This is the first section of our 'Weberbuch'. Here we trace the political history and meaning of the concept of "rationalization" that plays a central role in Weber's work and, after him, in that of countless social theoreticians and economists, no less than philosophers, from Lukacs to Schumpeter to the Frankfurt School. Although he never used this term, the philosophical antecedents of this concept and the historical unfolding of the political reality it contains were expounded originally in the work of Friedrich Nietzsche. Although a most powerful elaboration can be found also in Karl Marx's critique of political economy and of capitalism, the limitation of Marx's insight in this specific respect is that he failed to see how a "scientific framework of analysis" can be much more than "merely" ideological. Unlike Nietzsche, Marx always believed in "reality" and "science" - which is why he could not see how "science", like "history", is a praxis that is always conducted and written by those who happen to hold power in human societies. Economic "science", as Schumpeter knew, is "a box of tools": but it is not a "value-neutral" box of tools (contra Weber) because the "regularities and patterns", the "data", that it seemingly records or discovers are not objective or spontaneous reflections of "reality"; rather, they reflect the state of affairs imposed and coerced upon the polity by the people who lead it - as Nietzsche put it, "we find what we already put there"! This, in a nutshell, is the "truth" and the "lie" of scientific positivism.
To make the reading of this piece a little easier, we can summarise its thesis quite simply as follows: the essence of capitalism is "the exact calculation" of profit made possible by the violent "rational organization of formally free labour through the regular discipline of the factory". The modality of this violence, its "scientific" application, cannot be comprehended by economic analysis because this analysis serves only to sanction as "science" what is instead the product of social and political antagonism the conduct and administration of which has become the overriding purpose of what we call "the nation State", that is, a specific form of political command that has been refined since the rise of government bureaucracies and modern armies dating back to 17th century Europe, especially in Stuart England and in Absolutist France - and whose great theoreticians are, of course, Machiavelli and Hobbes.
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To make the reading of this piece a little easier, we can summarise its thesis quite simply as follows: the essence of capitalism is "the exact calculation" of profit made possible by the violent "rational organization of formally free labour through the regular discipline of the factory". The modality of this violence, its "scientific" application, cannot be comprehended by economic analysis because this analysis serves only to sanction as "science" what is instead the product of social and political antagonism the conduct and administration of which has become the overriding purpose of what we call "the nation State", that is, a specific form of political command that has been refined since the rise of government bureaucracies and modern armies dating back to 17th century Europe, especially in Stuart England and in Absolutist France - and whose great theoreticians are, of course, Machiavelli and Hobbes.
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Introduction: State and Capitalist Bureaucracy
as ‘Trennung’
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’. (‘Parliament and Government’, p.145 in CWP)
In
statistical terms the numbers of office workers in private firms are growing
faster
than manual workers, and it is quite ridiculous for our litterateurs
to
imagine that there is the slightest difference between the
mental
work done in the office of a private firm and that performed
in an
office of the state.
Fundamentally
they are both exactly the same kind of thing.
Looked at
from a social-scientific point of view, the modern state is
an
‘organisation’ (Betrieb) in exactly the same way as a factory; indeed
this is
its specific historical characteristic. (p.146)
Weber’s approach to and theorization of
the Rationalisierung experiences a
marked and dramatic evolution between the year 1917 when he writes and
publishes the articles on Parlament und
Regierung and the year 1920 when he completes the Vorbemerkung to the Aufsatzes
zur Religionssoziologie. This last contains a definition of the Rationalisierung encompassing its
origins in both state administration and in industrial capitalism that reveals
a marked deviation from its abstract “ideal type” sociology prior to 1917
traceable back to the Protestantische
Ethik. The tide of events – the
worsening of the military position of the Reich and apprehension over its
domestic political repercussions together with the revolutionary tumults in
Russia and their significant echoes in Western Europe – had forced Weber to
turn his attention sharply to the re-structuring of “Parliament and Government
in a ‘Newly-Ordered’ [neu-geordneten]
Germany”, and particularly to “the nature of political parties” (Parteienwesen)
and of the existing bureaucracy (Beamtentum, officialdom) within the overall
problematic of the Demokratisierung
of the old European absolutist regimes that followed the rise of the industrial
working class. The evolution of Weber’s thought over this period offers a
unique vantage point from which to trace this entire Problematik of the relationship between capitalist social relations
of production, their intrinsic social antagonism in the dynamic context of
“economic growth and development”, and the mode of political organization and
representation of the antagonistic forces it pro-duces.
