Capitalism and Modernity

An Excursus on Marx and Weber

Derek Sayer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134979127
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

First Published in 2004. The nature of modernity, and its connection with capitalism, are questions at the forefront of contemporary sociological debate. Derek Sayer re-examines the answers given by Karl Marx and Max Weber, authors of two of the most profound sociological critiques of modernity. His reassessment of Marx and Weber on capitalism and modernity provides a new reading which reveals the remarkable consonances between their sociologies of the modern condition. Going beyond the well-known stereotypes of 'the Marx-Weber debate', Professor Sayer shows that both Marx and Weber produced a challenging critique of the nature of power and subjectivity in modern society, a critique which retains all its intellectual force and moral relevance today. A major work of original scholarship, Capitalism and Modernity is clearly and accessibly written. It is an authoritative and provocative commentary on a debate central to modern sociology and politics and will be a key text in social theory for students of sociology, politics and philosophy.

Chapter one
Mors immortalis

There is a continual movement of growth in productive forces, of destruction in social relations, of formation in ideas; the only immutable thing is the abstraction of movement—mors immortalis.

Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy (1847:166)

1

Although the term did not by any means originate with him—its first recorded use, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, was in 1627—it was Baudelaire who first gave vogue to the idea of ‘modernity’ in his essay The Painter of Modern Life, written in 1859–60. His definition is a celebrated one: ‘modernity is that which is ephemeral, fugitive, contingent’. Baudelaire himself understood by modernity simply the quality of contemporaneity or presentness; all enduring works of art, he sought to establish, were so in part because of their ability to capture ‘the stamp that time imprints upon our perceptions’, to ‘extract the eternal from the ephemeral’. In this sense ‘every old-time painter had his own modernity’ (1986:37–9). But the idea of modernity has since taken on rather different connotations. It has come to define the present in opposition to the past, to designate an epoch. Ephemerality, fugitiveness and contingency are no longer the attributes of any present, but qualities thought specific to ‘the modern world’, in contrast to all its predecessors.

This notion of modernity was anticipated by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in The Communist Manifesto, a work written at the beginning of that ‘Year of Revolutions’, 1848, when ancien régimes momentarily looked set to crumble the length and breadth of Europe. ‘Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones’, they proclaim. ‘All fixed, fast-frozen relations…are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air’ (1848:487). Marshall Berman had good reason to describe Marx as ‘perhaps the first and greatest of modernists’, and his Manifesto as ‘the archetype of a century of modernist manifestos and movements to come’ (1982:129, 89; cf. Frisby 1985).

‘During its rule of scarce one hundred years’, the Manifesto continues, the bourgeoisie ‘has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together’. ‘It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former Exoduses of nations and crusades.’ Change becomes the only constant of modern society: ‘the bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society’. Such change is wholesale, leaving no walk of life, and no corner of the globe, untouched. Capitalism, says Marx, has ‘put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations’, and ‘pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors’”. It has ‘drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy waters of egotistical calculation’, and ‘stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe’. It has ‘torn away from the family its sentimental veil’, ‘created enormous cities’, and ‘rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life’. It has engendered the modern state—‘one nation, with one government, one code of laws, one national class-interest, one frontier and one customs-tariff’— yet ‘given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country’. It ‘draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilization […] In one word, it creates a world after its own image’ (1848:486–9). This world, Marx leaves us in no doubt, is radically new.

The Manifesto paints in very broad brushstrokes, and Marx was to qualify many of these sweeping generalizations in other writings. His opinion of what he elsewhere called ‘the great civilizing influence’ of capital is more mixed than this passage suggests. None the less these sentences sharply bring out two central themes in his thinking on capitalism. The first is its utterly revolutionary character. The new world ushered in by capital, for Marx, is fundamentally different from all that has gone before. Capitalism’s revolution is rapid, unprecedented, total and global, and it is the sheer comprehensiveness of this revolution which allows us sensibly to speak of modernity at all. Capitalism creates a qualitatively distinct kind of society from any of those which preceded it. ‘Only the capitalist production of commodities’, says Capital, ‘revolutionizes…the entire economic structure of society in a manner eclipsing all previous epochs’ (1878:37). It does so, moreover, continually. Where ‘conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form’ was ‘the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes’, the bourgeoisie—for the first time in human history—makes its revolution permanent (1848:487).

