6
But
the question still remains of what “modern industrial work” means and of how it
leads necessarily – “inescapably” – to “concentration”, to “socialization” and
thence to what this last “inevitably means”, namely, “bureaucratization”. This
is an all-important chain of historical and theoretical transitions or passages
that must be traced carefully. Even as late as Parlament und Regierung, however, Weber fails to do this,
preferring instead to leave the whole chain of historical connections entirely
open.
The
ultimate foundation of social life is “the system of needs and wants”. The
ultimate aim and purpose of society is to satisfy these needs and wants that
are ineluctably “individual”. Not only is “the individual” and “self-interest”
the foundation of human society, not only is the satisfaction of “needs and
wants” – their “provision” – the essential aim of social life. But also the
efficient satisfaction of these needs and wants depends on the “rational and
systematic organization of free labor”. And this “free labor” is understood as
“operari”, as mere, sheer “labor power” or “force” – a homogeneous and measurable “quantity” that does not itself “create”
anything, pro-duce any goods, but rather “consumes” and “utilizes” the external
world so as to satisfy and “provide” for its “wants” – wants that are deemed to
be as “insatiable” as the Schopenhauerian Will. In Schopenhauer, the Ding an
sich is still present in the entity of the Will whose “objectification is the
body”. Therefore “the external world” exists as well, though only as
“representation” that can be “com-prehended” scientifically by the Understanding (Verstand) in accordance with
the Principle of Sufficient Reason. In the Schopenhauerian version of the
negatives Denken the world is still a “Wirk-lichkeit”, a “work-likeness”, an
“actu-ality” in which the human operari is “conditioned” by scientific
logico-mathematical “laws” just as it was in Kant, whose greatest merit for
Schopenhauer consisted precisely in this “separation” of thing-in-itself and
phenomena. Except that Schopenhauer effects a “re-versal” (Um-kehrung) of
Kant’s metaphysics: the “external” world therefore is not an “inscrutable
Ob-ject”, an unknowable “reality” of noumena “op-posed” (Gegen-stand, ob-ject)
to the Will, of which we can only register “phenomena”. But because it is now
the “subjective side” that is the “thing-in-itself” from which the “phenomena”,
the “objectifications” originate, the “scientificity” of experimental
observations, of phenomena, is guaranteed by the unity of their “re-presentation” (Vorstellung) as “subject-object”
– a unity that overcomes the infamous Kantian “antinomies of thought”: esse est
percipi – what you see is what you get. In this sense, Lukacs’s critique of
Kant’s “formalism” is fully comprehensible only through the “screen” of
Schopenhauer’s “reversal” of Kant.
The “separation”
of noumenon and phenomenon also disappears in Machism; but this time it is the
“thing-in-itself” that is entirely “eliminated” in favour of the “simple” mathematical con-nection between
phenomena or “sensations” (Empfindungen) in an experimental relationship that is “predictable and regular”. Like Neo-Kantism, Mach’s phenomenology, the
Empfindungen, effectively “instrumentalise” science reducing it to the state of
a mere “tool”, to its “success” or, in the phrase of one of the founders of the
marginalist revolution, Stanley Jevons, to a set of “predictions and regularities”. There is here
a virulent and total rejection of any “reality” or “substance” that may lie
“behind” phenomena, of any “metaphysics”. Science is sheer “certainty” achieved
in the “simplest” relations capable of being described and calculated with
mathematical precision.
For
Weber as for Nietzsche, there cannot be any “separation” (Trennung) in the
Marxian sense between “labor” and the “means of production” because there was never any union between them! The human operari is entirely “instrumental” to
its goal – the provision of want. There is and there can be no Gattungswesen, no species-conscious
being, no “original union” of workers with tools because, if anything and quite
to the contrary, the nature of human wants and the “scarcity” of their
provision ensure that there is “conflict” between and among workers, let alone
between workers and capitalists! Human beings are irreducibly and ontologically
“things-in-themselves”; they are “Wills” or, as Nietzsche describes them,
“instincts of freedom” that can “co-operate” or “col-laborate” to the extent
that their “needs”, their “iron necessities” and their “wants” are provided for
and satisfied.
