4
Assuming that precisely this possibility were to be
an inescapable fate who
could help smiling at the anxiety of our
litterateurs lest future social and political
developments might bestow on us too much
'individualism' or ‘democracy' or
the like or that 'true freedom’ would not emerge
until the present
‘anarchy' in our economic production and the ‘party
machinations'
in our parliaments had been eliminated in favour of
‘social order’ and
an ‘organic structure’ - which means in favor of
the pacifism of
social impotence under the wing of the one quite
definitely inescapable
power, that of the bureaucracy in the state and the
economy?(169)
The laughable incomprehension of “the nature of the matter” by the literati,
the decadent liberal intelligentsia (an orientation that persists to the
present day!), is to believe that the capitalist economy is “anarchical” and
that parliamentary politics is “Machiavellian” – that the problem that besets
society is “too much ‘individualism’” or “democracy”, and that only “social
order” will restore “true freedom”. Yet it is precisely this “yearning” for a lost
paradise of “true freedom” – the Schumpeterian Individualitat of the
“entrepreneurial spirit” (Freedom) reconciled with the “scientific rationality
of Economics” (Truth) -, this unwillingness to grapple with the “anarchy” of
capitalism and the “machinations” of politics that constitutes “the pacifism of
social impotence” (the Nietzschean Ohn-Macht); it is the
unwillingness to tackle the “inescapable fate” of conflict that will condemn us
to “one definitely inescapable power, that of the bureaucracy in the state and
the economy”!
Weber gives ample proof in this passage of how well he has understood
Nietzsche’s pitiless “De-struktion” of the Vollendung, the “com-pletion”
of Western values in science, philosophy and morality. Schumpeter’s vain
attempt to reconcile the Individualitat of the Unternehmergeist
with the “scientificity” of the Economics is definitely “overcome”. Not only is
it not possible to retain any “scientific” analysis of the Economy that can
“quantify” its “conflict” and reduce it to the “rational individual choice” of
the market; not only can there be no “development” of the capitalist economy
due to the “subjectivity” of the entrepreneur because “development” originates
from a “system of needs and wants” that curtails and conditions any “subjectivity”;
but it is also the very conflict over the provision for needs and wants
“liberated” by capitalism with the formation of “free labor” organized as a
class that now finally subsumes “scientific activity” itself to
that conflict by means of the “rational organization of free labor”.
In other words, far from being the outcome of the unstoppable expansion
of the sphere of “empirical science” to the realm of social life and of the
Economics in particular, the Rationalisierung theorized by Nietzsche
(philosophically) and Weber (sociologically) engenders the subsumption of the
scientific process to the explosive, uncontainable conflict and antagonism
between “the system of needs and wants” aimed at “the care for external goods”
(“the iron cage”) and the ability of the capitalist mode of production “to
guide and govern” it through a program of
“development and growth” that “preserves and reproduces” the existing
capitalist social relations of production. Any rational evaluation
of capitalism in the sense of “empirical science” as understood by Schumpeter
in the Theorie and by the Economics is therefore quite impossible!
Scientific rationality itself is now subsumed to the conflict that capitalism
generates as a motor of its own development.
It is this “triptych” of the relationship between social conflict from
the democratization of “labor”, its rational and scientific organization in the
direction of “capitalist development”, and the “political governance” needed to
mediate the effects of “growth-through-crisis” that concerns Weber in the
all-important period between 1917 and 1919 and that covers the lectures on Politik
als Beruf and Wissenschaft als Beruf and then the series of papers
on Parlament und Regierung.
A lifeless machine is congealed [crystallized] spirit
[geronnener Geist].
It is only this fact that gives the machine
the power to force men to serve
it and thus to rule and determine their daily
working lives, as in fact happens
in factories. This same congealed spirit is,
however, also embodied in that
living machine
which is represented by bureaucratic organisation with its
specialisation of trained, technical work, its
delimitation of areas of
responsibility, its regulations and its graduated
hierarchy of relations
of obedience. Combined with the dead machine, it is
in the process
of manufacturing the housing of that future serfdom
to which, perhaps,
men may have to submit powerlessly, just like the
slaves in the
ancient state of Egypt , if they consider that the
ultimate and only value
by
which the conduct of their affairs is to be decided is good administration
and
provision for their needs by officials (that is ‘good’ in the ‘pure' technical
sense
of rational administration). Bureaucracy achieves this,
after all,
incomparably
better than any other structure of rule. (158)
It is the very “freedom” of “labor” that allows workers to organize as
a class and that permits therefore the “organization” of conflict in a
“rational” manner by “the living machine” of private capitalist and state
bureaucracy, that is to say, “under the regular discipline of the factory”, -
of the factory as “lifeless machine” with its “congealed spirit” of “the system
of wants and needs”! The “lifeless machine” of capitalist production possesses
a “congealed spirit”, and the “machinery of bureaucracy” is a “living machine”
that stands “in the closest relation” to both capitalist “enterprise” and
“state administration”. No “rationality” is possible without the “free”
expression of social antagonism over the wage relation. The reality of Western
“economy and society” – against Schumpeter’s misunderstanding of Weber’s
Rationalisierung as “empirical science” replacing the “teleological
rationality” of “metaphysics”, against Werner Sombart’s interpretation
of “modern capitalism” as “economic rationality”, soon to be repudiated by
Weber in the Vorbermerkungen of 1920 – is that capitalism is “the rational
organization” of “free labor”!
