As our friends would know by now, we have constantly and even more stridently denounced in this Blog the misguided - whether by choice or by sheer inanity or indeed clinical insanity - attempts by "the Left" to pursue a new type of "identity politics" that only serves to disperse and divide what should be instead a unifying drive toward the emancipation of society and the pacification of existence. But the question comes immediately to mind: what, if anything, can be the end-goal of this "unifying drive", what can be its underlying human interests, and what can serve as its historical agency to lead us there? We believe that the clear analysis and critique of capitalist-liberal ideology and of its political expression - parliamentary democracy -, on one side, and, on the other side, its material productive support - the material foundations and reality of capitalist production and distribution - is the necessary precondition for the creation of a historical agency that can be the material carrier toward the achievement of this unifying goal. So here goes the next section of our study on Liberalism versus Capitalism.
As we hinted above, Weber’s position represents a regression with respect to Constant’s
still clear and sharp distinction between “freedom” and “guarantees”, between
active participation in politics and passive “enjoyment” of constitutional
“rights and liberties”. Both Constant and Weber maintain the metaphysical notion of “possession”, of
the “in-dividual’s” natural right to
the pro-duct of individual labors.
But whilst Constant still preserves
the validity of the Classical notion
of “freedom” which, to his mind, has been eclipsed by the complexity of the “socialisation” occasioned by “the system of
needs and wants”, for Weber, instead, this classical “freedom” or Freiheit never existed! It was never
“real”, but was only a “meta-physical”
delusion. What is real for Weber, what is physical,
is the “greed-dom” of conflicting
individual self-interests that have finally found their most “rational”
expression as the end-result of the “ascetic Ideal” that has debouched into
“the iron cage of modern industrial labor”. Constant’s liberalism remains tied
to the ideology of “Enlightenment” in its British or French or German varieties
all of which see “freedom” as the final re-solution
of human conflict, as “the end of history”
in both senses of the word – the conclusion and the final goal of history.
Weber’s Entwurf instead has already
overcome this “enlightened” version of bourgeois civil society and conceives of
“free-dom” not in a telelological, millenary sense, but only as the negative
by-product of “greed-dom”.
Far from being the Hegelian Vergeistigung, the apotheosis of human universality as a stage of
the Objective Spirit in the extrinsication of the Idea (cf. Philosophie des Rechts, final section on
“Welt-geschichte”), or the “guarantee” of the “neutrality” of its institutions whether actual as in the Liberal
utopia or “potential” in the Socialist - yet founded for both these ideologies on
the “scientific” enforcement of the Law of Value (even in the Marxian framework
where instead the “withering away” of the State is anticipated once capitalism
is superseded), - for Weber instead
the “State” exists not as an end but purely as an instrument, as a means
– and most important as a means and an
instrument that by definition cannot be “neutral” but must be wielded by a
particular class or “human community” intended as a sub-set of society!
Ultimately, one can define [78] the
modern state sociologically only in terms
of the specific means peculiar to it, as to every political association, namely,
the use of physical force….Today the
relation between the state and violence is an
especially intimate one. In the past, the
most varied institutions—beginning
with the state—have known the use of
physical force as quite
normal. Today, however, we have to say
that a state is a human community [a “group”, a class]
that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate
use of
physical force within a given territory. Note that 'territory' is one of the
characteristics of the state.