But
this instrumental “operari”, this “labor” itself does not have “utility”. Only
consumption goods have “utility”: they and they alone ultimately “measure” or
“value” or “price” the marginal utility of “the means of production” not in an
“objective or substantive sense”, but merely from the “viewpoint”
(Gesichtspunkt), from the “per-spective” of the “individual choice”. Utility is
an entirely subjective and inscrutable entity that can be “measured” as
“Value”, that can be given “social significance” or a “social Form” – that can
be “reified” – only through the “social osmosis” of the market pricing
mechanism where individual Wills “clash” or “com-pete” for the same “scarce”
consumer goods. And this Value can be calculated not just in an instantaneous
or timeless analytical dimension but even in a temporal one, in terms of “time
preference”, even as a “projection” toward “the future”!
In
this “view” (Anschauung), in this “perspective” (Welt-anschauung), “labor” can
have no “utility” because it has no intrinsic “value”. Instead, “labor” is
“effort”, it is the “objectification of the Will”, it is the “operari”, it is
“Pain” (Leid) without “Pleasure” (Lust): “labor” is “dis-utility”! And the “marginal utility” of the consumption goods
produced “to provide for the worker’s wants” – the wage - must be equivalent to
the “marginal dis-utility of labor” if the production of consumption goods is
to be optimal!
Neoclassical theory from Gossen onwards begins with the
notion that human living activity is “toil”, it is “effort”, it is “want”
(Bedarf) and “pain” (Leid) in search of “provision” (Deckung). It follows from
this perspective that human living activity is conceptually “separated” from
its “object”, from its environment which supplies it with “the means of
production”. And consequently human living labour is seen from the outset as
pure and utter “destitution”, as “poverty”, as “want”. Accordingly, all means
of production cannot serve as means for the expression or objectification of
human living labour but rather as “labour-saving devices”! For the Neoclassics,
then, “labour” and workers are by definition the factor of
production that is in “want” or “need”, that suffers “toil” and “pain” and “dis-utility” – and that “needs”
capital (the means of production as “labour-saving tools”) in order to satisfy
its “wants” that are made “immediate”, “urgent” – in contrast with the
capitalist owner who can “defer” consumption – by the very fact that it does
not now have “provisions” for its subsistence and reproduction and survival!
What this means is that human living labour itself is
already considered, for one, as a “tool”, as an instrument whose “productivity”
can be measured in terms of “units of output per unit of time”. And for
another, it is seen as an activity or a “labour power” that is purely abstract, mere “potentiality”, utter
“possibility”, sheer “pro-ject” not bound to a particular, specific mode of
expression or activity. In practice, it is the latter “view” of living labor
that serves as the premise that leads inexorably to the former conclusion! Weber's
entire understanding of "free labour", discussed here earlier, is the
sociological equivalent of this decadence and nihilism – not, pace Lukacs, a “destruction of Reason”,
because “Reason” itself is the “summum bonum” that culminates in nihilism - of European thought. In this perspective,
this “abstract labour” is sheer, naked, destitute poverty, barren misery –
“potential” that can only become “actual” if, and only to the extent and manner
that, it is allowed by “the laws of
supply and demand” to come into contact as
a tool with “the means of production” that are the “endowment” and
“possession” of the capitalist.
Weber’s “inexorable separation” (“inexorable” because for
him there is no existential basis whatsoever for conceiving of a “union” of the
worker with the means of production except on the basis of “individual
ownership” of the latter) - the “inescapability of bureaucratic rule over
modern industrial work” anticipates fatidically the philosophical synthesis
operated by Heidegger only eight years later in 1927 with the publication of
his epoch-making Sein und Zeit.
Heidegger’s ontology of human Da-sein, of human being as “possibility”, is a
philosophical reflection of the politically-enforced “separation” (Trennung)
that Weber deems “inescapable” and that Heidegger will misconstrue philosophisch for phenomenological “inauthenticity”
(Un-eigentlichkeit) and existential “estrangement” (Verfall). Pathetic (like Schopenhauer’s
“sym-pathy” derided by Nietzsche, like Romain Rolland’s “oceanic feeling”
refuted by Freud in Die Unbehagen der
Kultur) will be Lukacs’s plaintive longing for the “enchantment” of
“totality”, his late-romantic vision of the proletariat as “the individual
subject-object of history” – just as equally pathetic will remain Heidegger’s appeals to “authenticity” in the
face of the Vorhandenheit
(instrumentality) of Technik. (The
proximity of the two thinkers is reviewed by L. Goldmann in Lukacs et Heidegger.)
