Gould, M. - Marx and Weber and The Logic of Historical Explanation - The Rise of Machine Capitalism

656271
research-article2016
JCS0010.1177/1468795X16656271Journal of Classical SociologyGould
Article
Journal of Classical Sociology
Marx and Weber and

1–28
© The Author(s) 2016
Reprints and permissions:
the logic of historical sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/1468795X16656271
explanation: The rise of jcs.sagepub.com
machine capitalism
Mark Gould
Haverford College, USA
Abstract
In Marx’s characterization of the first stage of manufacture, economic production is constituted
by the formal subsumption of labor under capital and thus the retention of precapitalist
processes of production. In consequence, increases in production occur with constant returns
to scale, competitive constraints are incompletely developed (per unit costs are not reduced),
cooperation is simple, and this economic structure is consistent with various traditional as well
as with rationalizing values. The objective, coercive, competitive constraints found in machine
capitalism (the “iron cage”) are absent, and if capital accumulation occurs within this first stage
of manufacture, it must be motivated subjectively. While Weber provides an explanation of the
nature of this subjective motivation, an explanation of the capacity of the Protestant ethic and the
spirit of capitalism to motivate capital accumulation systematically presumes a characterization
of the logic of economic production that is developed incompletely in Weber’s analysis. The
Protestant ethic becomes the spirit of capitalism, and methodically motivates capital accumulation,
only when it interpenetrates the first stage of manufacture. Thus, neither Marx nor Weber alone
provides an adequate explanation for the emergence of machine capitalism. Marx slights the
necessity for the autonomous, subjective motivation of capital accumulation within the first stage
of manufacture, while Weber provides an inadequate analysis of the nature of manufacture, the
structure of economic production that is rationalized subjectively by the spirit of capitalism.
However, their arguments are complementary and, if integrated, provide the foundation for a
satisfactory explanation of this developmental process. Through my characterization of their
analyses of capital accumulation in the first stage of manufacture, I construct an argument about
Marx and Weber’s understanding of the role of value-commitments in the analysis of economic/
social structures and about the common logic of historical explanation found in their theories.
Keywords
Capitalism, Marx, Weber, religion
Corresponding author:
Mark Gould, Department of Sociology, Haverford College, Haverford, PA 19041, USA.
Email: mgould@haverford.edu
Downloaded from jcs.sagepub.com at UNIVERSITE LAVAL on July 13, 2016

2 Journal of Classical Sociology
In this essay, I outline a simple framework within which it is possible to compare Marx
and Weber’s viewpoints on the role of value-commitments in history. I examine their
respective attempts to explain the genesis of machine capitalism in England and then
attempt to determine what, if his theory was to be logically coherent, each had to assume
about the independent effects of value-commitments in the emergence of machine capi-
talism. This discussion enables me to show how they converged on the same logic of
historical explanation.
In Marx’s characterization of first stage of manufacture, a stage of capitalist develop-
ment in both agriculture and industry, economic production is constituted by the formal
subsumption of labor under capital and thus the retention of precapitalist processes of
production. Here, increases in production are not essential; if increases in production do
occur, they do not occur because of increases in productivity. In the first stage of manu-
facture, increases in production occur with constant returns to scale, where simple coop-
eration prevails, and competitive constraints are incompletely developed because
increases in production are not associated with reduced per unit costs. There are no
objective constraints within this structure that necessitate capital accumulation; in conse-
quence, this economic structure is consistent with various traditional as well as with
rationalizing values. The objective, coercive, competitive constraints found in machine
capitalism (the “iron cage”), due to the emergence of the real subsumption of labor under
capital, the development of a specifically capitalist mode of production, and consequent
increases in productivity and decreases in per unit costs during the process of industriali-
zation, are absent. If capital accumulation occurs within the first stage of manufacture, it
must be motivated subjectively. If, in the first stage of manufacture, the society and
economy are regulated by traditional values, capital accumulation will only be sporadic
and it will not be sustained systematically. There will be no tendential development
toward machine capitalism.
Weber provides an explanation of the nature of the subjective motivation for capital
accumulation during the first stage of manufacture in his characterization of the Protestant
ethic and the spirit of capitalism. The Protestant ethic is the set of religious commitments
associated with ascetic Protestantism; when these values interpenetrate an economy
characterized by the first stage of manufacture, the spirit of capitalism, a set of economic
value-commitments, emerges to motivate capital accumulation systematically. This anal-
ysis presumes what we do not find developed adequately in Weber, a characterization of
the logic of economic production in the first stage of manufacture.
This analysis results in the conclusion that neither Marx nor Weber provides an ade-
quate explanation for the emergence of machine capitalism, where labor is not formally,
but really, subsumed under capital and where the specifically capitalist mode of produc-
tion emerges through industrialization. Here, the use of machines results in increases in
productivity, the reduction of per unit costs, and thus the emergence of objective, com-
petitive constraints. Capitalists who adhere to traditional values in machine capitalism,
legitimating traditional processes of production, are driven out of business. In machine
capitalism, capitalists are constrained objectively to transform their processes of produc-
tion to increase productivity; the only values consistent with this process are character-
ized by instrumental rationality.

Gould 3
Marx slights the necessity for the autonomous motivation of capital accumulation
within the first stage of manufacture, while Weber provides an inadequate analysis of the
nature of manufacture as a structure of economic production. I focus on the first stage of
manufacture because it is here, where the economic order does not limit the nature of
actors’ economic orientations to ones that are instrumentally rational, that we can see the
importance of integrating a characterization of the process of production with the values
that motivate how actors act within it.1 Within this discussion, we will also discover that
Marx and Weber’s arguments are complementary and compatible, and, when integrated,
provide the foundation for a satisfactory explanation of the process leading from the first
stage of manufacture to machine capitalism.2 I begin by characterizing a framework
within which we might compare the logic of historical explanation in their arguments.
The logic of historical explanation

In the Theory of Collective Behavior, Neil Smelser explicates the logic of value-added
models. These articulate universal class propositions that specify the necessary and suf-
ficient conditions for the occurrence of some outcome. Unlike most such arguments, the
order of the independent variables enunciated by the propositions is important in deter-
mining the nature of the expected outcome. The activation of these variables, in turn,
narrows the range of possible outcomes. Drawing on an analogy from economics,
Smelser (1962) comments that
Every stage in the value-added process … is a necessary condition for the appropriate and
effective addition of value in the next stage. The sufficient condition for final production,
moreover, is the combination of every necessary condition, according to a definite pattern.
(p. 14)
As each variable is introduced, “the explanation of the outcome becomes increasingly

determinate or specific” (p. 14). Crucial in this model is the recognition that the earlier
variables must combine in a specific order before the next variable becomes relevant in
the explanation of a particular outcome. Thus, the variables are viewed as ordered within
any particular explanation.
The ordering of the independent variables is not necessarily temporal:
In a value-added process … we must distinguish between the occurrence or existence of an

event or situation, and the activation of this event or situation as a determinant. The value-
added logic implies a temporal sequence of activation of determinants, but any or all of these
determinants may have existed for an indefinite period before activation.
(p. 19)
The variables are not necessarily ordered in time. The second independent variable
may be present prior to the first, but the second will only “add value,” become relevant
to the predicted outcome, when the first is also present. Thus, in this model, we are

