Work and Identity: Karl Marx and Max Weber

Marx’s Life and Thought

Karl Marx (1818-1883) was a German philosopher, economist, and political theorist whose writings had a transformative impact on the modern world. His work has inspired countless social movements and revolutions across the globe, and played a pivotal role in the establishment of socialist and communist governments in the 20th century. His ideas also laid a foundation for the work of modern-day critical theorists and other scholars who explore the role of economic systems, power structures, and social inequalities in shaping human societies and cultural products.

Marx began his career as a journalist, becoming editor of the Rheinische Zeitung (Rhineland News) in 1842. The newspaper faced government censorship due to Marx’s radical views, and was ultimately banned in 1843. The same year, Marx and his wife, Jenny von Westphalen, moved to Paris, where Marx met the German socialist Friedrich Engels, who would become his lifelong collaborator and friend. Marx and Engels co-authored several works, most famously The Communist Manifesto (1848).

Marx was an active participant in the revolutionary uprisings that swept Europe in 1848. Following the failure of these revolutions, Marx was expelled from Paris and spent the rest of his life in exile in London. Despite financial struggles, he continued his writing and remained engaged in revolutionary politics. He devoted much of his later years to writing Das Kapital, a comprehensive critique of political economy.

Central to Marx’s thought is the concept of class struggle. He held that societies throughout history have been characterized by a continuous conflict between opposing economic interests, and that historical progression results from changing economic structures, leading to different social classes and different forms of conflict. In capitalist societies, class conflict takes the form of a struggle between two social classes: the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The bourgeoisie, which includes business-owners, shareholders, and landlords, are owners of the means of production—the land and capital (machinery, buildings, raw materials, money, etc.) used to produce goods and services. The proletariat, or working class, lacks access to the means of production; their only possession of significant economic value is their capacity to work. Members of the proletariat exchange their labor for a wage, which represents a portion of the value their work has created. Since the bourgeoisie seeks to maximize the portion of this value they appropriate as profits, their interests stand in fundamental conflict with the interests of the proletariat.

Marx predicted that this inherent tension would lead to a revolution in which the capitalist system would be replaced by a communist system in which the means of production are collectively owned and goods and services are distributed based on need.

Argument

All History is Class Struggle

The Communist Manifesto opens as follows:

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.

Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.

In the earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society into various orders, a manifold gradation of social rank. In ancient Rome we have patricians, knights, plebeians, slaves; in the Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs; in almost all of these classes, again, subordinate gradations.

The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.

Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinct feature: it has simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other — Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.

Key Principle

History as Class Struggle: An Outline

In the above passage, Marx lays out his view of history as class struggle, from ancient times to the present day. This involves four key claims:

(1) Every period in history involves some form of class division.

Examples: a peasant farmer and his feudal lord in medieval times, a cashier and the owner of the grocery store she works at in modern times.

(2) These class divisions are characterized by an antagonism between classes, with the more powerful class oppressing the less powerful.

Examples: A feudal lord can seize the produce of a farmer within his land, but the farmer does not have the power to do this to the lord. A store owner can give orders to her cashier and fire her if she does not obey, but the cashier cannot do these things to the owner.

(3) This antagonism eventually leads either to a fundamental transformation of society or to social collapse.

Examples: At some point, the oppressed will fight back against their oppressors. Serfs rebel against their feudal lords; factory workers strike against their employers.

(4) History is characterized by this process of class division, oppression, and revolution.

Work and Flourishing

The bourgeoisie has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.

The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers.

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.

The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere.

The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation. The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.

The bourgeoisie keeps more and more doing away with the scattered state of the population, of the means of production, and of property. It has agglomerated population, centralised the means of production, and has concentrated property in a few hands. The necessary consequence of this was political centralisation. Independent, or but loosely connected provinces, with separate interests, laws, governments, and systems of taxation, became lumped together into one nation, with one government, one code of laws, one national class-interest, one frontier, and one customs-tariff.