Specifically, at the present time, the right to
use physical force is ascribed to other
institutions or to individuals only
to the extent to which the state
permits it. The state is considered the
sole source of the 'right' to use
violence. Hence, 'politics' for us means
striving to share power or striving to
influence the distribution of power,
either among states or among groups
within a state. (PaB, p.78)
The well-nigh universal consensus in interpretations of
Weber’s political sociology is that because Weber insists on the need for the
State as a “means” or instrument to
hold its “monopoly of physical force” in a manner that is “legitimate” – because of this condition,
many conclude thereby that for Weber the Political or “legitimacy” takes
priority and has primacy over
Economics! To be sure, Weber does stipulate that if a state is to claim and
hold successfully a monopoly over “the legitimate
use of physical force”, then it needs a modicum of “inner assent”. But far from
postulating what many have called “the autonomy
of the Political” in the sense that the “power” of the State is based
solely or predominantly on its “legitimacy”, Weber is speaking of a very specific type of “legitimacy” – that is
to say, a “successful” legitimacy, one that comes not from the base (from the demos, “from the bottom up”) but
from the vertex (from the
“leadership”, “from the top down”) of the social pyramid of power and
authority! And this “legitimacy” rests for him precisely on “the social
question”, that is to say, on that “sphere of necessity”, on that “struggle for existence” dictated by “the scarcity of means”, by the Economic, upon which
the “autonomy” or “freedom” of the Political is founded! Let us read Weber
carefully:
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 to manifest outwardly this
minimum of assent. (165)g
Die modernen Parlamente sind in erster Linie Vertretungen der durch die
Mittel der Bürokratie Beherrschten. Ein gewisses Minimum von innerer
Zustimmung mindestens der sozial gewichtigen Schichten der Beherrschten ist ja
Vorbedingung der Dauer einer jeden, auch der bestorganisierten, Herrschaft. Die
Parlamente sind heute das Mittel, dies Minimum von Zustimmung äußerlich zu
manifestieren.
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), and
"modern parliaments" on the other side which exist as a "means
to manifest outwardly this minimum of assent”. It is the “bureaucracy”,
which is both “official” (military and civilian) and “private” (capitalistic),
that effectively “rules the people” independently
of their assent or dissent! “A
measure of inner assent outwardly manifested by means of parliaments” is
essential for Weber not to the definition of a State, of its rule, but only
as a “condition of its duration”. 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”! After all, it is difficult to conceive of a
State that “ruled” without the “inner assent” of “at least those sections of
the ruled who carry weight in society”, whether or not they themselves in
reality held the reins of State power in that society or whether they allow
their “representatives” to do it!
Indeed, it is all but evident from Weber’s
indisputable adherence to elitarian theories of politics (from Pareto to
Mosca to his Archiv colleagues Michels and Schumpeter) that he always
intended by “legitimacy” and “inner assent” not so much - if at all! –
“democratic consensus” but rather “the use by the State of its monopoly of
physical force instrumentally on behalf of the powerful elites in society”! By
this last phrase Weber means 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. This is a point – the “circulation” of capital as a tool of
“disciplining” their representative governments on the part of the bourgeoisie
– to which Constant gives great prominence.
Still, it is evident that not only officialdom but
also private capitalist enterprise needs, in turn, 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” because, as we saw in Part Two, the “rationalization” operated by the
advent of capitalist industry is dependent on the “exact calculation”, or “profitability”,
that is specific to a society founded on “the rational organisation of
free labor under the regular discipline of the factory”! Thus this “inner
assent” (legitimacy and authority) at least under what Weber calls “modern
capitalism” seems to depend very much for him on the ability of “the
rulers” (the combined bureaucracies, public and private) to deliver the goods
of economic growth and development; - and on 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”, the State, that dispenses
political power in accordance with a pool of economic resources drawn from the
productive activities of workers.
Thus, it is not so much that Parliament is “the
means by which this inner assent [its legitimacy] becomes manifest” in
the sense that Parliament merely ex-presses or is a mere mouthpiece for
“the system of needs and wants”, “the iron cage of modern industrial labor”.
Rather, Parliament is the means by which this “inner assent is made manifest” in an objective
instrumental organicist sense! –
Today parliaments
are the means to manifest outwardly this
minimum of assent.
Die Parlamente sind heute das
Mittel, dies Minimum von Zustimmung äußerlich zu manifestieren.