The second theme, however, is what makes Marx’s treatment of modernity distinctive. A sense of the fundamental novelty of the world taking visible shape in the nineteenth century is in one way or another a staple of all ‘classical’ sociologies. It has become a commonplace that modern sociology was born of the convulsions symbolized by the French and Industrial Revolutions, although it might conversely be said that it is sociology’s own conceptions of the newness of the modern world which render this Minervan account of its origins plausible in the first place. From the perspective of women’s experience, for instance, 1789 might not so self-evidently figure as an epochal watershed. Be that as it may, modernity can be argued to be the object of enquiry which first grounded the establishment of sociology as an independent academic discipline. This is attested in the sharp contrasts—of, in sum, ‘past’ and ‘present’—which undergird virtually all nineteenth and early twentieth-century sociological theories: Durkheim’s mechanical and organic solidarity, Tönnies’ Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, Maine’s status and contract, Spencer’s military and industrial societies, Weber’s traditionalism and rationalization, Simmel’s monetized and non-monetized economies. Typologies and theories grounded in the presumed radical distinctiveness of modernity continue to be the stock-in-trade of sociological thought. A century later Anthony Giddens, ardent critic of nineteenth-century evolutionism though he is, remains in no doubt at all that ‘the world in which we live today certainly differs more from that in which human beings have lived for the vast bulk of their history than whatever differences have separated human societies at any previous period’ (1981:165; cf. Sayer 1990)—a stupendous piece of modernist hubris (and one which begs the obvious question of who are the ‘we’ of and for whom he speaks). But where Marx is singular is in his insistence that what makes modernity modern is, first and foremost, capitalism itself.

Capital, for him, is the demiurge of the modern world. It is ‘the general light tingeing all other colours and modifying them in its specific quality’, ‘a special ether determining the specific gravity of everything found in it’, ‘the economic power that dominates everything in modern society’ (1857:43–4). Capitalism is modernity, and modernity capitalism. ‘It is only capital which creates bourgeois society’, says the Grundrisse, and it is bourgeois society which makes ‘all previous stages [of society] seem merely local developments of humanity and idolatry of nature’ (1858:336–7). In the meeting in the market-place of the free labourer and the capitalist, asserts Capital, is comprised ‘a world’s history’ (1867a:170). Indeed, claims The German Ideology, it is capitalism which ‘produced world history for the first time’ (1846a:73, cf. 49–51).

The grand themes of modern sociology—industrialization, urbanization, secularization, rationalization, individualization, state formation—are all addressed by Marx; most of them indeed in the famous passage I have quoted from the Manifesto. So is the darker face of modernity: the ephemerality and insecurity of modern life, the disintegration of community and susceptibility of society to its ideological substitutes, the anomic isolation of the rootless individual, the ‘disenchantment’ of the world, the iron cage of an en-veloping rationality in which means usurp ends. Marx’s writings are not entirely free from a very modern nostalgia for what Peter Laslett (1973) has dubbed ‘the world we have lost’. Marx understood this in terms of ‘the originally not despotic…but rather satisfying and agreeable bonds of the group, of the primitive community’ (1881a: 39), and envisioned humanity’s salvation as lying in ‘the return of modern societies to the “archaic” type of communal property’, adding that ‘we should not, then, be too frightened by the word “archaic’” (1881b:107). He was not alone in this hankering for an Arcadia: consider Emile Durkheim’s proposals for resurrecting the medieval guild (1984, Preface to 2nd edition; 1957). There is, in fact, little in fin de siècle sociological analyses of modernity and its multiple ills that is not anticipated somewhere in Marx’s voluminous writings.

The question is, to what extent can so wide-ranging an analysis of ‘that which is “new” in “modern” society’ be grounded in a theory of capitalism? Marx’s is the most ambitious attempt to do this, and thus an appropriate starting-point for this enquiry. It is not too much to claim that later sociological reflections on the topic, Max Weber’s included, amount to an extended debate with Marx’s ghost.

