Ron_Damon said:
"Economy and Society" is probably the greatest book ever written in the whole of the social sciences. Max Weber was a genius in the same league as Newton, Darwin and Einstein.
Weber is considered to be an important sociologist, but not the only important one - it depends on whether or not one agrees with his perspective. Karl Marx is the original genius from whose work Weber drew to develop aspects of his theory. Sociologists differ about the extent to which Weber agreed with Marx's analysis:
It is conventional to regard Weber as one of the major critics of Marx and Marxism. The reasons for this position are: (i) that Weber's emphasis on the role of culture, especially religion, in shaping human action appears to be a refutation of economic determinism (q.v.); (ii) the importance of subjective orientation of individuals in Weber's analysis of social relations is said to be in contrast to the analysis of objective structural effects in Marxism; (iii) Weber's account of status groups and markets appears to run counter to Marx's emphasis on economic class and relations of production; (iv) Weber was explicitly critical of Marxist analysis of the imminent collapse of capitalism, since he argued that the planned economy in socialist society would enhance rationalization, not terminate it. An alternative view is that: (i) Weber regarded Marx, along with Nietzsche, as one of the most important thinkers of the nineteenth century; (ii) Weber's criticisms were directed at institutionalized Marxism (in the form of the German Democratic Party) rather than at Marx; (iii) the Protestant Ethic thesis was not intended to be a refutation of Marx; (iv) Weber often wrote in a manner that suggests a strong element of determinism; (v) Weber's description of the nature of capitalism as an 'iron cage' was often very close to Marx's analysis and, in particular, there is a close relationship between the concepts of alienation (q.v.) and rationalization; (vi) Weber came to regard capitalist society as having a logic which operated independently of the subjective attitudes of social actors. (5) Weber's sociology and his attitude towards Marxism have to be seen in the context of German society between 1870 and 1918... More at
http://www.soci.canterbury.ac.nz/resources/biograph/weber.shtml
The similarities between Weber's and Marx's theories are discussed in a 2000 paper by University of Wisconsin sociologist Erik Olin Wright. The paper is entitled 'The Shadow of Exploitation in Weber's Class Analysis' and is available online at
http://www.ssc.wisc.edu/~wright/weber.pdf . And it is arguable whether 'Economy and Society' is "the greatest book ever written in the whole of the social sciences" - Marx wrote a number of books, including 'Capital' volumes 1, 2 and 3, which are regarded by many to be the social science equivalent of Darwin's 'The Origin of Species by Natural Selection'. It's all a matter of one's ideological position and one's subjective opinion.
RON_Damon said:
In relation to the Leftist connection, let me apply Weber's methodology in the following way:
What makes the West unique among the many civilizations is that overtime it developed the concept of rationalization and of decision-making according to calculus, not ritual. That is the axis upon which our modern world is built. You can see rationalization affecting diverse developments throughout Western history: the Catholic Church constituted as an institute, cities as associations, calculability and systematization in the law, and most spectacularly, capitalism.
There is nothing rational about capitalism. It is an anarchic system where the 'unfettered free market' regularly results in crises of overproduction and crises of shortages, and where investors (capital) scramble to catch up with chaotic 'market trends' (look at the stock market – all attempts to predict what it will do next fail). A *rational* economic system would involve some kind of planning - ie, it would involve a planned economy, where instead of leaving production up to unpredictable 'market forces', production decisions are based on quality information (recent technological innovations facilitate such planning on a global scale). That is how I interpret the meaning of 'rational' and 'decision-making according to calculus', in any case.
RON_Damon said:
People get paid according to the law of marginal productivity... prices and interest rates are fixed by supply and demand, business is conducted in such a way to maximize earnings and minimize costs, private property is protected and the law made predictable so that large scale investments can be possible, and resources are allocated according to efficiency criteria. Most important of all, the individual is let free to choose his own path.