Indeed, it would not even be possible to speak of “true freedom”, of Individualitat,
of individualism and democracy and “the Rights of Man” without the imponent
push of the “conflict” that capitalism has “organized under the regular
discipline of the factory”. “It is a piece of cruel self-deception to think
that even the most conservative amongst us”, even those of us most opposed to
“freedom and democracy”, “could carry on living at all today without these
achievements from the age of the ‘Rights of Man’”, that is, the American and
French Revolutions and the Enlightenment, which have led through the
“liberation of labor”, through “free labor” and its “autonomous market demand”,
to the kind of “rational organization of free labor”, of social conflict and
antagonism embodied by the “all-powerful trend toward bureaucratization”
– that is to say, the “provision” of “the most basic needs and wants of social
life”, to the “socialization” that is the necessary pre-condition of
bureaucracy.
It is vital to discern how Weber traces a strict link between “freedom
and democracy”, and therefore the Demokratisierung, through to the
“liberation” of “labor”, its constitution “as a class” that can press its
“autonomous market demands” in terms of “the care for external goods”, of its
“needs and wants” – all the way to the Vergesellschaftung, the
“socialization” of these conflicting needs and wants as a result of the need
for capital “rationally to organize this free labor” in the pursuit of
“rationally calculable profit” (in opposition to the romantic Gemeinschaft
theorized by Tonnies as an echo to Kant’s “ungesellige Geselligkeit”) –
that is, of its own “private” form of bureaucratization in opposition to,
and therefore separate from, the State bureaucracy to which it is yet “most
closely related”. As we will soon see in section 6, here Weber, because of his
“reified” notion of “labor”, falls back into and retraces the conceptual Schematismus
of the Neo-Kantian “sociological Forms” theorized by Simmel, distinct from
their “content” not in terms of “historical-materialist experience” but only in
terms of “durability” (the “Forms” being Kantian “concepts” or “categories”
that have epistemological and scientific validity whilst their “content” is
purely variable and historically “contingent” or aleatory). The same
distinction applies to the Rationalisierung and to “bureaucratization”.
Not until the Vorbermerkungen will Weber seek to deal explicitly and
coherently with these matters.
In view of the fundamental fact that the advance of
bureaucratisation
is unstoppable, there is only one possible set of
questions to be
asked about future forms of political organisation:
(1) how is it at all
possible to salvage any remnants of 'individual'
freedom of movement
in any sense given this all-powerful trend towards
bureaucratisation?
It is, after all, a piece of cruel self-deception
to think that even the
most conservative amongst us could carry on living
at all today without
these achievements from the age of the 'Rights of
Man'. However,
let us put this question to one side for now, for
there is another
which is directly relevant to our present concerns:
(2) In view of the
growing indispensability and hence increasing power
of state officialdom,
which is our concern here, how can there be any
guarantee
that forces exist which can impose limits on the
enormous, crushing
power of this constantly growing stratum of society
and control it
effectively? How is democracy even in this
restricted sense to be at all possible? (169)
Therefore, “in view of the “growing indispensability and hence increasing power of
state officialdom [bureaucracy]” that has been
brought about by this growing “socialization”, the second question is “what
limits” can be imposed on this “enormous, crushing power” so as to be able –
and this is the first question - “to salvage any remnants of ‘individual’
freedom of movement in any sense at all”! These two
questions have to do crucially with “the future forms of political
organization”. The attempt “to control growth” in such a manner that the
explosive push of the system of needs and wants and its ineluctable “conflict”
can be mustered and then channeled into the preservation and reproduction of
existing capitalist social relations of production – the profit motive –
engenders an “increasing power of State bureaucracy”, a “growth of control”,
that becomes inexorably more “indispensable” in terms of gauging and monitoring
the “rationally calculable” functioning of the “system” – both the “needs and
wants” and the “profit motive” -, but at the same time grows ever less capable
to decide “legitimately” the “direction” of the “system”! The “control of
growth” required for the preservation of existing relations of production – the
“rational conduct of capitalist business” - engenders a “growth of control”
designed “to maintain” these relations of production that tends to stifle and
smother the very “conflict” that “the system of needs and wants” rationally
organized as “free labor” with an “autonomous market demand” inevitably and
irrepressibly generates. The result is exactly the same as Weber had
apprehended for “rational Socialism”. The
living machine cannot exorcise the
“congealed spirit” of the lifeless machine:
- only the “leading Spirit” can guide and govern it.
Yet this too is not the only question of concern to
us
here, for there is (3) a third question, the most
important of all, which
arises from any consideration of what is not performed by bureaucracy
as such. It is clear that its effectiveness has
strict internal limits,
both in the management of public, political affairs
and in the private
economic sphere. 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.(170)… In the
sphere of the state the same applies to the leading politician.