For the Nietzschean
Weber, these “literati” with their “romantic fantasies” fail to grasp the
irreducible and overriding irreconcilability
of human individual “needs and wants”, the total absence of any “social
syn-thesis”, the complete lack of any inter
esse in human Da-sein. Life is “conflict”; it is “struggle”; it is Will to
Power. This much Weber has learned from Schopenhauer and Nietzsche combined.
But this ineluctable, physio-logical human conflict can and does allow for
human co-operation in a purely
instrumental sense, to achieve practical purposes that satisfy individual
“needs and wants”. Social institutions, both symbolic and political, can lead
to the “socialization” of the instincts through “compromises” that channel
human instincts of freedom toward the construction of an “ontogeny of thought”
that stretches from the notions of consciousness and “ego-ity” (Ich-heit), to
those of logic and mathematics, and then to science, individuality, society and
the State. This “ontogeny of thought” is what allows Weber to reconcile
Nietzsche’s “true perspectivism and phenomenalism” with Neo-Kantian
epistemology and Machian philosophy of science. Kant’s transcendental idealism
remained fundamentally “subjective”. The universality of Pure Reason is
questioned in the Critique of Judgement
and made to retreat to the sphere of
intuition and aesthetics, as Heidegger would argue later in the Kantbuch. Neo-Kantism is the avowal of
this “retreat of Reason”, of the definitive abandonment of the “summum bonum”
of German Idealism of unifying metaphysics with epistemology – a surrender
presaged already by Kant in the Opus
Postumum and the subject of the dramatic clash at Davos between Heidegger
and Cassirer. The Natur-wissenschaften
and the Geistes-wissenschaften will
never be “united” again: the irretrievable “separation” of the Subject from the
Object is finally conceded. The social sciences must turn to the Unicum of the “Soul” which can ex-press
and “externalize” its “spirit” through “symbolic and social forms”. This is the essence of
“socialization” that mani-fests itself in all areas of human life even to such
an extent that these “Forms” acquire “a life of their own”, until they become a
“crystallized Spirit” (geronnener Geist) that dominates the lives of
“individual souls”. The intellectual path of Lukacs from Die Seele und die Formen (adopting Simmel’s schema of “Soul” and
“Forms” from the Philosophische Kultur)
to the elaboration of the concept of “reification” out of the Marxian
“fetishism of commodities” in Geschichte
und Klassenbewusstsein describes faithfully
and fatefully this “flirtation” of
Marxism with the Vollendung of German
Idealism:
At the
time, then, it was Marx the ‘sociologist’ that attracted me and I saw him
through spectacles tinged by Simmel and Max Weber. I resumed my studies of Marx
during World War I, but this time I was led to do so by my general philosophical
interests and under the influence of Hegel rather than any contemporary thinkers. (from ‘1967 Preface’, p.ix)
Indeed, it was Marx who first acknowledged this
“flirtation” with Hegel (in the Preface to Kapital)
and then coined the phrase “crystallized
labor-time” [blosse Gerinnung von Arbeitszeit, Vol.1, Kapital] to indicate the “socially necessary labor time” that is “embodied” in the means of production
used by living labor “to valorize” commodities in the process of production.
Marx sought thereby to circumvent the obvious inconsistency that it is
impossible for “market prices”, which are “subjectively” allocated according to
“demand”, to determine what is “socially
necessary” labor-time. It is something with which the most discerning
Marxists have struggled since the publication of Volume Three of Das Kapital. The finest among them have
sought to reconcile the inconsistency by appealing precisely to this
“crystallization” of labor-time through the “reification” of human living labor
that the “fetishism of commodities” engenders through the market mechanism.
(See especially Lukacs’s chapter on “Reification” in Geschichte and the final chapter on “Marxism: Scienza o
Rivoluzione?” in L. Colletti’s Ideologia
e Societa’.) The insuperable objection to this “version” of Marx’s critique
is that if “value” is sheer “mystification” and “fetishism”, then it is
absolutely impossible for it to determine the quantitative allocation of social
resources for production! Nor is it possible for us to discern a way to evade
this “fetishism”! Lukacs himself confesses to the “overriding subjectivism” of
this framework (p.xviii) and indeed to its affinity
with Weber’s own brand of Neo-Kantian “rationalization” (as we will see later)
and Heidegger’s phenomenological account of “inauthenticity” and “totality” in Sein und Zeit (p.xxii).