dealing with a series of independent, yet interdependent, variables (Parsons, 1949 [1937]:
25, fn. 2), ordered in terms of their effect upon the final predicted outcome, but not nec-
essarily ordered in linear time.
It is necessary to make one addition to Smelser’s discussion. Value-added models are
organized within a cybernetic hierarchy. A cybernetic system is made up of at least two
parts, one said to be high in information, the other high in energy. In this system, the first
controls the second, while the second conditions the first. “Conditions” limit the range of
variation defining the state of relations within the system, while “controls” regulate the
state of the system within that range (cf. Wright, 1979 [1978]: ch. 1).
In a theory encompassing economic, political, and ideational variables, these may be
ordered within the cybernetic hierarchy Parsons has articulated – working towards the
cybernetically controlling system, the organization is as follows: the economy (A), the
polity (G), the societal community (I), and the fiduciary subsystem (L). The economy is
said to condition the polity, or less elliptically, organizations in the economy provide
adaptive resources to organizations in the polity, resources that limit the possibilities of
effective political action. While political decisions may contradict economic limitations,
they will not be capable of successful implementation if they fall outside of those struc-
turally defined limits (Gould, 1976, 1987: ch. 4; Marx and Engels, 1975: 60, vol. 5).
In a value-added model, “material conditions” precede (although not necessarily in
time) “ideational controls.” The presence of the former is required if the latter are to “add
value.” Thus, the presence of the theoretically relevant conditions is necessary before the
controls are activated, although the latter may appear on the scene prior to the former.
Every variable in a value-added theory is a necessary condition for the occurrence of
the explicandum, but only together do they encompass the necessary and sufficient con-
ditions for the outcome. Thus, value-added theories are universal class propositions of a
multivariate nature: if xyz, then a.3
Marx, Weber, and the value-added model

I can best illustrate the relevance of the value-added model to an analysis of Marx and
Weber if the discussion is restricted to two variables, defined by their relative position
within the cybernetic hierarchy. Marx and Engels (1975) pointed out in The German
Ideology that unless the “material conditions” for a revolution are present, it is immate-
rial whether the “ideas” of revolution have been expressed a hundred times (vol. 5, p. 54;
cf. 59–60). The implication of this statement is that both specifiable “material condi-
tions” and “ideational controls” are necessary for the occurrence of a revolution, that the
“material conditions” must be present for the “ideational controls” to be relevant to the
genesis of revolution (to “add value”), but that the “ideational controls” are independent
of (even if interdependent with) the “material conditions” in that they may emerge first
in linear, historical time. Their presence may be generated by circumstances other than
the relevant “material conditions.”4
The logic of the value-added model appears to differ from the logic of Marx’s theo-
retical arguments on one important point. For Marx, at least as read by many, the pres-
ence of the “material conditions” for the occurrence of some event necessarily gives rise
to those ideas also necessary as preconditions for its occurrence. This is the famous

Gould 5
determination in the last instance (Engels, in Marx and Engels, 1965 [1955]: 417–425).
Thus, while Marx orders his variables in a cybernetic hierarchy and is aware of the
necessity of multivariable explanations, including “ideational” factors, his independent
variables are not truly independent, as in time, all are dependent upon, emerge from, the
primary “material conditions.”
Weber’s model, on the other hand, is a pure value-added construct. While “material”
factors were seen as the conditions for social transformation, “ideational” factors were
seen as autonomous from those conditions, although interrelated with them.5 Weber’s
order for the variables follows the same cybernetic hierarchy Marx articulates, but, as in
the value-added model, he maintained the independence of the variables; there is no
determination in the last instance, only a series of prior conditions required for the next
variable up the hierarchy to be relevant in the genesis of the explicandum. The presence
of the “material conditions” for the occurrence of the explicandum is neither a necessary
nor a sufficient condition for the occurrence of the “ideational controls” (see Weber,
1958 [1904–1905]: 26–27, 190, fn. 16, 277, fn. 84).
Both Marx and Weber formulate value-added models in which “material conditions”
(almost always economic conditions) limit the range of possible outcomes. For both, the
genesis of major social transformations requires the concomitant presence of “ideational
controls” and for both “ideational controls” may be present prior to their material coun-
terparts. Thus, “ideational controls” may be generated independently of their “material”
counterparts. Nonetheless, these “ideational controls” add value only when the “material
conditions” are present. The difference is that for Marx, when the “material conditions”
are present, they will in time generate their “ideational” counterparts. This is the “last
instance.” If, as Althusser (1970 [1967]) tells us, “the lonely hour of the ‘last instance’
never comes” (p. 113), the logic of Weber’s and Marx’s historical explanations is
identical.
From manufacture to machine capitalism

Rather than attempting to document this interpretation of Marx’s and Weber’s work, I am
now going to outline their respective theories explaining the emergence of machine capi-
talism. I hope to demonstrate that a satisfactory reconstruction of Marx’s argument
requires the inclusion of value-commitments as an integral component in his explana-
tion. We will find, in other words, that whatever Marx’s stated views (in one passage or
another) with regard to the “determination” of events by “material,” economic condi-
tions, his own theoretical argument concerning the emergence of machine capitalism
requires that he accept the viewpoint that “material,” economic circumstances limit pos-
sible outcomes, but only in conjunction with “ideational” controls do they determine
outcomes. As the reader might suspect, it will not be necessary to worry about the “last
instance.”
In addition, I show that Weber’s explanation requires the inclusion of specifiable eco-
nomic conditions to explain satisfactorily the emergence of machine capitalism. While
Weber was always aware of this, nowhere does he specify these conditions with any
cogency. Thus, to approach logical closure, Weber’s explanation requires the inclusion
of Marx’s insights about the nature of economic production in the first stage of

manufacture in addition to his own analysis of the value-commitments that rationalize

economic production. Contrary to being an anti-Marxist, we will see that Weber’s theory
requires that he adopt a Marxist perspective.
A reconstruction of Marx’s position6

In the first stage of the development of capitalism, the first stage of manufacture, the
labor process is subsumed formally under capital. The labor process thus becomes a
means in the extraction of surplus value, a vehicle in the capitalist valorization process.
The capitalist is severed from direct production, assumes managerial responsibilities,
and exploits the worker, but manufacture is not characterized by a labor process of a
specifically capitalist type, by the “specifically capitalist mode of production.” For
Marx, capitalism is, in its most general form, typified by the capitalist valorization
process, but not necessarily by a distinct process of production.
Manufacture, at least in its first stage, does not imply any alteration in the actual pro-
cess of production:
On the contrary, the fact is that capital subsumes the labour process as it finds it, that is to say,
it takes over an existing labour process, developed by different and more archaic modes of
production. And since that is the case it is evident that capital took over an available, established
labour process, for example handicraft or the form of agriculture corresponding to a small,
independent peasant economy.
(Marx, 1976 [1867]: 1021. I have altered what I assume is a typographical error in the text; cf.
Marx, 1971: 194.)7
In manufacture, a monetary relationship exists between the buyer and seller of labor
power. Workers are formally free and are dependent on capitalists because the latter con-
trol the conditions of their labor. Technologically and organizationally, workers may con-
duct their labor process exactly as they did prior to this subordination, but now it is their
labor that is consumed in the labor process and the capitalist has control over the com-
modity that is produced. A master’s position in artisanal production is defined in terms of
the trade he has mastered: his “capital” is tied to specific use-values, and the methods of
production are defined traditionally. In manufacturing, the use-value of the capital is
theoretically irrelevant to the capitalist, whose only concern is the surplus value pro-
duced.8 In such circumstances, the capitalist will be removed from the actual process of
production and will assume the functions of capital, the appropriation and control of the
labor of others, and the selling of the products of that labor (Marx, 1967 [1867, 1885,
1894]: 308–309, vol. 1).
Manufacturing, when based on the formal subsumption of labor under capital, yields
absolute surplus value. Machine capitalism revolutionizes the labor process and yields,
in addition, relative surplus value. The specifically capitalist mode of production, sui
generis, is based on the extraction of relative surplus value;9 here, there is congruence
between the method of production and the valorization process; it is here that the capital-
ist mode of production is dominant, while manufacturing only predominates.10 In

