History Without A Subject by David Ashley

Author:David Ashley [Ashley, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General
ISBN: 9780429979644
Google: eXNgDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2018-10-08T05:07:33+00:00

With reference to the major shifts in regimes and modes of regulation described earlier, let us now briefly consider how Weber as well as Marx might have theorized such transformations. Associating class formation with “interests involved in the existence of the market,” Weber (1978, 927–928) took it for granted that a displacement or weakening of market relations necessarily lessens the influence of class. The problem with this assumption, however, is that it precludes consideration of how class domination is reproduced by nonmarket variables in regimes other than those of “extensive accumulation” (Wolff 1995). As we have seen, class relations in Fordist or “advanced” capitalist formations are sustained by organizational rationality and the legal authority of the state, as well as by “market situation.”

Weber (1978, 82) recognized that the enhancement of “marketability”—“the degree of regularity with which an object tends to be an object of [free] exchange on the market”—and the spread of capitalism were not the self-same process.6 He (1958, 13) nonetheless assumed that the highly differentiated economic rationalization of life first institutionalized in the West by regimes of extensive accumulation represented “a line of development having universal significance and value.” As a result, he concluded (incorrectly, it seems) that the nestling of market relations within capitalism in early modern capitalist societies was a universal process that would come to characterize every society.

Marx, however, emphasized that market relations became structurally determining in the early modern period only after the bourgeoisie had managed to establish itself as a dominant class. As he (1978, 715) noted, the proletariat “became sellers of themselves only after they had been robbed of all their own means of production and of all the guarantees of existence afforded by the old feudal arrangements.” From this perspective, the market could normalize class relations only after “the property order has shed its political form and been converted into a relation of production that [legitimates] itself” in the “political anonymization of [bourgeois] class rule” (Habermas 1975, 22). Political theorist Crawford Brough Macpherson (1965, 11) once described the relation between markets and modern forms of liberal, parliamentary representative democracy rather well: Liberal (capitalist) democracy “did not abandon its fundamental nature … by admitting the mass of the people into the competitive party system.” On the contrary, “it simply opened the competitive political system to all the individuals who had [already] been created by the competitive market economy” (11).

In short, whereas Weber viewed early modern extensive accumulation as apolitical and instrumental (and unavoidable), Marx saw it as a historically specific and temporary instrument of class domination. Unlike Weber, Marx did not believe that the reduction of social relations to the formal principles of market rationality was the inevitable outcome of a mysterious, disembodied process of rationalization that had managed to impose itself over the heads of real historical actors. Marx (1978; 1967a, 713–716) thus did not believe that the class relations of the modern era had developed just by “chance in the market” or had arrived merely through the impersonal mechanisms of “competitive price struggle.

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