Modern Capitalism of Karl Marx vs. Max Weber

Modern Capitalism of Karl Marx vs. Max Weber

Regardless of their irrefutable diversities Marx and Weber share a lot in their assessments of current capitalism. They have a common vision of the capitalist monetary system in the world where, according to Marx, people are directed by concepts. Here, impersonal associations and items substitute personal associations of reliance and the accumulation of wealth turns into absurd and an end in itself. Their study of capitalism is indissoluble in Marx’s precise critical outlook and in Weber’s undecided view. However, the substance and the insight of the analysis are extremely diverse. Furthermore, while Marx banks on the likelihood of dusting capitalism by personnel of socialist influence, Weber is a philosophical and submissive onlooker at the approach of production and management that appears to him to be unavoidable (Giddens 73).

Weber and Marx are both considered as pioneers of contemporary sociology. Both are fascinated by money matters and the way the general public functions under specific fiscal circumstances. They studied the way people get into these financial conditions however their observations vary on this point. One of Weber’s best works The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism recognizes religious thoughts as a rationale for the growth of financial conditions. Marx claims that monetary circumstances are the foundation of all other developments. Since Weber thinks that there are earlier sources of monetary situations in society, he believes that varied societies can develop independently of one another and pursue diverse economic courses. Marx conversely thinks that the whole society is on a common trail to one specific financial structure. Weber, furthermore, seems to research the history and deduce the way societies function and why they function in that manner. Marx seems to be more engrossed in the future and desires to go past the analysis of history by calling for transformation in the approach that the general public operates with (Giddens 73).

The phrase mode of production was used by Marx to bring up the precise organization of financial manufacture in a given culture. A mode or form of production consists of the means of production employed by a given people, like industries and other amenities, machinery, as well as raw materials. It also incorporates employment and the management of the personnel. The expression relations of production denote the link between those who possess the means of production (the entrepreneurs or the bourgeoisie) and those who do not (the employees or the working class). Marx claims that history develops through the interface between the method of production and the dealings of production. The means of production persistently progresses toward an understanding of its complete industrious ability, but this development generates oppositions between the society classes defined by the associations of production—proprietors and personnel. (Giddens 73)

Entrepreneurship is a mode of manufacture founded on personal possession of the means of production. Consumerists make merchandise for the trade market and to stay aggressive should extort as much toil from the employees as possible at the lowest feasible expenditure. The financial significance of the industrialist is to compensate the employees as little as possible, actually just sufficient to keep him living and industrious. The personnel, consecutively, come to comprehend that their financial significance lies in stopping the entrepreneur from utilizing them in this manner. As this case demonstrates, the community associations of manufacture are naturally hostile; leading to a rank resistance that Marx thinks will give rise to the defeat of free enterprise by the working class. The waged people will substitute the industrialist form of production with a means of production anchored in the communal possession of the means of production, known as Communism.

In his original texts, which are more theoretical than financial, Marx illustrates how the employee under an entrepreneurial form of production becomes alienated from himself, from his employment, and from other employees. Basing his argument on Hegel, Marx disputes that employment is essential to an individual’s self-formation and sense of happiness. By concentrating on and changing idea issues into nourishment and items of use-significance, humans meet the requirements of life and come to view them externalized in the globe. Employment is as much a performance of individual conception and a protrusion of one’s character as it is a way of continued existence. Nevertheless, entrepreneurship, the scheme of personal possession of the means of production, denies individuals of this essential basis of self-merit and personality. The employee views employment merely as a way of survival and obtains none of the other individual job contentment since he does not own the products of his labor. These goods are as an alternative confiscated by entrepreneurs and traded for revenue (Derek 96).

In private enterprise, the employee, who is estranged or separated from the goods he produces, is as well alienated from the manufacturing process, which he considers simply as a method of survival. Estranged from the production procedure, the employee is thus also separated from his or her own humankind, since the revolution of environment into constructive items is one of the elementary aspects of the human situation. The employee is therefore estranged from his or her genus being, from what it is to be human. Lastly, the industrialist form of production isolates individuals from fellow humans. Denied of the fulfillment that comes with possessing the creation of one’s effort, the employee looks upon the entrepreneur as an outsider and antagonistic. The isolation of the worker from his labor and of the employee from capitalist shapes the foundation of the hostile social connection that will ultimately give rise to the defeat of capitalism.

As noted earlier, the work of the Karl – a renowned philosopher – impacted heavily on Marx as well as other scholars of his time. Hegel provided a detailed dialectical analysis of human perception as a method of development from plain to more intricate categories of thinking. Karl cited that the human thought has changed from very fundamental attempts to grasp the personality of objects to advanced forms of self-awareness and nonfigurative thought. History changes through a comparable dialectical procedure, whereby the challenge of a particular age leads to the rise of a new era based on a flattening over of these challenges. Marx came up with an analysis of history comparable to Karl’s, but the major distinction between Marx and Karl is that Marx is a materialist and Karl is an idealist.