Gould 7
machine capitalism, there is a “real subsumption of labour under capital” (Marx, 1976
[1867]: 1024ff, 1034ff).
Even in its first period, manufacture is based on cooperation as a productive power of
capital. At its most primitive level, this cooperation induces no change in the actual pro-
ductive process other than concentrating on larger numbers of workers under one roof or
coordinating the work of workers who ply their trades in their own dwellings. Later it
may give rise to a situation in which the workers perform different but connected tasks
in the production of commodities:
[I]n the handicraft-like beginnings of manufacture, and in that kind of agriculture on a large
scale, which corresponds to the epoch of manufacture … [s]imple cooperation is always the
prevailing form, in those branches of production in which capital operates on a large scale, and
division of labour and machinery play but a subordinate part.
(Marx, 1967 [1867, 1885, 1894]: 335, vol. 1)
The latter type of cooperation, in which different workers perform different tasks,
melds into manufacturing processes based on a more complex division of labor. In
heterogeneous manufacture, articles made separately are later fitted together; here,
where the production of each part is separated from the rest, the labor process may, and
in its early stages usually was, farmed out to private homes, saving the capital outlay
on a shop. In serial manufacture, commodities are produced in connected processes.
These remain isolated from each other, but in most cases, Smith’s example of the
manufacture of the pin being the most famous, this process is best carried out under
one roof. Serial manufacture clearly transforms the labor process itself; it is a form of
the real subsumption of labor under capital. It covers the gap between the earliest capi-
talist production, based solely on the formal subsumption of labor under capital, and
machine capitalism through the process of industrialization. In manufacture based on
complex cooperation and characterized by the division of labor, the value embedded in
individual commodities may decrease, and thus relative as well as absolute surplus
value may be extracted (see Marx, 1967 [1867, 1885, 1894]: 342–368, vol. 1).11
Two distinctions are crucial here: (1) between (a) usurer’s and merchant’s capital situated
within the interstices of precapitalist modes of production and (b) manufacture and (2) between
(the first stage of) manufacture and the specifically capitalist mode of production. The first
distinction concerns production formally subsumed under capital versus production
in which capital is to be found in certain specific, subordinate functions, but where it has not
emerged as the direct purchaser of labour and as the immediate owner of the process of
production, and where in consequence it has not yet succeeded in becoming the [pre – M.G.]
dominant force, capable of determining the form of society as a whole.
(Marx, 1967 [1867, 1885, 1894]: 1023)
The two subordinate forms Marx (1967 [1867, 1885, 1894]) has in mind are usurer’s
and merchant’s capital:

In such forms capital has not yet acquired the direct control of the labour-process. By the side
of independent producers who carry on their handicrafts and agriculture in the traditional old-
fashioned way, there stands the usurer or the merchant, with his usurer’s capital or merchant’s
capital, feeding on them like a parasite. The predominance, in a society, of this form of
exploitation excludes the capitalist mode of production; to which mode, however, this form
may serve as a transition, as it did towards the close of the middle ages.
(Vol. 1, p. 510; my italics – M.G.)
These subordinate forms of capital are not based on the formal subsumption of labor
under capital. “The immediate producer still performs the functions of selling his wares
and making use of his own labour” (Marx, 1976 [1867]: 1023). In dealing with merchant
capital, outside the formal subsumption of labor under capital, artisans sell their com-
modities to a customer; they do not sell their labor power to a capitalist. While the line is
often a fine one, it is important to draw it.
The second crucial distinction is between (1) manufacture based on the formal sub-
sumption of labor under capital, characterized by precapitalist labor processes and thus
an incongruence between the valorization and labor processes, by simple cooperation
and constant returns to scale, by the extraction of absolute surplus value, and thus by no
or very limited increases in productivity and no objective competitive constraints, and
(2) the specifically capitalist mode of production based on the real subsumption of labor
under capital, characterized by a congruence between the labor and valorization pro-
cesses, by increases in productivity, by decreases in per unit costs, by the extraction of
relative surplus value, and by the emergence of competitive constraints. The specifi-
cally capitalist mode of production emerges in the second stage of manufacture, in the
context of complex cooperation, but before the introduction of machines. Historically,
this second stage of manufacture is very important, but here, in a discussion of Marx
and Weber, I focus on the first stage of manufacture and on machine capitalism. When
I use the term manufacture, unless otherwise noted, I will be referring to the first stage
of manufacture.
Capital accumulation may occur within the context of a manufacturing system based
on the formal subsumption of labor. Here, where absolute surplus value is extracted,
accumulation grows either with the lengthening of the work day, the intensification of
work, or more clearly via an extension of production, where an increase in the volume of
capital implies a proportional increase in the number of persons employed and thus an
increase in the amount of surplus value extracted and available for reinvestment – accu-
mulation via replication of producing units at constant returns to scale. It is still absolute
surplus value that is extracted, and aside from a comparatively slight increase in relative
surplus value that might occur indirectly via an intensification of the labor process, the
lengthening of the work day, or via simple cooperation, only absolute surplus value.12 In
this situation, an increase in surplus value is paralleled by a proportional increase in total
capital invested; the rate of surplus value and the rate of profit remain constant. Where
the amount of surplus value is increased by an increase in the scale of production, where
no or almost no increase in relative surplus value occurs, and where the rate of surplus
value remains constant, I refer to the surplus value gleaned in accumulation as iterative

Gould 9
surplus value. In such a system of extended reproduction, competitive constraints are not
articulated.
In machine capitalism, where there is the real subsumption of labor under capital,
competition acts as a coercive mechanism; capitalists will attempt to increase labor pro-
ductivity to garner surplus profits by selling commodities below their (social) value.
Here, the individual value of commodities is below their social value and the capitalist is
able to undercut the prices of his competition while still making above-average profits.
As production increases, prices fall, and pressure is put on those capitalists who have not
innovated to increase productivity. Either they follow suit or eventually they will go out
of business. Marx argues, but does not demonstrate, that in the long run, as the competi-
tors catch up, this process will lower the average rate of profit for all capitalists. In
increasing the productivity of labor in those industries whose commodities constitute the
goods incorporated in the value of labor power, this process will also increase the relative
surplus value extracted (which buoys the rate of profit).13
Increases in productivity in machine capitalism come primarily through increased
investment in fixed (a form of constant) capital. Marx argues that in this situation, “moti-
vated” by competition, productivity will increase, relative surplus value will increase,
the absolute level of surplus value will increase, but owing to an even greater increase in
the organic composition of capital, the ratio of constant to variable capital, the rate of
profit will tendentially decrease.14
The important question to pose in this context concerns the nature of the mechanisms
that lead to an increase in the number of productive units formally subsumed under capi-
tal, that is, that lead to capital accumulation where iterative surplus value predominated.
It is clear that the formal subsumption of labor under capital may occur in many conjunc-
tures and that it did occur without becoming the predominant mode of production within
a society:
This enlargement of scale constitutes the real foundation on which the specifically capitalist
mode of production [the real subsumption of labor under capital] can arise if the historical
circumstances are otherwise favourable, as they were for instance in the sixteenth century. Of
course, it may also occur sporadically, as something which does not dominate society, at
isolated points within earlier social formations.
(Marx, 1976 [1867]: 1022; see also Marx, 1973 [1939]: 505–506)
I am concerned with the conditions of the predominance of manufacture, where its

development is systematic and where it controls the tendential movement into the next
stage of economic organization.15
Marx informs us that the production of surplus value is the absolute law of the capital-
ist mode of production. Use-values are produced solely as a means to the valorization of
capital (e.g. Marx, 1967 [1867, 1885, 1894]: 618, vol. 1). Thus, the aim of capitalism is
production; consumption is essential only because the value of produced commodities
must be realized. Marx (1976 [1867]) also informs us that production for production’s
sake, production as an end in itself, appears with the formal subsumption of labor under
capital, where the exchange value of the product is the deciding factor in its production:

But this inherent tendency of capitalist production does not become adequately realized – it
does not become indispensable, and that also means technologically indispensable – until the
specific mode of capitalist production and hence the real subsumption of labour under capital
has become a reality.
(p. 1037)
Only in the latter case is production severed from “needs laid down in advance.”
Here, the law of value is fully developed, and accumulation is manifest in the form of
concentration and centralization and thus, Marx suggests, through industrialization in an
increase in the organic composition of capital. Capital accumulation becomes a necessity
if an individual capitalist is to remain competitive and survive.
Marx (1976 [1867]) further distinguishes between the use-values that enter into the
productive process:
On the one hand, we find the material means of production, the objective conditions of
production, and on the other hand, the active capacities for labour, labour-power expressing
itself purposively: the subjective conditions of labour.
(pp. 980 and ff.)
The capacity of each of these two sets of conditions to determine the nature of the
productive process changes in the movement from manufacture to machine capitalism:
In Manufacture, the organization of the social labor-process is purely subjective; it is a

combination of detail labourers; in its machinery system, Modern Industry has a productive
organism that is purely objective, in which the labourer becomes a mere appendage to an
already existing material condition of production.
(Marx, 1967 [1867, 1885, 1894]: 386, vol. 1 – my italics)
It is important to add that in machine capitalism, capitalists are also constrained by the
objective conditions of production. They function only as personified capital, just as
workers are labor personified; “the capitalist is just as enslaved by the relationships of
capitalism as his opposite pole, the worker, albeit in a quite different manner” (Marx,
1976 [1867]: 990).
In machine capitalism, increases in productivity allow for the lowering of per unit
costs and prices. This process creates the coercive constraints of competition. “Free com-
petition brings out the inherent laws of capitalist production, in the shape of external
coercive laws having power over every individual capitalist” (Marx, 1967 [1867, 1885,
1894]: 270, vol. 1; cf. 316). It is this competition that objectively coerces capitalists into
lowering the per unit cost and price of their products via the introduction of new produc-
tive techniques, and it is competition that forces the generalization of these techniques. It
is competition that forces production for production’s sake and, incidentally, creates the
material conditions for the development of a new social order while actualizing the law
of capital accumulation (Marx, 1967 [1867, 1885, 1894]: 319, 592, vol. 1).

Gould 11
This distinction between subjective motivation and objective constraint is crucial,

but it must not be misunderstood. Marx does not argue that in machine capitalism the
individual capitalist will necessarily follow the law of capital accumulation; rather, he
contends that determinate consequences will befall the capitalist who fails to obey it.
Competitive pressures enforce these consequences. If the system is to function reason-
ably efficiently, a rationalizing ideology will emerge within it motivating actions con-
gruent to those required for survival. Thus, capital accumulation will appear as voluntary
and capitalists will be committed to it, perhaps even in situations where it is not required
by competitive pressures. To say that the constraints within the system are “objective”
does not imply that value-commitments legitimating action within the system are unim-
portant, rather it means that these commitments must be of a particular, narrowly
defined, sort.16
Where labor is formally subsumed under capital, competitive constraints are, at most,
incompletely developed. In a strict sense, as manufacture approaches a system with con-
stant returns to scale, they are not present at all. This means that capital accumulation is
not mandated by “objective constraints” inherent in the mode of production. In conse-
quence, various types of value-commitments may prove to be consistent with manufac-
ture, even commitments that do not motivate capital accumulation.
In manufacture, as we have seen, accumulation occurs within the context of itera-
tive surplus value; accumulation implies the extension of production, the replication of
production units (cf. Marx, 1967 [1867, 1885, 1894]: 612ff, vol. 1). Accumulation in
manufacture is not coerced by the inadequately realized tendency of capitalist accumu-
lation. While there may be motivations to expand production to increase profits or
even to try to lower costs to gain a competitive advantage, they are not inherent in the
laws of capitalism within the context of the extraction of iterative surplus value, in the
first stage of manufacture, where competitive constraints are not in place. At this stage,
activities are subjectively motivated, rather than “objectively constrained,” for both
capitalists and workers.
Marx explicitly recognizes this for the worker. Much of his discussion of primitive
accumulation involves a specification of the conditions under which persons might be
forced to work as wage-labor. This argument is codified in his equation, at one point, of
the subjective conditions of labor with the means of subsistence. The greater control over
the necessities maintained by the capitalist, the more firmly established the formal sub-
sumption of labor under capital (Marx, 1976 [1867]: 1026). He also emphasizes this
point in his discussion of discipline problems under manufacturing. While it is clear that
certain aspects of manufacture were structured with a view to giving control over the
labor process to the capitalist (cf. Brighton Labour Process Group, 1977; Marglin, 1974,
1984, and for a critique, Williamson, 1985: ch. 9), only with the development of machine
capitalism was this control, and the consequent discipline, conclusively established
(Marx, 1967 [1867, 1885, 1894]: 367–368, vol. 1; cf. Braverman, 1974; Burawoy, 1985;
Stone, 1974).
When it comes to providing an understanding of the subjective controls over the capi-
talist, Marx’s arguments are less cogent. He indicates that the development of manufac-
ture grounded in the real subsumption of labor under capital is a spontaneous formation,
leaving us with the image of a chance mutation and the competitive advantage of natural

selection (Marx, 1967 [1867, 1885, 1894]: 363, vol. 1). Usually, when Marx uses the
word “spontaneous,” he is referring to a natural process within a constituted tendency.
The problem in this case is his failure to establish the structures that constitute the ten-
dency leading to the “spontaneous” formation of manufacture based on division of labor,
the real subsumption of labor under capital, from manufacture grounded in the formal
subsumption of labor under capital.
However, he also discusses the ascetic values of the capitalist, the bourgeois virtue of
reinvesting surplus value as capital instead of squandering it as revenue:
It will never do, therefore, to represent capitalist production as something which it is not,
namely as production whose immediate purpose is enjoyment or the manufacture of the means
of enjoyment for the capitalist. This would be overlooking its specific character, which is
revealed in all its inner essence.
(Marx, 1967 [1867, 1885, 1894]: 244, vol. 3; cf., vol. 1, p. 586)17
Forgetting the philosophical flourish, this statement is intelligible only within the context
of the real domination of labor by capital, the congruence between the valorization and labor
processes, and thus the extraction of relative surplus value in competitive conditions. Within
this context, Marx’s analysis of commodity fetishism makes perfect sense for all who are
“supports” (Träger) of the system. It is a mystification if applied to the first stage of manu-
facture, for it assumes a commitment to a form of rationality that had to be created.18
Fortunately, Marx provides hints to the answer to this problem, and Weber comes very
close to its solution. There are in Marx’s writings scattered references to the importance
of Protestantism, or more specifically Puritanism, in establishing the hegemony of capi-
talism. He tells us that Protestantism is the most fitting form of religion
for a society based upon the production of commodities, in which the producers in general enter
into social relations with one another by treating their products as commodities and values, whereby
they reduce their individual private labour to the standard of homogeneous human labour …
(Marx, 1967 [1867, 1885, 1894]: 79, vol. 1)
He explicitly notes the importance of Protestantism in eliminating traditional holidays

