These notes on Weber are really a continuation of the material of "On Revolution" posted yesterday. As you can see, we are trying to formulate a conceptual framework that will allow us to integrate our critique of economic reality in an overall strategy of political trasnformation, a project of liberation
from the strait-jacket (ever more hideous and odious) of capitalist command of living labor through the money-wage (the material on Keynes adumbrates these matters - just search this site using the facility on the top left-hand corner of this page). Again, apologies for the "difficult" nature of the discussion, but the task is urgent given what is happening at the moment....
Weber’s Political
Sociology
If we return now to the more specifically political aspects of Weber’s social
theory, we will find that our lengthy but thorough exegesis of his version of
Nietzschean Rationalisierung and of capitalist society is enormously useful in
the interpretation of his political theory as well as sociology. Suddenly, what
seemed to be disconnected and far-flung ideas and suggestions for the
“re-construction” of Germany
after the Great War, fall into place and form a coherent strategy (not just an “ideology”) for the preservation and renewal
of bourgeois hegemony over society. Let us take a look.
Let
us now turn to parliament.
First
and foremost modern parliaments are assemblies representing
the
people who are ruled by the means of bureaucracy. It is,
after
all, a condition of the duration of any rule, even the best
organized,
that it should enjoy a certain measure of inner assent from
at
least those sections of the ruled who carry weight in society. Today
parliaments
are the means whereby this minimum of assent is made
manifest.
(166)
Clear is the
“division of labor” indicated by Weber between “the bureaucracy” on one side,
which simply “administers” to “the most basic needs of social life”, that is,
the “rationality” of capitalist enterprise that has now become “social capital”
and on whose “profitability” the entire reproduction of “the society of
capital” is dependent. It is this “bureaucracy”, which is both “official”
(military and civilian) and “private” (capitalistic), that effectively “rules
the people” who are in turn “re-presented” by “assemblies that constitute
modern parliaments”. Weber therefore assumes the pre-existence of a pyramid of
“power” (potestas) that runs from officialdom to private capitalistic
enterprise that “rules the people” of a modern nation-state who are in turn
merely “re-presented” by an assembly called “parliament” which they have
“selected” to secure for the “rule” – that is, importantly, for the
“bureaucracy”, official and private – “a certain measure of inner assent”,
which means “legitimacy and authority”, “from at least those sections of the
ruled who carry weight in society”!
By this last phrase
Weber must mean principally the owners of capital – because we must remember
that a nation-state is “a nation-state among many”, in the sense that capital
is free to be withdrawn from the territory of a nation-state. Still, it is
evident that not only officialdom but also private capitalist enterprise needs
a minimum of legitimacy in terms of its ability to provide for the needs and wants
of most members of a society, in particular its workforce which is part of
“those sections who carry weight”. Yet this “assent” (legitimacy and authority)
seem to depend very much on the ability of “the rulers” (the combined
bureaucracies, public and private) to deliver the goods of growth and
development. And the means to ensure that this happens, first, in a manner that
does not endanger the wage relation and, second, in a manner that perpetuates
the existing system of political domination, that is, by means of a “tool” that
dispenses political power in accordance with a pool of economic resources drawn
from the productive activities of workers.
There is a
political discrepancy, then, between the “collection” of resources for the
public budget through taxation, and the “dispensation” of these resources that
go through the “filter” of the state bureaucracy. It is obvious that the
greater is the role of the government budget in the economy, the more
politically explosive the role of the State becomes and the more precarious
will grow the role of Parliament – also in its role as “direct employer of wage
labor”. In other words, the “delivery” or less of “growth and development”
tends, yes, to become an “apolitical” form of control, but it also makes the failure
of delivery a direct threat not just to “private capital” but to “the
collective capitalist” as well!