To be sure, “looked at from a
social-scientific point of view, the modern state is an ‘organisation’
[Betrieb] in exactly the same way as a factory” – which is why it is of fundamental importance to understand
their symbiosis and “con-currence” in the fact that if indeed it is the
“specific historical characteristic” of the “modern state” to be “organized in
exactly the same way as a factory”, it was also the new asset of the European
absolutist nation-state that made possible the concentration of political power
that enabled the bourgeoisie to impose “the rational organization of free labor
under the regular discipline of the factory” on the rest of society!
The literati,
the nostalgics and apologists for the aristocratic status quo, for the “republique des notables”, overlook the
reality that “there is [not] the slightest difference between the mental work
done in the office of a private firm and that performed in an office of the
state”. Indeed, “the number of office workers in private firms is growing
faster than that of manual workers”. There is a profound and urgent need to
understand the transformation of capitalist industry and labor process because
it is this that forms the foundation of the modern nation-state – it is its
“model” that must be examined closely so that the “machinery of State” may
adapt to the “needs” of society, of its “economy” in such a way that the
“political will” of the economically decisive parts of society may be expressed
“powerfully” – for there to be “positive politics” and not the present “negative
politics” whereby Parliament is “prevented or impeded” from exercising the
vital functions of “leadership” that the “national economy” – the economy
understood in terms of the Machtsstaat
– demands and requires.
The capitalist “entrepreneur” here has
been already side-lined. It is not that his “function” is unimportant: it is
rather that the entrepreneurial function itself is incapable of “mediating” and
“realizing” the trans-formation of the economy, of capitalist “development” in
the broadest sense, even in the manner championed by Joseph Schumpeter! The
genial Austrian economist had sought to identify and describe precisely the
“mechanism of transformation” that is specific to the capitalist economy and
that leads to its “development”. But this “development” is dependent on society
not just in the sense that it occurs in a social context but also in the far
more important sense that the “trans-formations” that capitalist industry
generates have far-reaching political implications and consequences that need
themselves to be mediated and mustered to maximize the Macht of the Nationaloekonomie,
the power of the nation-state and of its leading class, and not only “profits”.
The differentiation between the “dynamic” role of the “entrepreneur” and the “static”
or passive one of the rentier or “capitalist” is duplicated at the political
level by the pressing need to by-pass the passive
and abulic inertia of the machinery
of bureaucratic state administration with the active powerful leadership of a parliamentary elite that is not
imposed on the country from above but that rises instead from its midst as the
powerful expression of the political will
of the nation, of its industrially
relevant components - “the representatives of the truly important powers in
the economic world today”(PuR, in Political
Writings, p.93).
This “problematic” had been completely missing in Weber’s earlier studies on
the Protestant Ethic and the “entrepreneurial spirit of capitalism”. Armed with
the insights of Schumpeter’s Theorie,
however, Weber is now able to integrate the Austrian’s “theory of economic
development” with a much more powerful Nietzschean account of parliamentary
politics “in a society that is destined to remain capitalistic for a long time
to come”! The essential and urgent
task is how to co-ordinate the Demokratisierung
of social forces within the institutional framework of the Parlamentarisierung. The problem is no longer so much to interpret
the role of the entrepreneur as the herald of capitalist development within the
“organisation” that is the capitalist factory. Instead, the essential and
pressing task is that of preserving the rule of the bourgeoisie and of
invigorating the nation-state by understanding whereupon and wherefrom
capitalist industry derives its explosive dynamic “power” – a power that drives
the national economy and therefore its “Macht” a lot more efficiently and “rationally”
than does the state administration. It is not the specific role of the
entrepreneur within the “congealed spirit” represented by the capitalist
machine that interests Weber, but rather the “source” of the energy, of the
productive power that the entrepreneur musters and channels in the direction of
“development”. And if, as Schumpeter argues, “development” is really the entrepreneurial
channeling or use of crisis, then the
state bureaucracy must learn in equal measure how to muster and channel its own
“crisis”, how to relinquish the romantic utopian dreams of “social equilibrium”
in order to utilize social conflict,
to mediate and to govern it so as to
preserve the power of the nation in the global arena.
