Page 88 - Culture Society and Economy

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CAPITALISM ORGANIZED AND DISORGANIZED

and individual rationality, however small, in a world which has become
profoundly hostile to liberal values of any kind. Economies of Signs and
Space is Lash and Urry’s Protestant Ethic with ‘reflexivity’ now supposed
to carve out the space in which the threatened liberal subject can nervously
survive.
The fact that Lash and Urry, like Weber, raise the issue of monopoly
capital in this abstract form of the levels of ‘organization’ (or ‘bureau-
cracy’) of ‘society’ and not of capitalism per se makes it difficult for them to
come to grips with the phenomenon with which they are dealing. Lash and
Urry’s emendation of Weber makes matters worse in one sense. At least
in Weber’s case it was easy to ‘translate’ bureaucracy into monopoly
capital and thereby to understand more comprehensively the reasons for
the rise of bureaucracy, the collapse of the liberal bourgeois competitive
economy and with it the liberal democratic political project – the accom-
panying breakdown of the inner coherence of the bourgeois self and the
rise of modernist disenchantment. Indeed, it is not hard to place certain
aspects of Weber’s ideas within the general context of the body of literature
at the end of the nineteenth or early twentieth century, which includes
writers such as Hobson, Hilferding, Rosa Luxemburg, Kautsky, Bukharin,
Lenin, and, from another angle, Freud, although, as was to be expected,
Weber himself resolutely resisted any such contextualization. In particular,
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as Mommsen points out, Weber was opposed to Marxist theories of the
concentration of capital from which the entire theory of monopoly and
finance capital as well as of imperialism springs. If anything, Weber was
more open to the views of ‘evolutionary socialism’ put forward by Bernstein,
according to which the growth of monopoly (‘organized’) capital – cartels
and the like – opened the possibility for a more harmonious capitalism
which would be self-regulating – a capitalism evolving towards socialism. 12
This is ironic for, as has often been pointed out, Hilferding’s notions of
‘organized capitalism’ sowed similarly fatal evolutionary illusions among
Social Democrats in Weimar Germany. 13
Notwithstanding this attitude on the part of Weber, the fact remains
that he was dealing with the same problems posed for liberalism by the
supersession of liberal competitive capitalism by monopoly capitalism, but
dealing with them from a liberal-conservative viewpoint. Pace Weber’s
well-known sardonic remarks ridiculing socialist critiques of the anarchy
of production under capitalism and his argument that socialism only
aggravated the problems of bureaucracy which had developed under
monopoly capitalism and that, therefore, socialism was bound to lead to the
final loss of all personal freedom – all these viewpoints notwithstanding,
Weber’s problematic places him squarely within this body of literature. 14

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