In simpler terms, Karl supposed that ideas are the principal mode in which people relate to the world. Moreover, he thought that history can be comprehended in terms of the thoughts that characterize each consecutive historical age. In contrast, Marx believed that the basic truth about a period in history or a certain society is how that society is structured to suit material desires. while Karl visualized history as a series of ideas and a working out of challenges on an abstract stage, Marx saw history as a progression of modes of production or economic systems, each of which is prearranged to gratify human material desires other than ensuring the rise of antagonism involving diverse classes of people, thus perpetuating the formation of new societies in an developing pattern. (Lichteim 86)

Weber views bureaucracies as goal-oriented organizations planned according to normal principles with the aim of ensuring that their efficiently realize their goals. Offices are categorized in a hierarchical categorization, with information moving up the series of command, while directives flow down.  Several operations relating to different organizations are characterized by remote rules that unambiguously state responsibilities, duties, consistent procedures and behavior of office holders.  Offices are extremely focused. Any kind of appointments made to these offices are carried out by adhering to particular qualifications rather than any recognized criteria.  All of the ideal characteristics have one objective towards the promotion of a resourceful realization of the organization’s aims. (Weber 19)  

Although, several people have acutely misconstrued Weber and conversely claiming that he was a fan of bureaucracy, that he considered bureaucracy as a perfect organization.  Weber describes bureaucracy as being supreme so that he can accurately illustrate their growth in scope and in the present world.  The bureaucratic dexterity of the action of large numbers of people has turn out to be the main structural aspect of modern societies.  It is only through this organizational device that large scale coordination and planning in the modern economy and state to become possible.  The cost of the growth in the scope and power of these organizations is central to being aware of the world.

The anti-entrepreneurial review of Marx is structured around five elementary ideas: the inequality of misuse, the loss of freedom from isolation, venal quantification, illogicality and contemporary barbarism. When it comes to unfairness and abuse, the industrialist scheme is stuck, separately from this or that supporting financial system on the voluntary additional labor of employees, resulting in all types of rental fees and revenue. The severe demonstrations of this community inequality are the abuse of children, wretched earnings, ruthless operational hours, and the disgusting circumstances of plebeian life. The loss of freedom from hostility, reification, and product obsession is the second theme. In the entrepreneurial form of production, individuals-manual workers specifically are subjugated by their own goods, which take the shape of independent obsessions and thus flee their power (Sayer 89).

At the centre of Marx’s study of alienation is the idea that entrepreneurship is a form of disillusioned religion, where items in the market substitute spirituality. The more the employee is externalized in his employment, the more the external, intended globe, which he produces himself, becomes dominant, the more he is self-indigent and the more his interior world happens to be deprived, the less he acquires that which is his own. It is very similar with religious conviction. The more man devotes himself to God, the less he is capable of holding to his own self. The perception of obsession rediscovers the history of belief in the shape of primordial idolization which by now holds the same opinion of all spiritual experiences.

The other argument was the venal quantification of community life. Capitalism, which is synchronized by trade worth and the computation of earnings and the accrual of wealth, is liable to melt and demolish all qualitative significance: application worth, moral value, human relationships and feelings. The influence of money is one of the wicked signs of industrial quantification. It denatures all innate individual traits, through the form of production in presenting to the currency standard. The measure of finances becomes more and more the exceptional and influential possessions of man simultaneously reducing all humans to its notion, and itself becomes decreased by its own sense to quantitative being (Sayer 91).

The fourth premise is illogicality. The intermittent predicaments of excessive production that shake the industrialist structure reveal its absurdity, the concept used in the Manifesto. There are abundant techniques of survival, although the mainstream of people is short of essential means of survival. This universal irrationality is not conflicting, evidently, with a fractional and limited prudence, at the stage of production supervision in every industrial unit. Contemporary barbarism is the other idea. In a particular logic, entrepreneurship is the forerunner of the historical development demonstrated by the proponent progress of productive energy, thus forming the material circumstances for a new social order with team spirit and liberty. Nevertheless, all together becomes a force of social degeneration in the logic that it formulates from every financial development of a public catastrophe.  It also imposes development and/or imperialism of entrepreneurship, the aggressive and spiteful control of colonized communities, their compliance by the preemptory spirit of the essentials of industrial production and the accretion of wealth (Sayer 91).

In conclusion, what Weber, in distinction from Marx does not discern is the supremacy of trade value over individual action. The systems of valorization and computerization adorned in market interactions initiate the “monetarization” (Sayer 91) of community interrelations and a “depoeticization” of the humankind, to be precise, as the market turns into a mundane feature of life; there is a weakening of knowledge and of “poiesis” (Sayer 91). Marx and Weber branch on the initiative of the considerable absurdity of entrepreneurship that it is not conflicting with the reverence to its official or fractional shrewdness. Both make allusion to religion to try to confront this illogicality. For Weber, it is the beginning of this irrationalism, of a setback of that which we refer to as the innate position of items that we require to clarify. He further recommends making reference to a sequence of personal emotions fastened to precise pious depictions: the Protestant ethic (Weber 1905). For Marx, the starting point of capitalism does not take us back to a spiritual ethic of economy, but rather to the wicked procedure of expropriation and embezzlement that he defines as primordial accrual of capital. The remark of the belief even so plays a significant part for appreciating the sense of entrepreneurship as “inversion” (Marx 63). In both cases, human beings are subjugated by their own goods, finances in capitalism and God in religion.