Marx v. Weber

Marx and Weber were both thoroughly dismayed with the oppressive practices of capitalistic enterprise, and they agreed on organized wage-labor as the defining characteristic of modern capitalism. But they differ radically in their accounts of the origins of capitalism, accounts that spring from fundamentally different views of what causes change over time. For Marx, material conditions determine change. While Weber does not deny the importance of material conditions, he emphasizes instead the role of ideas.

Marx’s story begins with private property. While under feudalism serfs and small farmers shared land use rights with landowners, the owners began to claim absolute rights over their property, which gradually forced the less prosperous yeomanry from the land. This group of landless peasants would in time become the proletariat, a mass of people with nothing to sell but their labor. Since initially they appeared dangerously restless, however, these vagrants required forceful discipline to become a submissive, productive workforce. As Marx describes it, then, the development of capitalism was “the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production.” It was violent and coercive. “Conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder” conditioned the rise of the bourgeoisie.

Weber is no happier with modern capitalism than Marx. But violent coercion plays a much smaller role in his account of its development. Indeed, the robbery and murder that impresses Marx appears to Weber more ancient than modern. “At all periods of history,” he writes, “there has been ruthless acquisition, bound to no ethical norms whatever.” Indeed, this fact presented an obstacle to modern capitalism, which had to overcome unrestrained avarice with the peculiar “spirit of capitalism.” This worldview, with its origins in the worldly asceticism of Calvinist doctrine, combines “the earning of more and more money” with “the strict avoidance of all spontaneous enjoyment of life.” Since the proper goal is not pleasure, but success, work never relents. Over time, this voluntary asceticism of the religious came to “dominate worldly morality” and helped to create “the tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order.” For Weber, then, “technical and economic conditions” may “to-day determine the lives” of all individuals, but capitalism originated in a set of ideas.

In thus describing the development of capitalism, Marx and Weber make transparent their views on history. For Marx, change occurs as a result of material conditions, specifically through class conflict. The direction of history comes from whatever group happens to control the “means of production”, or capital – so capitalism emerged with the destruction of the commons and the development of private property. Marx is fully persuaded that the working class revolt will be enabled by “the development of industry,” not inspired by an idea. In fact, Marx writes to his middle class reader, “Your very ideas are but the outgrowth of the conditions of your bourgeois production and bourgeois property.” Or as he puts it later, one’s consciousness “changes with every change of his material existence.”

Weber takes issue with this approach because of its lack of complexity. In his view, change results from a “tremendous confusion of interdependent influences”; spiritual and material causes are “equally possible.” But he is clearly most impressed with “the magical and religious forces” which to him are “among the most important formative influences on conduct.” In direct contradiction to Marx’s famous claim that the “ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class,” Weber posits that the spirit of capitalism had to “fight its way to supremacy” and, once supreme, refashioned the material conditions of society. This conviction of the power of ideas leads Weber to locate the origins of capitalism in Calvinistic belief – an argument Marx would deem out-of-order, since in his view religion was no more than a means of duping the working class.

Weber’s argument that Calvinism effectively caused capitalism is tenuous – he would need to provide empirical evidence in order to prove that Calvinists had the kind of influence he claims. His more nuanced approach, however, represents a superior model for historians. For Weber, humans are not merely functions of their class standing. Human conduct, as Anthony Giddens writes in his introduction to The Protestant Ethic, “is intrinsically meaningful and has to be ‘interpreted’ or ‘understood’ in a way which has no counterpart in nature.”

While helpful in understanding how ideas might possess causative power, though, Weber’s argument does not suggest that we do anything about it. Weber leaves us wringing our hands over the “iron cage” of modern capitalism. Marx’s approach, even if we smirk a little at his bombastic style and utopianism, holds out hope for a kind of “prophetic history” that could be extremely valuable. In addition to highlighting the importance of material conditions, Marx provides a powerful example of how righteous indignation can propel both activism and historical scholarship.