberg does not
conceive the possibility of replacing the alienated logic of self-valorizing value
by a democratic control of production.22

Both Weber and Marx shared the idea of a substantial irrationality of the
capitalist system -- which is not contradictory with its formal or partial
rationality. Both refer to religion to try to understand this irrationality.

For Weber, what one has to explain is the origin of this irrationalism, this
"reversal of natural conditions," and the explanation he proposes refers to the
decisive influence of certain religious representations: the Protestant ethic.

For Marx, the origin of capitalism does not relate to any religious ethics,
but to a brutal process of plundering, murder and exploitation, which he
describes with the term "the primitive accumulation of capital."23 The
reference to religion plays, however, a significant rôle in explaining the logic
of capitalism as "reversal." It is not a causal relationship, as in Weber, but
rather a structural affinity: irrationality is an intrinsic, immanent and essential
feature of the capitalist mode of production as an alienated process, and as
such it has a structural resemblance with religious alienation: in both cases,
the human beings are dominated by their own products -- respectively Capital
(money, commodities) and God.

Exploring the elective affinities between the Weberian and the Marxist
criticisms of capitalism, and combining them in an original way, Lukacs
produced the theory of reification, and Adorno/Horkheimer the critique of
instrumental reason -- two of the most important and radical theoretical
innovations of 20th century's Western Marxist thought. 24

Notes

1. L. Goldmann, "Le Marxisme Est-il une Sociologie?" in Recherches

Dialectiques (Paris: Gallimard) 1955. return

2. It is true, as Ernest Mandel observed, that there is an evolution between

the Manuscripts of 1844 and the economic writings of the later years:
the passage from an anthropological to an historical concept of
alienation. See E. Mandel, La Formation de la Pensée Economique de
Karl Marx (Paris: Maspero) 1967. return

3. K. Marx, Manuscrits de 1844 (Paris: Ed. Sociales) 1962, pp. 57-58.

return

4. H. Assmann, F. Hinkelammert, A Idolatria do Mercado. Ensaios Sobre

Economia e Teologia ( S.Paulo: Editora Vozes) 1989. See also the
fascinating text by Walter Benjamin -- largely inspired by Weber --
"Kapitalismus als Religion," Gesammelte Schriften, (Suhrkamp Verlag)
1991, Band VI, pp. 100-103 return.

5. See M. Löwy and Robert Sayre, Romanticism Against the Current of

Modernity (Durham, N.C.:Duke University Press) 2000. Carlyle is one of
the typical representatives of the Romantic/conservative critique of
capitalism. return

6. Karl Marx, Misère de la philosophie (Paris: Ed. Sociales) 1947, p.33.

 return

7. K. Marx, Manuscrits de 1844, pp. 101, 123. return

8. K. Marx, Le Capital, Livre I (Paris: Garnier Flammarion) 1969, p.350.

return

9. K. Marx, "Arbeitslohn," 1847, Kleine ökonomische Schriften (Berlin:

Dietz Verlag) 1955, p. 245. return

10. K. Marx, Capital, pp. 557-558, 563. return

11. D. Sayer, Capitalism and Modernism. An excursus on Marx and Weber

(London: Routledge) 1991, p. 4. return

12. M. Weber, Le savant et le politique, 1919 (Paris: C. Bourgeois) 1990, p.

184. In a comment on this phrase, Enzo Traverso writes: "Against the
Fortschrittsoptimismus of many of his contemporaries, both liberals and
socialists, which contemplated with satisfaction the march of history
towards what they considered as a natural and inevitable progress, his
warning was of pitiless clear-sightedness." See E. Traverso, L'histoire
déchirée. Essai sur Auschwitz et les intellectuels, (Paris: Ed. du Cerf)
1997, p. 47. return

13. M. Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, translated
by Stephen Kalberg, (Los Angeles: Blackwell) 2002, p. 17 (slight
correction by me ML). return

14. Ibid. return

15. Ibid. p. 31. See also p.37. return

16. Max Weber, "Der Sozialismus," in Schriften für Sozialgeschichte und

Politik (Reclam) 1997, p. 246. return

17. M. Weber, The Protestant Ethic..., p. 123. return

18. Ibid. p. 123 return

19. See. E. Tiryakian, "The Sociological Import of a Metaphor. Tracking the

Source of Max Weber's 'Iron Cage'," in P. Hamilton (ed.), Max Weber.
Critical Assessment (London: Routledge, 1991) vol. I, 2. Pp. 109-120.
return

20. M. Weber, The Protestant Ethic..., p. 124. return

21. Karl Löwith, Max Weber and Karl Marx (London: George Allen & Unwin)
1982, pp.47-48. return

22. See on this Jean-Marie Vincent, Max Weber ou la democratie inachévée,

(Paris: Ed. du Felin) 1998, pp. 141, 160-161. return
23. Marx does not ignore the affinities between capitalist accumulation and
the Puritan ethics, although he does not give it the same importance as
Weber. In his Grundrisse he refers to the "connexion" (Zusammenang)
between capitalism and English puritanism or Dutch Protestantism.
return

24. I developed this viewpoint in my paper "Figures of Weberian Marxism,"

in Theory and Society. Renewal and Critique in Social Theory, vol. 25.3,
June, 1996, pp. 431-446. return

MICHAEL LÖWY, a French citizen born in Brazil, is the

Research Director In Sociology at CNRS (National Center
for Scientific Research) and also a lecturer at the Ecole des
Hautes, Etudes en Sciences Sociales. His latest book was
The Theory of Revolution in the Young Marx (Haymarket,
2003).

Contents of No. 42

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