and thereby in regulating the work schedule within economic production (Marx, 1967
[1867, 1885, 1894]: 276, vol. 1, fn. 2; cf. Thomas, 1964; Thompson, 1967). Most impor-
tant, he recognized the relationship between English Puritanism (“and also Dutch
Protestantism”) and asceticism, self-denial, self-sacrifice, frugality, and contempt for
mundane and fleeting pleasures (Marx, 1973 [1939]: 232). Unfortunately, he does not tie
this religious ethic, which is itself never effectively discussed, to the process of accumu-
lation within the first stage of manufacture. For this linkage, we must turn to Weber.
A reconstruction of Weber’s position

The logic of Weber’s studies in comparative religion is as follows: a series of necessary
and sufficient conditions for the genesis of modern Occidental capitalism may be

Gould 13
established; these conditions, with the exception of one, motivating and legitimating
value-commitments (moral obligations), enforced with psychological and social sanc-
tions, were found in a number of situations. The requisite value-commitments were
understood to be independent of (yet interdependent with) the “material,” and most espe-
cially the economic, conditions that lead to the development of machine capitalism. The
necessary and sufficient conditions were cybernetically ordered; the cybernetic controls
(including the legitimating values) were understood to have consequences for the devel-
opment of capitalism only when the “material conditions” were present. In only one situ-
ation, northwest Europe from the sixteenth century, were all of the necessary and
sufficient conditions present, including the required “ideational control,” and here we
find the origins of modern capitalism, the constitution of a structure whose tendencies
resulted in the creation of machine capitalism. Unfortunately, Weber does not provide
adequate theoretical specification of the non-ideological conditions for the development
of the modern capitalism, nor does he explicitly identify and discuss them in his com-
parative work. One of these conditions was the presence of a manufacturing economy.19
Weber is sometimes accused of providing a circular definition of modern capitalism.
He recognized that capitalism has often existed in the absence of “the spirit of capital-
ism” and that this set of rationalizing value-commitments was at the time only found in
modern Western European and American capitalism (Weber, 1958 [1904–1905]: 52). He
might be accused of explaining modern capitalism (the pursuit of profit on the basis of a
rational organization of formally free labor when coupled with rationalizing values) in
terms of one of its definitional attributes, the spirit of capitalism (the rationalizing val-
ues). His position is clarified if one recognizes that the Protestant ethic had positive
consequences for the development of capitalism only when it legitimated actions within
a specific mode of production, manufacture, and that the predominance of manufacture
is understood to lead to the dominance of machine capitalism (where machine capital-
ism, not “modern capitalism,” is the explicandum). Machine capitalism may be defined
without reference to either the Protestant ethic or the spirit of capitalism.20
If we substitute “machine capitalism” for “modern capitalism,” it is clear that our dis-
cussion is not tautologous. Weber’s argument is that the presence of ascetic Protestantism
within a situation of a rudimentary manufacturing economy gave rise to capital accumula-
tion and to the predominance of that economy.21 The presence of ascetic Protestantism in
situations not characterized by a rudimentary manufacturing economy did not give rise to
the predominance of manufacturing within the economy and, thus, it did not lead to the
development of machine capitalism.22
Weber’s main conclusion is that a modern capitalism seeking profit in terms of the
rational organization of formally free labor (i.e. machine capitalism), while dependent
on a given economic foundation and on many other variables, originally emerged in
the context of the rational ethical prophecy embedded in Calvinism. He wants to dem-
onstrate the effect of a certain set of religious commitments on the ethos of a manufac-
turing economy. He is neither concerned with the theology of Protestantism nor with
its direct teachings concerning economic activities. Rather, he is concerned with the
consequences of its teachings in the genesis of value-commitments controlling these
economic activities. He is at pains to argue the unintended consequences of Calvinism
and continually emphasizes the sanctions that reinforced the social obligations

derivative from those commitments (see, for example, Weber, 1958 [1904–1905]: 97–
98, 197, fn. 12; 217, fn. 3).
Weber emphasizes that rational action is relative to a particular point of view and
embedded in a particular series of social relations. Rationalization entails the systematic
organization of ideals and the efficient selection of means to attain the goals embedded
within those ideals. Rational action within the feudal mode of production or according to
Catholic ethics differs from rational action in a manufacturing structure or according to
Puritan ethics. It is not self-interest that concerns Weber, but rather formally rational
action, which was characterized in a situation of manufacture by the calculation of profit.
The rationalization of an embryonic capitalism led to its self-sustaining growth; an ethic
demanding an inner-worldly asceticism, operative in another set of circumstances, would
have another set of consequences.
The interpenetration of the Protestant ethic within an economy at the first stage of
manufacture gave rise to the spirit of capitalism; through this interpenetration, a religious
set of values transformed into a set of economic values. In a situation of rudimentary
manufacture, the inner-worldly asceticism embedded in the notion of a calling, demand-
ing as a moral duty the fulfillment of religious obligations in worldly affairs and empha-
sizing what later came to be called Methodism in their pursuit, gave rise to the spirit of
capitalism, which entailed the rational acquisition of profit. This pursuit was sanctioned
by the necessity of manifesting one’s salvation; within a theological system defined by
predestination, this resulted in the rational ordering of one’s entire worldly life. The
weighing of good deeds against bad deeds was unacceptable where works were irrele-
vant to salvation; the certainty of salvation in faith and the manifestation of this certainty
in good deeds were relevant only as an indication of God’s favor. This certainty came in
a totalistic judgment of one’s self and thus in the disciplined ordering of one’s life. A
theology based on predestination was not the sole foundation of moral sanction – Weber
especially notes the importance of church discipline – but it clearly was an important one
in the genesis of the pattern of commitments Weber discusses as the Protestant ethic.23
Within a situation of nascent manufacture, these religious commitments, as the spirit of
capitalism, resulted in systematic capital accumulation.24
Weber differentiates between what I would label a manufacturing system legitimated
by traditional values and one legitimated by rationalizing values. In the first instance, the
form of organization was capitalistic (labor was formally subsumed under capital):
But it was traditionalistic business, if one considers the spirit which animated the entrepreneur:
the traditional manner of life, the traditional rate of profit, the traditional amount of work, the
traditional manner of regulating relationships with labour, and the essentially traditional circle
of customers and the manner of attracting new ones.
(Weber, 1958 [1904–1905]: 67)
When the same organizational form is found in conjunction with the spirit of modern
capitalism, that is, where the values that regulate its operation are specifications from the
values of ascetic Protestantism, a process of rationalization occurs. This process resulted
in systematic capital accumulation via iterative surplus value, in extended reproduction.