For
certain acts, the public powers are obliged to use the form of an
agreement
in law after prior consultation with parliament,
the
most important of these is the budget. Today,
and ever since the
time when the prerogatives
of the estates were first created, the right
to control the budget, the
power to determine the manner in which
the state procures its
finances has been parliament's decisive instrument
of power. (166)
The potestas of
Parliament consists in its ability to decide over how to devolve social
resources drawn from civil society, from the economically significant sectors
of it, which means from those sectors that generate “profits”. In so doing,
Parliament plays an intermediate role in the sense that its own operation is
not “for profit”, and yet it aims at preserving the means for the generation of
“profits”. The overriding aim of Parliament therefore is to preserve a “private
economic sphere” in which at least “putatively” the profitability of the entire
system is drawn, even if this means the “subtraction”, at least temporarily, of
entire areas of “investment” from private capital. Parliament plays the role of
a safety-valve that is able to release political pressure by “monitoring”, by
“redistributing”, by “planning” its future distribution (“electoral promises”),
and by intervening where necessary to neutralize or destroy or even prevent the
formation of alternative sources of “power” (in the sense of potestas – so that
in fact the State does NOT have a monopoly of “power” – only of potestas, not
of potentia). This is the essence of
liberalism!
There is therefore
a “latency” to “power” that a “negative politics” on the part of Parliament may
well not detect and that may lead to social and political upheaval. This is
what Weber’s “positive politics” is meant to prevent.
Admittedly,
so long as parliament’s only means of
lending
weight to the population’s complaints about the administration
is
to deny the government finances, to refuse its assent to legislative
proposals
and to put forward motions of its own which lack binding force,
parliament
is excluded from participating positively in
political
leadership. It can and will then engage only in 'negative
politics’
confronting the leaders of the administration like some hostile power,
and
hence being fobbed off by them with the irreducible
minimum
of information and being regarded as a mere hindrance,
an
assembly of impotent grumblers and know-alls. On the other hand,
the
bureaucracy in turn tends to be regarded by parliament and the
voters
as a caste of careerists and bailiffs ranged against the people
who
are the object of its tiresome and largely superfluous arts. (166)
A “negative
politics”, one in which Parliament begins to fail in its “mediating” role
between social needs and “profitability”, threatens the stability of the
bureaucracy as well, because the bureaucracy merely “executes” the will of the
leadership – but if this “leadership” is merely hierarchical and sclerotic and
wishes to preserve the status quo, it will lack the dynamism required by a
capitalist system in which “labor” is “free” – “free”, that is, to indicate how
the money-wage is to be spent, again, a “negative” purchasing “power”
that leaves intact the “limits to production” imposed by the need of capital to
re-produce or “renew” the money-wage on an expanded scale (either “quantitative
expansion” or “qualitative development”).
The
situation is different in countries where parliament has established
the
principle that the leaders of the administration must either be
drawn
directly from its own ranks (a 'parliamentary system' in the true
sense),
or that such leaders require the expressly stated confidence
of
a majority in parliament if they are to remain in office, or that they (166)
must
at least yield to an expression of no confidence (parliamentary
selection of the leaders). For this
reason they must give an account of
themselves,
exhaustively, and subject to verification by parliament or
its
committees (parliamentary accountability of the leaders») and they
must
lead the administration in accordance with guidelines approved
by
parliament (parliamentary control of the administration). In this case,
the
leaders of the decisive parties in parliament at any given moment
necessarily
share positive responsibility for the power of the state.
Then
parliament is a positive political factor alongside the monarch,
whose
role in helping to shape policy is not based on the formal
prerogatives of the crown (or at least not mainly or
exclusively on such
rights),
but on his influence, which will be very great in any case but
will
vary according to his political astuteness and his determination
to
reach his goals. Rightly or wrongly, this is what is called a popular
democracy
(Volksstaat), whereas a parliament of the ruled confronting
a
ruling body of officials with negative politics is a variety of authoritarian
state
(Obrigkeitsstaat) , what interests us here is the practical
significance
of the position of parliament; whether one loves or hates the whole
parliamentary business it is not to be got rid of. (165-6)
In a modern state real rule,
which becomes effective in everyday life
neither through parliamentary
speeches nor through the pronouncements
of monarchs but through the
day-to-day management of the
administration, necessarily and inevitably lies in the hands of
officialdom,
both military and civilian.