That the capitalist economy can
occasion and provoke “crises” cannot be put in doubt. Weber had already
experienced the economic convulsions of 1905 and their political complications
reverberating from Russia to
Germany
The central problem of Socialism is one
posed by capitalist industry itself - the “anarchy of production”, the unequal
distribution of wealth in society; and both are a direct result of the
“separation” (the Marxian Trennung)
of the worker from the means of production.
The relative independence of the
craftsman or the home-worker, the
freehold farmer, the Commendatar,
the knight and the vassal, rested in (147)
each case on the fact that they
themselves owned the tools, provisions,
finances or weapons which they
used to perform their economic,
political or military functions,
and lived off them while they were
carrying out those functions.
Conversely, the hierarchical dependency
of the worker, clerk, technical
employee, the assistant in an academic
institution and also of the
official and soldier of the state rests in every
case on the fact that the tools,
provisions and finances which are
indispensable both for the
performance of his work and for his economic
existence are concentrated in the
hands of an entrepreneur in
the one
case, and in those of a political master in the other. (146-7)
The former “autonomy” of the artisanal skilled
worker, of the Gelernte, belonged to
a stage of society in which communities were relatively self-reliant and
controlled the “totality” of the labour process. But this is exactly what
capitalist industrial “development” has changed – what occasions its “crises”
in the explosive “socialization” of the reproduction of society itself! The
concentration of industry by capitalism with the Taylorisation of the labor
process has determined the massification of society to such an extent that all
pining for a lost paradise of “artisanal” control over the labour process, of
“totality”, all resentment and ranting against the “dis-enchantment” (Ent-zauberung) engendered by the rise of
capitalist industrialisation are sheer “romantic fantasy”.
Whether
an organisation is a modern state
apparatus
engaging in power politics or cultural politics (Kulturpolitik)
or
pursuing military aims, or a private capitalist business, the same
decisive
economic basis is common to both, namely the ‘separation’
of the
worker from the material means of conducting the activity of
the
organisation - the means of production in the economy, the
means of
war in the army, or the means of research in a university
institution
or laboratory, and the financial means in all of them. (147)
“The same decisive economic basis is common
to both”! Common to the “modern state apparatus” and to “private capitalist business”. Both are “organizations”; they are “businesses” or “factories” –
and what distinguishes them is precisely “the ‘separation’ of the worker from
the material means of conducting the
activity of the organization”. This “separation”, this Marxian Trennung, then, may well seem peculiar
to capitalist industry but in reality it extends to the rest of society and in
especial mode to the “modern state apparatus” that we call “bureaucracy”,
including the army and indeed even “scientific research”.
This
apparatus is the common feature shared
by all
these formations, its existence and function being inseparably
linked,
both as cause and effect, with the 'concentration of the material
means of
operation'. Or rather this apparatus is the form taken
by that
very process of concentration. Today
increasing 'socialisation’ [Sozialisierung]
inevitably means increasing
bureaucratisation.
Historically,
too 'progress’ towards the bureaucratic state which
adjudicates
in accordance with rationally established law and administers
according
to rationally devised regulations stands in the closest
relation to the development of
modem capitalism.