Gould 15
This occurred, Weber emphasizes, without necessarily modifying the form of organiza-
tion or the nature of the labor process. But it changed the circumstances within which
those touched by these businesses did business.
The development of this system, where labor was formally subsumed under capital
and where the subjective control over the process was constituted by the spirit of capital-
ism, was autonomous in that while it drew on extant capital and labor (from the process
of primitive accumulation) and extant markets, it also created the capital, labor, and
markets it needed both domestically and, once it conquered the state, internationally.
Thus, a manufacturing system legitimated by the values of the Protestant ethic was a
self-sustaining system, operating in terms of the law of capital accumulation. This sys-
tem was predominant in early seventeenth-century England (Gould, 1987: ch. 4); the
narrowly economic foundation for it had existed elsewhere, but the manufacturing sys-
tem predominated only when that foundation was interpenetrated with a formally
rational, inner-worldly, ethos.
It is essential to recognize that the Protestant ethic did not define a substantive orien-
tation towards economic activities; ascetic Protestants in non-capitalist societies did not
suddenly act to maximize profits in the exploitation of formally free labor. Rather, in
conjunction with a rudimentary manufacturing structure, it rationalized activities already
extant. The logic of economic activities, and thus the nature of economic rationality, was
defined by the manufacturing structure within which these values were assimilated. In
rationalizing these activities, the Protestant ethic initiated a process leading to the pre-
dominance of manufacture within the English economy.
Weber (1958 [1904–1905]) agreed with Marx that the capitalist system in its devel-
oped form was self-sustaining:
The capitalist economy of the present day is an immense cosmos into which the individual is
born, and which presents itself to him, at least as an individual, as an unalterable order of
things in which he must live. It forces the individual, in so far as he is involved in the system
of market relationships, to conform to capitalistic rules of action. The manufacturer who in
the long run acts counter to these norms, will as inevitably be eliminated from the economic
scene as the worker who cannot or will not adapt himself to them will be thrown into the
streets without a job.
(pp. 54–55; see 72; 181–182; 282, fn. 108)
This is Marx’s machine capitalism, the dominant mode of production within a society
where the real subsumption of labor under capital has occurred and where objective
competitive constraints are operative. In Weber’s (1958 [1904–1905]) terms, “these are
phenomena of a time in which modern capitalism has become dominant and has become
emancipated from its old supports” (p. 72).
We must avoid the error of explaining capital accumulation within a manufacturing
system through the presumption that all actors at all times (excepting for error and igno-
rance) are instrumentally rational. The process of rationalization and the sanctions that
constrain it must be explained. In manufacture, if extended reproduction was to be routi-
nized, the controls definitive of the spirit of capitalism were necessary to motivate

persons within the economic system and to assure systematic capital accumulation and
the predominance of manufacture within the economy. Unlike in machine capitalism,
where adherence to traditional values will result in a capitalist’s uncompetitiveness and
elimination, such values were compatible with the first stage of manufacture. In this
economic order, capitalists who produced traditionally were not driven out of business,
but where traditional values interpenetrated the first stage of manufacture, they did not
lead to systematic capital accumulation.
If we return to the cybernetic analogy, I can clarify this argument in another way. In
machine capitalism, the objective conditions of production generate competitive con-
straints that necessitate efficient production if an individual capitalist is to survive. The
state of the system, controlled by the motivational value-commitments, is narrowly
delimited by its economic structure. In manufacture, however, the allowable variation in
the direction of action is much broader. Production in terms of constant returns to scale
and thus the absence of competitive constraints means that a wide variety of value-orien-
tations are consistent with economic survival and a wide variety of economic outcomes
are possible. The conditions delimited by manufacture as an organizational form are very
broad.
In machine capitalism, it may appear as if the economy determines value-orienta-
tions. In consequence, it is possible for neoclassical economists to assume that actors are
always instrumentally rational (excepting only error and ignorance [Parsons, 1949
[1937]: ch. 2]). In machine capitalism, actors are constrained to act rationally within the
economic system. In the first stage of manufacture, however, it should now be clear that
sustained and methodical capital accumulation is the outcome of the conjunction between
the formal subsumption of labor under capital and the instrumentally rational values of
the spirit of capitalism. In manufacture, the controls mandating rational action are both
interdependent with the logic of economic organization and independent from that logic
(Parsons, 1949 [1937]: 25, fn. 2); they emerged through the interpenetration of ascetic
Protestantism and manufacture.
Three possible objections

There are at least three objections that a reader might want to make to my arguments. The
first concerns Weber’s focus on exchange relations in defining capitalism, as against
Marx’s emphasis on the structure of production. The second concerns whether there
might not be some alternative motive force, besides the value-commitments generated
within, or functionally equivalent to, the Protestant ethic, leading to the rationalization of
manufacture and thus to the first development of machine capitalism.25 The third con-
cerns Kenneth Smith’s discussion of Marx’s analysis of the transition from simple to
extended reproduction and whether it provides an alternative characterization of the tran-
sition between manufacture and machine capitalism.
With regard to Weber’s emphasis on exchange as against production, the following
points might be made. He succeeds in avoiding the pitfall of what Brenner has labeled
“Neo-Smithian Marxism”; he does not assume the operation of capitalist rationality;
rather, he seeks to explain its emergence.26 Weber (1958 [1904–1905]) also avoids
another Neo-Smithian pitfall when he recognizes that modern capitalism is grounded in

Gould 17
formally free labor (p. 22). What he fails to realize is that the distinction that he wants
to draw between the forms of economic system Marx labels manufacture (in its first
stage) and machine capitalism can only be articulated in terms of an analysis of the logic
of production, in an analysis of the labor process and the mode of surplus extraction.
The distinction between a capitalism grounded in objective constraints (Weber, 1958
[1904–1905]: 54–55, 62, 70) and one grounded in subjective controls (pp. 65–69) is
meaningless if one simply focuses on exchange relationships. The distinction, to use the
neoclassical terms, between an economic order grounded in constant and one grounded
in increasing returns to scale is intelligible only if one focuses on the structure of
production.
To express both of these points, the necessity of explaining capitalist rationality and
the differentiation between a capitalism that allows for variations in motivation from one
that constrains rational activity, requires a Marxian analysis grounded in the distinction
between the formal and the real subsumption of labor under capital and between abso-
lute-iterative and relative surplus value. Thus on these and other grounds, Weber’s analy-
sis of the structure of capitalism is inferior to that provided by Marx. Nonetheless, owing
to his avoidance of the pitfalls of most analyses focusing on exchange, the assumption of
rationality, and the failure to focus on wage-labor,27 his analysis is compatible with
Marx’s, in that it might be corrected via Marx’s insights while incorporating the central
points Weber makes into our modified theory.
The second possible objection concerns alternative forces of motivation for the ration-
alization of economic activity. Insofar as we are concerned with the first emergence of
machine capitalism, we can rule out competitive constraints from outside the system
under analysis. May we also rule out political forces from within the system? At times
Marx appears to imply that political pressures mandated capital accumulation.
In point of fact, we can rule out political pressures as a first source of systematic
rationalization. To assume their presence is to put the cart before the horse. The congru-
ence of political actions with capitalist development requires explanation; the emergence
of a state compatible with the rationalization of English manufacture required a series of
revolutions.28
If the state served to regularize the process of capital accumulation in a manufacturing
system dominated by the formal subsumption of labor under capital, then no possible
explanation can be offered for the necessity of “bourgeois revolutions.” If we argue that
the patrimonial state in early seventeenth-century England was a bourgeois state, regu-
larly serving the interests of manufacturing capitalists, no explanation for the transfor-
mation of the state to facilitate capitalist development is possible, unless one argues what
is clearly false, that this transformation occurred to facilitate the emergence of machine
capitalism, in contradistinction to manufacture.
The prerevolutionary English social formation must be conceptualized, to adopt
Piaget’s (1962 [1932]) term, as a “stage of action,” as a transitional stage (see Gould,
1987: ch. 8). This type of social formation is characterized by a set of practices looking
forward to the next stage of social development; it is the nature of such a stage that these
actions are legitimated in terms of beliefs drawn from the previous stage.
The transitional stage extant in early seventeenth-century England was constituted
economically as a manufacturing structure, in both town and country, which Marx treats