The modern high-ranking officer even
conducts battles from his
‘office’. (145)
The Beamtetum (officialdom) that Weber has in mind here is
not restricted to the strictly “lifeless” machinery of production and
government administration, but involves also the “leadership” of this “machine”
that “embodies” within its structures “the care for external goods” that is the
“autonomous market demand for the provision of needs and wants” expressed by
“formally free labor”. It is this “iron cage” of needs and wants that gives
“life” in the “form” of a “congealed spirit” to the “machinery”– “both military
and civilian”, no less than “economic” – of “everyday life” that is subject to
the “rule” of “the modern state” that “becomes effective” through the active
“management of the administration”.
What matters to Weber is the re-presentation, the faithful
and accurate and “effective management” – that is to say, trans-mission and
co-ordination and implementation – of the system of needs and wants that constitutes the “everyday life” of “the
nation” and therefore also its “political
will”.
What interests us here is the
question of the political legacy bequeathed
by Bismarck as a result of all these things. He
left behind
a nation entirely lacking
in any kind of political education, far below the
level it had already attained
twenty years previously. And above all a
nation entirely without
any political will, accustomed to assume that
the great statesman at the
head of the nation would take care of
political matters for them.
(144)
Not only does Weber believe that “the political will of the
nation” is a “unity”, an entity that can be given a specific shape and
expression, but he believes also that the expression of this “political will of
the nation” is a “rule”, in other words, that it is imposed from above on the
“ruled” below, whose “totality of interests” it both “re-presents” and
“manages” through the “administration”, the bureaucracy – military and civilian
and economic – that is drawn from the body politic.
At the same time his [Bismarck’s] enormous
prestige had the purely
negative consequence of
leaving parliament utterly without power.
It is well known that, after leaving
office, he accused himself of having
made a mistake in this respect)
and was then made to suffer the consequences
as part of his own fate. The
powerlessness of parliament also meant that its
intellectual level was very
'low.' Admittedly, the naively moralising
legend of our litterateurs
would have us believe that cause and effect
were in fact the other way
found, namely that parliament deserved
to remain powerless because
of the low quality of parliamentary life.
The true state of affairs,
self-evident on any sober reflection, is indicated
by some very simple facts and
considerations. Whether a parliament
is of high or low
intellectual quality depends on whether great
problems are not only discussed but are conclusively decided
there. In
other words, it depends on whether
anything happens in parliament and
on how much depends on
what happens there, or whether it is merely
the reluctantly tolerated
rubber-stamping machine for a ruling
bureaucracy. (144-5)
The “power” (potestas) of Parliament is not derived from its
formal legal statute but rather from the effective
exercise of its administrative functions. Weber intends power to be the
dual relationship between “the discussion of great problems” that are
re-presented by members of parliament authorized from their “constituencies” or
“electorates” so to do, from the bottom, but also the effective exercise of
this “legislative power” into its administrative implementation. Consequently,
the “power” of Parliament is “political” in a functional sense – as an
extension of “the management of the administration”. No mystique here, no halo,
no aura about the “role” of the leitender Geist! No “creativity”, no
“innovativeness”, no Individualitat or Personlichkeit! It is not “innate talent”
or “intellect” or (indeed!) “charisma” that determine the “ability” of
parliamentary leadership: it is the actual performance of the “leadership
functions” that hones the “task” of political “responsibility”.
The
leading spirit, the ‘entrepreneur’ in the one
case,
the politician in the other, is something different from an
‘official’.
Not necessarily in form, but certainly in substance. The
entrepreneur,
too, sits in an 'office'. An army commander does the
same.
The army commander is an officer and thus formally no differ-
159
ent
from all other officers. If the general manager of a large enterprise
is
the hired official of a limited company, his legal position is also no
different
in principle from that of other officials. In the sphere of the
state
the same applies to the leading politician. The leading minister
is formally an official with a pensionable
salary. The fact that, according
to
all known constitutions, he can be dismissed at any time and
can
demand to be discharged distinguishes his position outwardly
from
that of many, but not all other officials. Yet much more striking
is
the fact that, unlike other officials, he and he alone is not required
to
demonstrate any kind of qualification based on training.