2

Before examining Marx’s account of capitalist society itself, it is worthwhile to consider his treatment of the past against which this brave new world is contrasted. He sharply berated those who sought mechanically to draw out of Capital a universal model of social development, prescriptive of ‘the general course fatally imposed on all peoples’ (1877:136; cf. Shanin 1984, Sayer 1990). But this does not mean that he had no overarching vision of the course of human history. He did, and it is central to his work. He summarizes this vision in the Grundrisse, the first draft of Capital written in 1857–8:

Relationships of personal dependence (which originally arise quite spontaneously) are the first forms of society, in which human productivity develops only to a limited extent and at isolated points. Personal independence based upon dependence mediated by things is the second great form, and only in it is a system of general social exchange of matter, a system of universal relations, universal requirements and universal capacities, formed. Free individuality, based on the universal development of the individuals and the subordination of their communal, social productivity, which is their social possession, is the third stage. The second stage creates the conditions for the third.

(1858:95)

The third stage is, of course, communism, the second stage—that of ‘personal independence based upon dependence mediated by things’—capitalism. What I want to emphasize here, however, is that when reflecting upon the course of human history at this level of generality, Marx simply conflates as his ‘first stage’ all precapitalist social formations; and he regards these, nostalgia notwithstanding, as limited, and limiting, forms of human being.

Marx is at his most savagely modernist (and in retrospect shows himself up as a true Victorian) in his writing on ‘Asia’. I apostrophize because the continent in question was in large part a figment of the European colonizing imagination, as Said (1979) has devastatingly shown. Orientalist clichés thoroughly permeate Marx’s discourse, as they do that of most of the sources on whom he draws. Two infamous articles of 1853 are illustrative of his sentiments. ‘Sickening as it must be to human feeling’, he tells the readers of the New York Daily Tribune, to witness the disintegration of India’s ancient village life at the hands of British capitalism,

we must not forget that these idyllic village-communities, inoffensive as they may appear, had always been the solid foundations of oriental despotism, that they restrained the human mind within the smallest possible compass, making it the unresisting tool of superstition, enslaving it beneath traditional rules, depriving it of all grandeur and historical energies. We must not forget the barbarian egotism which, concentrating on some miserable patch of land, had quietly witnessed the ruin of empires, the perpetuation of unspeakable cruelties, the massacre of the populations of large towns, with no other consideration bestowed upon them than on natural events, itself the prey of any aggressor who deigned to notice it at all. We must not forget that this undignified, stagnatory and vegetative life, that this passive sort of existence evoked on the other part, in contradistinction, wild, aimless, unbounded forces of destruction and rendered murder itself a religious rite in Hindostan. We must not forget that these little communities were contaminated by distinctions of caste and by slavery, that they subjugated man to external circumstances instead of elevating man the sovereign of circumstances, that they transformed a selfdeveloping social state into never changing natural destiny, and thus brought about a brutalizing worship of nature, exhibiting its degradation in the fact that man, the sovereign of nature, fell down on his knees in adoration of Kanuman, the monkey, and Sabbala, the cow.

(1853a:132)

‘English interference…produced the greatest, and to speak the truth, the only social revolution ever heard of in Asia’ (ibid.). For, Marx asserts, ‘Indian society has no history at all…What we call its history, is but the history of the successive intruders who founded their empires on the passive basis of that unresisting and unchanging society’ (1853b:217). History here means change, progress (an equation Anthony Giddens has usefully criticized)—and possessing a history is a prerogative of the western world. Weber too was to explain modern capitalism by the supposed peculiarities of ‘the occident’, as we shall see. In Marx’s imagery of Asiatic passivity we catch an echo of a common sexualization of ‘the West’ and its dark and mysterious Other, which exists to be possessed. Like John Donne’s ‘My America, my new-found land’ (a metaphor for his mistress’s body), ‘Asia’ is passively feminine, an object of conquest and desire, modernity thrusting, masculine, erect.