as a form of capitalism, and by patrimonial political legitimation, which Weber treats as

a form of traditionalism. The English revolutions of the seventeenth century were an
outgrowth of the internal, immanent, movement of this manufacturing mode of eco-
nomic production, when controlled, as it was in England, by a set of rationalizing values,
in contradistinction to a political system legitimated by traditional values. The revolu-
tions mark the point where the continued transformation of the social formation became
self-sustaining, powered by a manufacturing structure governed by accelerated capital
accumulation. Prior to the revolutions, the state impeded this process.29
Third, one of the anonymous reviewers kindly suggested the possible relevance of
one of Kenneth Smith’s central arguments, in his Guide to Marx’s Capital, to my
explanation of the transition from the formal to the real subsumption of labor under
capital, from manufacture to machine capitalism (Smith, 2012). Unfortunately, I do
not believe that the Smith argument is pertinent to my discussion. Smith is concerned
with the transition from simple to extended reproduction, as discussed primarily in
Volume 2 of Capital. He suggests that Marx cannot explain this transition. Smith’s
discussion focuses on the capital accumulated due to the depreciation of fixed capital
(although I admit to being a bit unclear as to the point of his argument). I am inter-
ested in the conditions motivating capitalists to accumulate capital during the first
phase of manufacture, when fixed capital is relatively insignificant, when there are no
increases in productivity, and when there are no “objective” constraints on capitalists
requiring capital accumulation.
Smith’s argument may seem relevant to my own because he suggests that Marx lacks
a material means of explaining the expansion of the capitalist mode of production from
simple to extended reproduction. His line of reasoning seems contrary to mine because
he denies the validity of an argument evoking the will or spirit of the capitalist, or at least
he denies that such an argument would be acceptable to Marx (p. 78).30 His discussion
overlooks the distinction between the two forms of manufacture, the first stage character-
ized by simple cooperation and the formal subsumption of labor under capital and the
second stage characterized by complex cooperation and the emergence of the real sub-
sumption of labor under capital. Competitive constraints emerge in manufacture with
complex cooperation (where, originally, fixed capital is relatively unimportant, but
where increases in productivity are manifest and thus traditional, precapitalist production
processes are increasingly no longer viable), but not in the first stage of manufacture,
which is characterized by constant returns to scale.
Simply, Smith’s questions are different from the ones I pose. If they appear to be the
same, it is because he misunderstands the place where Marx believes objective con-
straints become significant. Smith tells us that “competition between capitalists can only
explain accumulation once the process of reproduction on an extended scale is already
underway …” (p. 84). However, as I have explained, competition emerged with the real
subsumption of labor under capital in the second phase of manufacture, after the move-
ment from simple to complex cooperation. It is correct that Marx cannot explain this
movement from subjective to objective constraints, but I have elucidated it using Weber
as a complement to Marx, emphasizing that the moral obligations constituted by the
Protestant ethic interpenetrate into a manufacturing economy, generating the spirit of
capitalism and, in consequence, systematic capital accumulation.

Gould 19
Marx provides a simple argument explaining the transition from the second stage of
manufacture (complex cooperation, the real subsumption of labor under capital) to
machine capitalism. In complex cooperation, the production process is reduced to its
component parts, which may then be transferred to machines. Second, as production
increases (as it must in the second stage of manufacture), the demand for labor increases
along with its cost (this is true although productivity also increases). Thus, it becomes
advantageous to substitute machines for workers, especially since doing so further
increases productivity (and thus for a time, surplus profits for innovators) in addition to
controlling the value of labor power. Here, in Marx’s argument, we have the tendency
that constitutes machine capitalism out of manufacture, one that he sees as leading to a
decline in the rate of profit.
If I understand Smith’s argument correctly (in Section II of his book), he presumes
that there is only one unit of fixed capital used during the process of production. He
asks why capitalists accumulate a fund to replace this unit of fixed capital during its
period of depreciation. It is, however, likely that there are many units of fixed capital
that are used up at different times. As Smith recognizes, the capital fund is money; it
thus need not be used only to purchase the unit of capital whose depreciation it repre-
sents; it can be used to purchase other aspects of constant or variable capital more or
less continuously (and in all likelihood, the capital fund includes capital representing
the depreciation of several forms of capital). Furthermore, even if there were only one
unit of fixed capital, a capitalist in a competitive economy would be forced to invest
the capital fund; she would not be able to hoard it because doing so would result in less
profit that others were garnering. Presumably, any investment would be undertaken in
anticipation of the need to monetize her capital at the time she will be required to pur-
chase the fixed (and other) capital required to continue production. All of this is the
case because Marx’s discussion of fixed capital and extended reproduction presumes
what I have called machine capitalism, where there are competitive constraints, objec-
tive constraints that impinge on all capitalists. Here, capitalists are forced to use capital
productively, to expand or transform the nature of production when required to do so
to produce profitably.31 In machine capitalism, where the organic composition of capi-
tal is assumed to increase, extended reproduction is the norm. Smith’s concern about
inadequate (productive) consumption seems to me to be relevant only when capitalists
hoard money, a situation better analyzed by Keynes than Marx (where such hoarding
is not possible if it reduces a firm’s profits).
Conclusion
We have seen that Marx paid insufficient attention to a distinction implicit in his own
theory, between economic structures that permitted significant variations in correlative
“ideational controls” (the first phase of manufacture) and those that severely limited such
variation (machine capitalism). This lapse led him into an error insofar as he assumed a
natural process of rationalization within manufacture leading into machine capitalism.
We have also seen that Weber failed to provide an adequate analysis of the economic
structure rationalized by the Protestant ethic; thus, he failed to explain adequately the
emergence of the spirit of capitalism, which is a consequence of the interpenetration of

the Protestant ethic and the first stage of manufacture. Together, however, they do pro-
vide a satisfactory analysis of conditions for systematic capital accumulation within a
manufacturing economy.
This theoretical conjuncture is, in itself, insufficient to explain the emergence of
machine capitalism. The next step is to explain how the growth of manufacture helped
to generate a bourgeois revolution constituting a state that acted in ways consistent
with the law of capital accumulation. If the prerevolutionary state is conceptualized
within Weber’s framework of patrimonialism, it can be shown that its conjunction with
a manufacturing economy interpenetrated with rationalizing values generated crucial
variables necessary for a revolution. One consequence of this revolution was the estab-
lishment of political controls that facilitated the emergence of machine capitalism
(Gould, 1987).
We may draw several important lessons from our analysis:
1. Both Weber and Marx articulated arguments consistent with the value-added
model. The logic of historical explanation each specified requires the analysis of
both “material” and “ideational” variables. While these variables are not neces-
sarily ordered in time, they are ordered in terms of their effects on potential out-
comes. A set of rationalizing values may appear independently of a particular
type of economic structure, but they will not be relevant to the genesis of machine
capitalism until the first stage of manufacture is present.
2. It can be hard to see the importance of explaining the emergence of rationalizing
values when examining machine capitalism, where objective constraints require
instrumentally rational action. In a discussion of machine capitalism, the pre-
sumption that all actors are at all times rational maximizers, that they always
maximize against constraints, may seem acceptable. The necessity of explaining
the presence and nature of rationalizing values is obvious, however, when exam-
ining the first stage of manufacture, which is consistent with both traditional and
rationalizing values. Thus, the necessity for Weber’s discussion of the Protestant
ethic (and the spirit of capitalism) is demonstrated in a Marxian analysis of the
first stage of capitalism.
3. While Marx and Weber each left much unsaid, and while each might be said to
have misspoken on occasion, when taken together, their arguments approach a
satisfactory explanation for the emergence of machine capitalism in England. We
may integrate their arguments successfully because the logics of historical expla-
nation within which each is made are congruent.
Acknowledgements
This essay emerged from work undertaken originally many years ago and published in Gould
(1987); much of the analysis of manufacture and ascetic Protestantism is taken from that text. I
want to thank my former colleague, Besnik Pula, for urging me to return to these materials and to
publish the current essay, which focuses on the nature of Marx and Weber’s theoretical arguments
in light of that earlier work. I revised this essay while a Visiting Fellow in the Human Rights
Program at the Harvard Law School. It is hard to imagine a location more conducive to hard and,
I hope, effective work.