An alternative view on this: if they’re lucky, workers get paid according to the 'going rate' of the only commodity they have to sell, their labour power - in other words, they get paid as much as it takes to sustain and reproduce the labour force. When workers are able to organise themselves into unions and present a united front they sometimes have the power to increase their wages above the bare minimum or to demand better working conditions. Those days are gone, as the powers of trade unions have been drastically eroded as a result of a number of complex factors arising from the globalisation of capitalist production. Workers are now forced to work for bare minimum wages, as the growing class of the 'working poor' demonstrates. American author Barbara Ehrenreich's 2001 book, "Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America", an extract of which is quoted at the URL shown below, writes about the US working poor,: http://www.pbs.org/peoplelikeus/resources/essays7.html
Ron_Damon said:
...prices and interest rates are fixed by supply and demand, business is conducted in such a way to maximize earnings and minimize costs...and resources are allocated according to efficiency criteria.
Or, another way of looking at these issues: prices and interest rates have to try to 'catch up' with belated attempts at balancing demand and supply; business is conducted in such a way as to maximize earnings for investors and minimize costs (frequently by reducing labour costs and thus the earnings of workers). Resources are allocated according to profit (rather than human need) criteria.
Ron_Damon said:
Most important of all, the individual is let free to choose his own path.
The individual is 'let free' to starve if he/she is not prepared to accept the wages offered, no matter how low those wages may be. As Marx writes in
The Communist Manifesto
In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital, is developed, in the same proportion is the proletariat, the modern working class, developed — a class of labourers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labour increases capital. These labourers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market. Ref:
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm
And a much more polemic piece that is bound to upset some readers (close your eyes if you are easily upset by notions of abolishing private property!):
By freedom is meant, under the present bourgeois conditions of production, free trade, free selling and buying. But if selling and buying disappears, free selling and buying disappears also. This talk about free selling and buying, and all the other “brave words” of our bourgeois about freedom in general, have a meaning, if any, only in contrast with restricted selling and buying, with the fettered traders of the Middle Ages, but have no meaning when opposed to the Communistic abolition of buying and selling, of the bourgeois conditions of production, and of the bourgeoisie itself. You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property. But in your existing society, private property is already done away with for nine-tenths of the population; its existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence in the hands of those nine-tenths. You reproach us, therefore, with intending to do away with a form of property, the necessary condition for whose existence is the non-existence of any property for the immense majority of society. In one word, you reproach us with intending to do away with your property. Precisely so; that is just what we intend. – Ref:
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch02.htm
Ron_Damon said:
The Leftist is different. He wants to do "good". He'll promote "social justice" and "human rights". He'll demand "fair pay". He'll ban "usury" and set "heartless corporations" straight.
Too right the leftist will do these things. How inhuman of leftists! How deplorable and unreasonable!
Ron_Damon said:
And to that end he'll seize authority and the power to coerce. And then we will be back at the beginning, with life regulated from above.
Umm, no – not quite… this is just what supporters of the status quo assert. To the ends of promoting social justice, human rights, a sustainable environment, etc., he (or she, perhaps?) will urge the people to no longer put up with the way they are being coerced by the economically and politically powerful class.
Ron_Damon said:
In the brief post-WWII period when Left-wing economic policies were applied in the US…
Keynesian economic policies are only relatively ‘left-wing’. They fully supported capitalism, only trying to ‘patch’ it up and diminish its worst excesses of exploitation (ie., the ‘reforms’ are cosmetic and while they may marginally diminish profits, they do not threaten the profit system: they try to make it more tolerable and to thereby decrease the threat of people standing up against it). These ideas represent what real left-wing socialists call ‘benevolent capitalism’ – and don’t worry; such ideas will in no way return: capitalists are far too greedy to allow that to happen now that they have (at least temporarily) the upper hand in their conflict against the working class.
Ron_Damon said:
Truly , if a minor technical fault that could be easily corrected prevented a train from departing, and the union-determined worker strictly allocated to correct that defect was unavailable, the train was forced to remain stopped and everyone prevented from fixing the problem until the ritualistically-assigned union-person was available to fix it. When a couple decided to start a private mail and package delivery service in response to gross inefficiencies in the government-run USPS, they were arrested.
Ah, yes – and here are examples of the ‘successes’ of the ‘free market’s’ workings: http://www.commondreams.org/views01/0222-04.htm ;
http://schumer.senate.gov/SchumerWe...releases/2005/PR40072.RailSecSunday11605.html
The Springs is home to James Dobson and Focus on the Family and Colorado does have Wayne Allard, Marilyn Musgrave, and Joel Hefley (I hate to lump Hefley in that group because he's done a lot for our district, but like all politicians, he's a mixed bag).