This ‘unchangeableness’ of Asiatic society, according to Capital, stems from ‘the simplicity of the organization for production in these self-sufficing communities’. They are based on the ‘possession in common of the land, on the blending of agriculture and handicrafts, and on an unalterable division of labour’. ‘Each [community] forms a compact whole producing all that it requires’, and—critically—‘the chief part of the products is destined for direct use by the community itself, and does not take the form of a commodity’. We have here ‘a specimen of the organization of the labour of society, in accordance with an approved and authoritative plan’, whose corollaries are ‘an unchanging market’ for products and the conduct by each producer of ‘all the operations of his handicraft in the traditional way’. There is ‘entire exclusion of division of labour in the workshop, or at all events a mere dwarf-like or sporadic and accidental development of the same’. The hallmark of such communities is simple reproduction; they ‘constantly reproduce themselves in the same form, and when accidentally destroyed, spring up again on the same spot and with the same name’ (1867a:357–8). Whenever population increases, a new community is simply founded on new land on the same lines as the old. Reproduction is mitotic, not innovatory. Nature worship and mindless traditionalism are but the expressions of this millennial stasis. For modern capitalism, on the other hand, ‘Christianity with its cultus of abstract man, more especially in its bourgeois developments, Protestantism, deism, etc., is the more fitting form of religion’ (1867a:79), and, Marx clearly thinks, a much superior one. Nature for him was something to be dominated, and ‘nature worship’ a symbol of human degredation.

Now, this construction of ‘Asiatic’ society is clearly, in one sense, an extreme. But it also operates for Marx as a kind of paradigm of all that capitalism is not, personifying the Other in terms of whose negativity it is defined. The motifs of these passages recur again and again in his depictions of pre-capitalist societies in general. To the degree that the more ‘developed’ ‘ancient’ and ‘Germanic’ forms of community, the social bases respectively of the ancient and feudal modes of production, which he discusses in the Grundrisse (1858:399–438), escape this regime of endless cyclicality, it is because their communal foundation has already begun to disintegrate. ‘Slavery and serfdom’, he considers—social relationships which emerge in ancient and feudal society respectively—remain ‘the necessary and logical result of property based on the community’ (1858:419–20). For Marx all pre-capitalist societies share, if to a greater or lesser degree, a common constellation of economic and social characteristics. These define them en bloc in their distinction from ‘the modern world’, and provide the foil against which the novelty of modernity is established. Much the same array of features is ascribed to the ‘pre-modern’ era (if with differing emphases and explanations) by Simmel, Durkheim, Weber, Tönnies and many others.

In Marx’s version of the world we have lost, either property is expressly communal or, where individuals do possess private property (in the means of production), they acquire it only in virtue of their membership of the community. An individual’s ‘relation to the objective conditions of his labour is mediated by his being a member of a community’: thus ‘property…means belonging to a tribe (community)’ (1858:416). As it was for Tönnies, the pre-modern world is predicated in Gemeinschaft, community. Such property is not freely disposable, but hedged about with various ‘political and social embellishments and associations’ (1865a: 618). The modern appearance of property as a primordial, unmediated relation between individuals and things, Marx argues against Hegel, is ‘a very recent product’ (1865a:615n). Save for slaves, individuals, within these relations, effectively possess their means of production, though they may not legally own them (if we can speak, in this context, of ownership at all). This is a critical difference from modern capitalism, and one which has an important corollary.

Here, Marx claims, ‘surplus labour for the nominal owner of the land can only be extorted by […] other than economic pressure’; ‘appropriation of this surplus labour…[has] its basis [in] the forcible domination of one section of society over another. There is, accordingly, direct slavery, serfdom or political dependence’ (1865a:790–1). ‘Personal dependence characterizes the social relations of production’ themselves, and hence ‘forms the groundwork of society (1867a:77). Within the pre-capitalist world ‘the appropriation of another’s will is presupposed in the relationship of dominion’ (1858:424). All ‘ancient Asiatic and ancient forms of production’, he therefore concludes, are ‘founded either on the immature development of man individually, who has not yet severed the umbilical cord that unites him with his fellowmen in a primitive tribal commu...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter One: Mors immortalis
• Chapter Two: Power and the Subject
• Chapter Three: The Ghost in the Machine
• Chapter Four: Without Regard for Persons
• Suggestions For Further Reading
• Bibliography