Argument

The Proletariat

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.

Owing to the extensive use of machinery, and to the division of labour, the work of the proletarians has lost all individual character, and, consequently, all charm for the workman. He becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack, that is required of him. Hence, the cost of production of a workman is restricted, almost entirely, to the means of subsistence that he requires for maintenance, and for the propagation of his race. But the price of a commodity, and therefore also of labour, is equal to its cost of production. In proportion, therefore, as the repulsiveness of the work increases, the wage decreases. Nay more, in proportion as the use of machinery and division of labour increases, in the same proportion the burden of toil also increases, whether by prolongation of the working hours, by the increase of the work exacted in a given time or by increased speed of machinery, etc.

The less the skill and exertion of strength implied in manual labour, in other words, the more modern industry becomes developed, the more is the labour of men superseded by that of women. Differences of age and sex have no longer any distinctive social validity for the working class. All are instruments of labour, more or less expensive to use, according to their age and sex.

No sooner is the exploitation of the labourer by the manufacturer, so far, at an end, that he receives his wages in cash, than he is set upon by the other portions of the bourgeoisie, the landlord, the shopkeeper, the pawnbroker, etc.

Connection

Weber and the “Iron Cage”

Marx wasn’t the only German philosopher in this period thinking about how economic structures affect our pursuit of the good life. Another was Max Weber, one of the founders of modern sociology. Weber was born towards the end of Marx’s life, but his work has some interesting similarities and expansions of Marx’s work. In Weber’s book, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, he argues that capitalist society is fueled by the Protestant Work Ethic. The basic idea is that hard work and contribution to society are outward manifestations of the fact that you are elected by God for salvation. The doctrine of election is a key tenet of Calvinism. This work and investment in the community surely benefits a capitalist system, which is reliant on labor and the flow of money. Thus, Weber contends that the ethic of work implicit in Calvinism fuels capitalism, explaining why both systems grew up together in Europe.

As capitalism developed, organizations and institutions became more bureaucratic and rationalized in their structures and processes. This rationalization, in turn, contributed to the emergence of what Weber termed the “iron cage” — the constraining and dehumanizing aspects of modern, bureaucratic systems. In modern capitalist societies, shaped by the Protestant Work Ethic, individuals find themselves trapped within systems that prioritize efficiency and calculability at the expense of individual freedom and meaningful values.

Here is Weber’s own account of the emergence of the iron cage, from Chapter 5 of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism:

The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so. For when asceticism was carried out of monastic cells into everyday life, and began to dominate worldly morality, it did its part in building the tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order. This order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which today determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force. Perhaps it will so determine them until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt. In Baxter’s view the care for external goods should only lie on the shoulders of the “saint like a light cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment.” But fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron cage.

Since asceticism undertook to remodel the world and to work out its ideals in the world, material goods have gained an increasing and finally an inexorable power over the lives of men as at no previous period in history. Today the spirit of religious asceticism – whether finally, who knows? – has escaped from the cage. But victorious capitalism, since it rests on mechanical foundations, needs its support no longer. The rosy blush of its laughing heir, the Enlightenment, seems also to be irretrievably fading, and the idea of duty in one’s calling prowls about in our lives like the ghost of dead religious beliefs. Where the fulfillment of the calling cannot directly be related to the highest spiritual and cultural values, or when, on the other hand, it need not be felt simply as economic compulsion, the individual generally abandons the attempt to justify it at all. In the field of its highest development, in the United States, the pursuit of wealth, stripped of its religious and ethical meaning, tends to become associated with purely mundane passions, which often actually give it the character of sport.

No one knows who will live in this cage in the future, or whether at the end of this tremendous development, entirely new prophets will arise, or there will be a great rebirth of old ideas and ideals, or, if neither, mechanized petrification, embellished with a sort of convulsive self-importance. For of the fast stage of this cultural development, it might well be truly said: “Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved.”