The
leading minister is formally an official with a pensionable salary.
This is the Organisationsfrage for Weber, the point
at which the Problematik of rational Socialism coincides with that of
capitalism: how can the present conflict-ridden “system of needs and wants” –
the congealed spirit of the lifeless machine – which under capitalism takes
institutional shape as the “rational
organization of free labor as a class” that is represented by the social
democratic workers’ parties of the whole of Europe be reconciled with that
“rationality”? If indeed the “system” is founded on an irrational “iron cage”
of “care for external goods”, how can its irrational conflict, its needs and
wants, its “freedom”, be reconciled with the “rational conduct of capitalist
business” for “profitability”, its “science”? Indeed, how is it at all possible
“to conduct business for profitability” rationally when the “system of
needs and wants” expressed through the “autonomous market demand” of “free
labor” is not itself rational? This is the point at which the “content” of the
presumed “rationality” of the overall “system of capitalist production” must be
enucleated, discovered and explained. And the content itself cannot be
rational merely in the sense of “calculable”. Either we find a “substantive
rationality” or else Weber’s Rationalisierung is sheer “mechanical
violence” whose “increasing power”, its “growing control” stands in the way of,
obtrudes and represses, those “most basic needs of social life”, those “needs
and wants” that make it “indispensable”!
This is where the “effectiveness [of bureaucracy, state and capitalist] has
strict internal limits, both in the management of public, political affairs and
in the private economic sphere” in that there are
things that “are not performed by bureaucracy”! The
bureaucracy can only measure and monitor and perhaps even “repair” the existing
“system”. But it cannot determine either the modalities of its own “growth” nor
those of the “system” whose operation it is supposed to measure and monitor:
its “growing power” grows the more oppressive and repressive the more it
requires the “responsibility of the leitender Geist”. The leitender Geist
can only become the ultimate safety-valve of “the system” by assuming the
“responsibility” for the “decisions” that must be made to guide and govern and
direct “the system”. The “leader” is the expression of a particular, specific,
historical institutional expression of the conflict and antagonism of the
capitalist “rational organization of free labor under the regular discipline of
the factory”. The leader is the culmination of social antagonism and its
ultimate “legitimation”.
This shows yet again how deficient was Schumpeter’s attempt to explain
the phenomenon of capitalist “development” purely in terms of the subjective Individualitat
of the entrepreneur able to trans-form the “wants and provisions” of capitalist
society, rather than in terms of the “conflict” intrinsic to these “wants and
provisions” and its “rational organization”! The leader is not
“different” or “separate” from the bureaucratic machine: the leader represents
merely the “moment of decision”, the function of responsibility” for the entire
“system”. But the concentration of legitimacy in the “figure” of the “leader”
serves merely to display “disastrously”, “catastrophically” the inability of
the living machine of bureaucracy to live up to its “indispensability”. As the
legitimacy of the leitender Geist declines so does the “effectuality” of
the State administration – and so does the “systemic risk” of the entire system
grow.
The Parlamentarisierung is supposed to facilitate and allow the
“control of the controllers” (Cicero ’s
paradox – “quis custodiet ipsos custodes?”) so as to preserve “the autonomy of
market demand” and “the remnants of ‘individual’ freedom of expression in any
sense at all”. But this presupposes that (a) the “conflict” inherent to “the
iron cage” is itself inescapable – a “fate”; (b) that “the growth of control”
is occasioned blindly and irrationally by “the system of needs and wants” –
that there are no other reasons outside of “the iron cage” for the
“socialization” of production and the increasing power of bureaucracy; and (c)
that the very possibility of “governance” under capitalism through the Parlamentarisierung
does not itself allow for an alternative form of “governance” that, apart from
the “leitender Geist” and its responsibility for decisions, cannot
resolve the conflict between wants and provision – a conflict that, far from
being “an inescapable fate”, Weber himself had traced back to its “historical
origins”! The question of the alternative must then be posed.
In other words, is there not an “inter esse” that is finally
expressed, however distortedly, by the “growth of control” engendered by the
“need” to control growth? Is the growth of control not itself the pro-duct of
that need to control growth within the bounds set by the capitalist
“rationality” of “profitability”? And does this “rationality”, this
“profitability” not rest on the “rational organization of free labor under
the regular discipline of the factory” – and not on “autonomous market
demand”? Clearly the problem here is that Weber’s “iron cage” itself needs to
be reviewed, its “inescapability” questioned, its “creation and maintenance” by
“the spirit of capitalism” traced to its historical origins. The very possibility
of “conducting capitalist business for rational and systematic profitability”,
through “the rational organization of free labor under the regular discipline
of the factory” needs to be examined. Only then will we be able to assess
realistically Weber’s plans for “Parlamentarisierung und Demokratisierung”,
that is to say, for the successful and lasting “integration” of “free labor
organized as a class” within the machine of State and private
capitalist bureaucracy under the legitimate and legal parliamentary oversight
of the leitender Geist as the ultimate expression of the political
will of the Herrenvolk.
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