Bureaucratisation is the “inevitable”
outcome of “socialization” which, in turn, is engendered by “the concentration
of the material means of operation” – and of course also of “the material means
of production”. Now, this “apparatus is the form taken by that very process of
concentration”: it is this extensive and pervasive parcelisation of social
labor, the very inter-connectedness of social functions that cater to “the most
basic needs of social life” that make a nostalgic return to the “artisanal
ownership of the means of production” on the part of the individual worker more
than just a fantasy – but a dangerous one as well! With one fell swoop, Weber
exposes the sheer “reactionary” content of the utopian ramblings of the Sozialismus.
The modern state emerges when the
prince takes this business into his
own household, employs salaried
officials and thereby brings about
the 'separation' of the officials
from the means of conducting their
duties. Everywhere we find the
same thing: the means of operation
within the factories, the state
administration, the army and university
departments are concentrated by
means of a bureaucratically structured
human apparatus in the hands of
the person who has command
over (beherrscht) this
human apparatus. This is due partly to purely
technical considerations, to the
nature of modern means of operation
- machines, artillery and so on -
bur partly simply to the greater
efficiency of this kind of human
cooperation: to the development of
'discipline" the discipline
of the army, office, workshop and business.
In any event it is a serious
mistake to think that this separation of
the worker from the means of
operation is something peculiar to
industry, and, moreover, to private
industry. The basic state of affairs
remains the same when a different
person becomes lord and master
of this apparatus, when, say, a
state president or minister controls it
instead of a private manufacturer.
The ‘separation' from the means of
operation continues in any case. (“Der
Sozialismus”, p.281, CPW)
To seek a remedy to “the anarchy of
private production” in a “socialism” whereby the ownership of the means of
production is “socialized” by the State is a pathetic and reactionary chimaera
for the simple reason that – as Weber blithely intuits here without perhaps
realizing the full implications of what he is writing – it was the State in the first place that effected the
“separation” of soldiers from their means of operation, and the State that
enabled a class of capitalists “to separate” the workers from the means of
production! Indeed, Weber may well have argued here that it was some of the
workers themselves who rose from the
ranks of artisanry to become accumulators of capital thereby “separating” or
“expropriating” their erstwhile fellow workers and huddling them into
factories!
Weber does make this last point in the Vorbermerkungen, quoted later here
[Maurice Dobb makes it a central plank of his Studies in the Development of Capitalism]. In Politik als Beruf, he is even more explicit about the first point:
Everywhere the development of the
modern state is initiated through
the action of the prince. He paves
the way for the expropriation of the
autonomous and 'private' bearers
of executive power who stand beside
him, of those who in their own
right possess the means of administration,
warfare, and financial
organization, as well as politically usable goods of
all sorts. The whole process is a
complete parallel to the development
of the capitalist enterprise
through gradual expropriation of the independent
producers. In the end, the modern
state controls the total means
of political organization, which
actually come together under a single
head. No single official
personally owns the money he pays out, or the
buildings, stores, tools, and war
machines he controls. In the contemporary
'state' — and this is essential
for the concept of state - the 'separation'
of the administrative staff, of
the administrative officials, and of the
workers from the material means of
administrative organization is completed.
Here the most modern development
begins, and we see with our
own eyes the attempt to inaugurate
the expropriation of this expropriator
of the political means, and
therewith of political power. (‘PaB’, p.82).
Lukacs, who quotes and discusses some
of these passages from Weber (at pp.95-6 of Geschichte
und Klassenbewusstsein), can only lament further on [at p.103] that “[t]he
specialisation of skills leads to the destruction of every image of the whole”.
Totally lost to him are
the far-reaching political implications of Weber’s observations about the role
of the State administration in Western Europe
after the Great Crisis of the early seventeenth century in the development of
capitalist industry (a topic closely canvassed in M. Tronti et alii, Stato e Rivoluzione in Inghilterra). Nor can it be doubted that
this deficiency has its roots in Marx’s own insistence on the “superstructural”
role of the State as against the “determinant” role of “the social relations of
production”. Evidently, somewhere along the line, Marx lost sight of the fact
that there is no such thing as a “capitalist economy” or an “Economics” with a
“market” functioning according to an objectively definable “Law of Value” that
can be abstracted from Politics – and that indeed “the State” is part and
parcel of those “social relations of production”, as we are seeking to demonstrate
with this study (on Marx’s theory of the State, cf. N. Bobbio, “Marx e lo Stato”
in Bobbio et al. Dizionario di Politica).