What the bureaucracy “cannot do” is actually “to decide” –
this is the “function” of the leitender Geist, but not in a “Caesarist” sense!
Even when Weber “mentions” the term “Caesarism”, he clearly and explicitly does
not intend it to be as a
charismatic leader” whose task or role in government is “special” or “elevated”
or different in quality from other “managerial administrative functions”: it is
simply a “function”!
For
it is not the many-headed
assembly
of parliament as such that can 'govern' and 'make’ policy.
There
is no question of this anywhere in the world, not even in
England. The entire broad mass of
the deputies functions only as a
following
for the 'leader' - or the small group of leaders who form
the
cabinet, and they obey them blindly as long as the leaders are
successful.
That is how things should be. The 'principle of the small
number'
(that is the superior political manoeuverability of small leading
groups)
always rules political action. This element of 'Caesarism' is
ineradicable
in mass states.
But
it is also this element alone which guarantees that responsibility
towards
the public rests with particular individuals whereas it would
be
completely dissipated within a many-headed governing assembly.
This
is particularly evident in true democracy. (174)
“True democracy” is then a parliamentary “oversight” of
“bureaucratic rule” based on the “exact calculation of profit” consequent upon
the “autonomous demand of workers” (free labor) whose “industrial work” is a
homogeneous “force” (labor power) to be “organized rationally” by capitalists
in accordance with this “autonomous demand” or “iron cage” – an “oversight”
that is “governed” by “leaders selected” by Parliament through debate and
compromise and whose continued leadership is dependent on their “continued
success”. Weber does not define “success” but we can take it that this pivots
on the “profitability” of the system which is the ultimate sanction of its
“rationality”. Once more, Weber’s reliance on the Hobbesian and Schopenhauerian
“pessimist or eristic individual possessivism”, – refined by Nietzsche
(philosophically) and by the Neoclassics (economically) - is unmistakeable.
The point Weber makes above about the “speed of
decision-making” which he calls “the superior political maneuverability of
‘small’ leading groups” is something that Robert Michels takes up in Political Parties to substantiate their
supremacy over more “democratic” or “consiliar” deliberative bodies. The
“responsibility” of the leitender Geist, then, is something that is owed to
“the public”, especially in “mass states”, and that “would be completely dissipated within a many-headed governing assembly”
if it did not “rest with particular individuals”. Again, “political
responsibility” is conceived of in terms of “results”, of “economy”, of
“efficiency” – not in terms of “political freedom”. Given that the “power”
(potestas) of the “rulers” is derived from “the provision for the system of
needs and wants” (“rational” under bureaucratic rule), it is entirely evident
here how Weber relies on an external or extrinsic notion of “free labor”,
one based on “labor power” and not on “living labor” which he would identify
with “the politics of conviction” as against “the politics of responsibility”!
But the main
question here, the impellent one, is: - what happens when “responsibility”
(read “profitability”) becomes “ir-responsible” because “profit” becomes “a
barrier to production”? This “barrier” is not a “technical” or “economic” one:
it is a “political” barrier in the broadest sense – and with this notion of
“living labor as a barrier to the accumulation of dead labor” both Arendt’s and
Weber’s notions of “freedom” (voluntaristic the first, mechanical
the latter) can be overcome. Of course, the only
way in which Weber’s “rationality” can be reconciled with the “freedom” of “labor”
is if this “freedom”, by which he means “autonomous demand for consumption
goods on the part of workers” is limited prepotently, violently, by
capitalists so as to ensure the “profitability” of “capitalist economic action”
– that is to say, the “renewed exchange(!) of living labor with
dead labor”. As Arendt reminds us in chapter five of “On Revolution”, “every
builder stands outside the object built”, and therefore it is utterly
impossible “to exchange” the human “ability to act” with an object pro-duced by
that living activity! (Although, to cavil
at it, Arendt does not see that the “distinction” between artist and artifact,
worker and work, is valid only to establish the impossibility of an equal
or free exchange between living and dead labor outside of “violence”.
This is not to say, however, that the artifact has nothing to do with the
artist: indeed, this “identity” of being human with the objectification
of being human is the aim of our historical project.)