It is not an accident then if Karl Lowith focused on the
convergence of the concepts of “rationalization” in Weber and of “alienation”
in Marx in his appositely titled early work on Max Weber and Karl Marx. This complex web of “sociological forms” characterizes also Weber’s entire methodology from the “ideal type” (Simmel’s
“Form”) as a “sociological form” to the hermeneutic Verstehen of social phenomena
(clearly drawn from Dilthey) that allows the liberation of “social science” from its “normative content” (wert-frei,
“value-free” science). Indeed, we will argue that Weber’s entire sociology and
“Wissenschaftslehre” is founded on these Simmelian “sociological Forms” that
allow him – as they do Schumpeter in the Theorie
and the Austrian School generally, especially von Mises who had links with
Weber – to conceive of the Rationalisierung
in terms of its “instrumental purpose” (Zweck-rationalitat
– what we may call “mathesis”) and therefore “scientificity” that can be
distinguished from its “Norm” or “Value” (Wert-rationalitat).
Once more, we are back full circle to Simmel’s Neo-Kantian dualism of “Soul”
(value, norm) and “Forms” (instrumental purpose). But in pursuing this schema, Weber moves very far from
Nietzsche’s much more consistent and sophisticated philosophical Entwurf and
his own original version of the Rationalisierung. Weber is more
“ecumenical” than Nietzsche in highlighting the “irrational” elements of Kultur
– in which Ratio and iron cage are “crystallizations” or “Forms” of the “Spirit
or Soul”. Such a neat “Kantian” distinction would have seemed absurd to Nietzsche
– part of that “moral theology” of German Idealism that he vehemently denounced.
And indeed part of the “emanationism” that Weber himself had rebuffed when
reviewing the “old” German Historical School in his Roscher und Knies.
It is a fact beyond doubt that Weber’s
scornful jibes at the “literati” and their “romantic fantasies” can be retorted
with some justice against his own “nostalgic lamentations” about the
“steel-hard casing” of “the care for external
goods”, at his ethereal conceptions of
a “crystallised Spirit” of modern
industrial work (to be examined below), and the “Ent-seelung” (out-souling,
desecration) of political life through its “massification” (in Politik als
Beruf), and the “Ent-zauberung” (dis-enchantment) of human experience through
its “instrumental rationalization”. Above all, as we will see, it is that central
notion of “free labor” that contains in its denotation of “autonomous market
demand” guiding and determining the “profitability” that is the benchmark of
“the rational conduct of capitalist business” – it is this notion of “free labor” that hides Weber’s ultimate
allegiance to the Spontaneitat of
human “needs and wants”. Here Weber
jettisons the initial Nietzschean “Resolve” (the notion of Gewissen or “conscience” or “responsibility” expounded and
championed against its opposite – schlechte Gewissen [bad conscience or bad
faith, later to mimetise into Heidegger’s Un-eigentlichkeit and Sartre’s
mauvaise foi] - by Nietzsche at length in the Genealogie) that he had espoused and proclaimed in his Inaugural
Lecture at Heidelberg in the attempt to bridge the divide between the
“revolutionary” and technocratic appeal of Austrian Machian empiricism, which sanctions the validity of “scientific
methods” in the study of social life, and the staid “conservatism” of German
Historical School historicism that seeks to preserve the aura of “subjectivity”, of Hegelian Ver-geist-igung (embodiment of spirit, or divine emanation), for human
existence. It is the “machinery” of the “congealed spirit”, whether “lifeless”
(the care for external goods, the wants and needs embodied in the labor process), or “living” (rational bureaucratic
rule) that Weber seeks to balance
(the “opposition” he vehemently emphasizes) with the Dezisionismus, the “responsibility” (Gewiss, Verantwortung), of the
leitender Geist. Even as late as
1918, Weber can still believe in the “value-neutrality” of his parliamentary
framework. But as we shall see, already in 1919 political developments inside Germany Weimar Republic
********************
No comments:
Post a Comment