But yet again Weber assumes that the
nature and substance of the “labor” that goes into production can be aggregated
into a homogeneous mass and be “divided” into “separate individual labors”
subject to the rational discipline of the factory for the maximization of
industrial production and ultimately profit. Weber fails to theorize and to specify
what the “content”, the historical “substance”, of this entity called “labor”
is: he continues to skirt the edges of the question, describing the rise of “the
bureaucratic state” as a “‘progress’ toward rationally devised regulations
[which] stands in the closest relation
to the development of modern capitalism”. We are still none the wiser as to the
“content” of this “rationality” and, in causal regressus, of bureaucracy, of
socialization, and then of concentration of both the means of production and
operation.
The main
inner foundation of the modern capitalist business is calculation. In order
to exist, it requires a system of justice and administration
which in
147
principle at any rate, function in a rationally
calculable manner according to stable,
general norms just as one calculates the
predictable performance of a machine.
The fact of the matter is that
“calculation”, however “rational”, is not and can never be more than a
“mathematical” or logical form of
behaviour. But it is as clear as daylight that “behaviour” itself can never be
“rationally calculable” unless it first assumes a “content”, a substantive
purpose that is capable of being
calculated, that makes this behaviour “calculable”! For it is simply impossible
to calculate or to rationalize the “incalculable” or the “irrational”! Mathematics
and logic all by themselves are mere “form”: they cannot be “applied” to human
behaviour and “functions” unless these are first reduced to operations or tasks
that can be “meaningfully quantified”! But such “quantification” cannot
be in and of itself “calculable and rational” precisely because it is the
“pre-condition” of the “mathesis”, of the “Rationalisierung”
that Weber says is “the inner foundation of modern capitalist business” and of
“the modern state apparatus” that make them both akin to (but not “identical with”!) “the predictable performance of
a machine”. The entire sociological meaning of the Rationalisierung, then, hinges on its
being a certain “practical conduct” whose content
is exquisitely political and can
never be reduced to “science” whilst
its form can be made “rationally
calculable” within broad parameters of that “practical conduct”. (We have examined in our Nietzschebuch the far-reaching
consequences of these Nietzschean insights on the entire logico-mathematical
foundations of Western “values”.)
We need to go further, to dig deeper
and find out what are the “stable, general norms” that allow such “predictable
performance”.
Bureaucracy is certainly far from being the only
modern form of organisation,
just as the factory is far from being the only form
in which manufacture can be
conducted. But these are the two forms which have
put their stamp on the present
age and the foreseeable future. The future belongs
to bureaucratization…
Compared with all these older forms, modern
bureaucracy is distinguished by a
characteristic which makes its inescapability much
more absolute than theirs,
namely rational, technical specialisation
and training. (156)
Yet, specialization and training may
well make the “inescapability” of bureaucracy “much more absolute” than
previous forms of organization; they certainly cannot account for it in the
first place.
But wherever the trained, specialised, modern
official has once begun to rule,
his power is absolutely unbreakable, because the entire organisation of providing
even
the most basic needs in life [Organisation der elementarsten Lebensversorgung]
then depends on his performance of his duties.
In other words, what makes “the power of the modern official and of
bureaucracy absolutely unbreakable” is the fact that “the entire
organization of providing even the most basic needs in life then depends on the
performance of his duties”. At last, we are now able to join the dots of
Weber’s circuitous definitions to conclude that the “socialization” on which
bureaucracy rests depends in turn on the “concentration” of the means of
production and operation of society itself that are “organized” in such a
manner that “even the most basic needs in social life” depend on the
rational, technical specialization and training of modern bureaucracy and, a
fortiori, of modern capitalism on which it is founded or at least “stands in
closest relation”.
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