It is not an accident that Weber uses the
impersonal, almost passive voice (“to manifest”) here and refers to
“parliaments” generically to convey strongly the sense that a
particular “parliament” is not the instrument of the “people”, of the demos,
whose “inner assent” it is there to re-present. Quite to the contrary,
Weber is saying that “parliaments generally” are the new “organic tools”
or “institutional instruments” by means of which the particular
structure and form of politico-economic power constituted by the capitalist
bourgeoisie “in the Occident” manifests itself outwardly or ostensibly as
"legitimate", as "inner assent", as a “show of support”! It
follows therefrom that “inner assent” is not a “spontaneous manifestation” of
popular democratic consensus formed autonomously by “the people”. Furthermore,
Weber’s use of the plural “parliaments” is clearly intended to stress the transience
of individual parliamentary terms or governments against the constancy – the
“duration” [Dauer] – of “bureaucracies! Instead, for the State bureaucracy
"to claim successfully" its monopoly over the use of physical force,
it must secure this “minimum of assent” by means of parliaments! In
other words, this "minimum of assent" must be “garnered and governed”
by the ruling bureaucracy, in the sense that it must be “gathered”,
“interpreted”, “shaped” and “directed” (and even “purchased”venally, grex
venalium) through the “separation” of workers from “the machinery of State”
(the bureaucracy) and their “individual division of labor”. It is evident,
therefore, that Weber always intended “legitimacy” to be part and parcel of his
“instrumental” definition of the State and not a separate requirement
or criterion for its definition! For him, there is no viable State
without “legitimacy” intended in this special instrumentalist and
elitarian sense:
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.
Weber never intended the Political to be fundamentally
autonomous from the Economic, from “those sections of the ruled who carry
weight in society”! Indeed, the Political reflects the “sphere of freedom” only
to the extent that “freedom” is intended either as sheer arbitrium – as
mere “arbitrariness” that is inconsequential in terms of the overall
structure and division of power in society; – or else as the articulation of
those relevant interests, the interests of “those who carry weight in society”,
whose “inner assent” is needed for the State, in its organic and instrumental
function as “a community with the legitimate use of physical force”, to exert
its constituted rule “for any length of time or duration”.
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
[Beamtentum, bureaucracy], both military and civilian. The modern
high-ranking officer even
conducts battles from his ‘office’. (145)
Weber makes a point that
Arendt seems to share about the “difference” between “political administration”
and “private enterprise” in that the latter is much more “technical” and even
represents the realm of“necessity”. And Socialism cannot overcome this
“necessity” because its very political organisation is elitist and ends up
preserving the “oligarchy” of private industry:
The revolution [of Germany , 1918] has accomplished, at
least in so far
as leaders have taken the place of the statutory
authorities, this much:
the leaders, through usurpation or election, have
attained control over
the political staff and the apparatus of material
goods; and they deduce
their legitimacy—no matter with what right—from the will of the
governed.
Whether the leaders, on the basis of this at least
apparent success,
can rightfully entertain the hope of also carrying
through the expropriation
within the capitalist enterprises is a different
question. The direction
of capitalist enterprises, despite far-reaching analogies, follows
quite
different laws from those of political administration. (PaB, p82)
The State, through Parliament, articulates those
“normative goals”, those “evaluations” that then become “unambiguous” and are
pursued rationally-technically or “scientifically” in relation to available
“scarce means”. Once again, as we showed in Part Three, Weber forgets that even
when“economic science” is applied “correctly” or “rationally”, the task is made
paradoxically impossible by the fact that the “scarcity” of means depends on
the “market prices” of those “means” – which is the classical circulus
vitiosus (more simply put, we cannot know what means are “scarce” until“the
market” prices them – but the market is supposed to price them on
their“scarcity”!). For this reason, even on Weber’s own
“presupposition-less”assumptions, the task of Parliament or “parliaments” to
determine“democratically” the political will of the nation is quite simply
impossible given that there is no scientific or automatic way of determining
not only the“goals” of government, but also the “means” available to achieve
them!
For liberalism, Politics and
Economics need to be “homologated”, - the one “guarantees” the other, but one
cannot invade the other’s sphere! Yet this is what the negatives Denken
does, not through the Economics, but through the Eris, the Strife, the polemos,
through the impossibility of “reconciliation” of self-interests. Indeed, as
ought to be amply evident by now, it is simply impossible for Weber to
distinguish neatly between Politics and Economics for the simple reason that he
quite correctly defines Economics in very broad terms as the area of social
life in which there is a“scarcity of means”, wherever there is a “struggle for
existence” (cf., ‘Objektivitat’, pp.64-5 in MoSS), or what he called in
his Inaugural Address "the economic struggle for life" – which for
him is just about in all areas of social life. But especially in modern
capitalism - defined as "the rational organisation of free labor under the
regular discipline of the factory", it is in the factory that this “scarcity”and
this “struggle” are concentrated and where the sphere of necessity in
society is separated from the sphere of freedom – from “cultural life”,
as Weber styles it.
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