Gould 21
Notes
1. Analytical, rational-choice Marxists presume, along with their neoclassical economist peers,
that all actors, all of the time, are instrumentally rational. This rationality is assumed, not
explained. Marx, in contrast, as will be demonstrated in this article, has to explain the emer-
gence of instrumental rationality. While an examination limited to a characterization of suc-
cessful actors in machine capitalism makes it appear as if we may assume that actors are
instrumentally rational, a careful consideration of the first stage of manufacture makes it
obvious that this assumption is erroneous. In that stage, some actors will surely act “ration-
ally” some of the time, but this episodic activity cannot explain a sustained and systematic
pattern of rationalization and capital accumulation where objective, competitive constraints
are absent.
2. It might be argued that the goal of this article is misconceived because it is impossible to
compare apples and oranges, theories articulated within incommensurable problematics. In
a complementary essay, I addressed this question, arguing, contrary to Parsons, that Marxist
theory must be categorized as a voluntarist theory of action (see Parsons, 1949 [1937]). Since
Weberian theory may also be categorized as voluntarist, it is legitimate for us to compare
the two theories as variations within one theoretical problematic (see Gould, 1982). For an
argument consistent with my own on certain points, but reaching a fundamentally differ-
ent conclusion, see Birnbaum, 1953, reprinted in Smelser, 1965; cf. Collins, 1980; Giddens,
1970. I noted earlier that my argument in this article draws on a theoretically driven, histori-
cal analysis undertaken many years ago. This article is intended as an analysis of Marx and
Weber and not of the secondary literature. In consequence, I have made no attempt to bring
the references up-to-date; I have cited more recent texts only when they are directly relevant
to my argument. The most important of these provide characterizations of Weber largely con-
sistent with my arguments; this is true especially of the work of Wolfgang Schluchter (Roth
and Schluchter, 1979; Schluchter, 1981 [1979], 1989, 1996).
3. If we assume that XYZ are the necessary and sufficient conditions for the occurrence of the
event A, then the phenomenon of overdetermination is not manifest in the case where XY (or XZ
or YZ) are the sufficient conditions for event A; in that case, the earlier theory is simply errone-
ous. Z (or Y, or X) is not a necessary condition for the occurrence of A. If XYZ are the necessary
and sufficient conditions for A, A is overdetermined in the presence of x1x2yz where y activates
variable Y and z activates variable Z, and either x1 or x2, both present, would suffice to activate
variable X. In this latter case, variable X is said to be overdetermined because there are at
least two substantive processes categorizable within its purview, either of which, alone, would
activate the variable (within some proposition), while both are present. Overdeterminations of
this sort are very frequent in actual historical situations. The problem of overdetermination is
made much more difficult owing to the practical problem of specifying exactly when a variable
is activated. In practice, sociologists too often make this determination when the dependent
variable appears on the scene; this “fudging” occurs in both historical and survey research
work. Thus, often there can be no distinction between determination and overdetermination
with regard to a given variable; this is a weakness in our ability to operationalize concepts,
a problem made much more difficult by the fact that the same concept will often need to be
operationalized differently in diverse social situations. These problems are implicit, among
others, in Althusser’s (1970 [1967]) discussions (see chs 3, 6).
4. The importance of the cybernetic order of the variables is difficult to see in a two-variable
model; I am using this simplified model only for purposes of illustration. I emphasize the
cybernetic model as it is very important to understand that “material and ideational variables”
are ordered in the same hierarchy by Marx and Weber; for both of them, economic variables
condition (place limits on) political variables, which in turn condition ideological variables.

Decisions in the political system can be implemented successfully only when they fall within
economic limits (which, for Marx, were structured, for example, in a capitalist economic
order, by the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie).
5. This interrelationship is sometimes characterized through the notion of “elective affinity.”
Usually, however, “elective affinity” is used in an imprecise, almost mystical way, without
any argumentative precision.
6. The following two sections draw on and quote from Gould (1987: ch. 4).
7. The logic of the argument I take from Marx is articulated with special clarity in the so-called
unedited chapter from Capital that is translated and printed in the Penguin edition of Capital,
Volume 1. This quotation and several others come from this “unedited chapter.”
8. This distinction, while theoretically accurate, is not so clear-cut in history. As Marx (1967
[1867, 1885, 1894]) commented, “epochs in the history of society are no more separated from
each other by hard and fast lines of demarcation, than are geological epochs” (vol. 1, p. 371).
9. An anonymous referee pointed out that capitalists are concerned with the extraction of “sur-
plus value,” and that in machine capitalism, both absolute and relative surplus values are
extracted from workers. This is, of course, correct. My point here (and elsewhere in the essay)
is that with the use of machines in the “real subsumption of labor under capital,” productivity
increases, per unit costs decrease, and so do prices, including in the sectors that produce con-
sumer goods for workers; in Marx’s terms, this reduces the value of labor power and increases
both the rate of surplus value and relative surplus value (workers produce a value equal to
the value of their labor power in less time; if they work the same number of hours each day,
relative surplus value increases). In contrast, while increases in production (not productivity)
may occur during the first stage of manufacture (the formal subsumption of labor under capi-
tal), involving the hiring of more workers and the extraction of more surplus value, ceteris
paribus, the rate of surplus value is constant after the increase in production and, while there
is an increase in (absolute) surplus value, there is no increase in relative surplus value. Later
in the essay, I refer to this as an increased iterative surplus value, suggesting that the increase
in surplus value is due to a multiplication of units of production with proportional increases
in surplus value.
10. A specific social structure is predominant within a system when its tendencies create the suf-
ficient conditions for the transition into the next stage of social development. A specific social
structure is dominant within a stage when (1) its tendencies create the sufficient conditions for
the transition into the next stage and (2) when its pattern is tendentially extended to all social
organizations within the system under examination.
11. At times, Marx (1967 [1867, 1885, 1894]) limits his characterization of manufacture to this
latter form: “While simple co-operation leaves the mode of working by the individual for the
most part unchanged, manufacture thoroughly revolutionizes it, and seizes labour-power by
its very roots” (vol. 1, p. 360). It is crucial, instead, to treat manufacture as encompassing both
the first stage of capitalist production, where the labor process is precapitalist and cooperation
is simple, and the second stage of capitalist production, where cooperation is complex and the
labor process is revolutionized in the real subsumption of labor under capital (but without or
with only a very limited use of machines) (Marx, 1967 [1867, 1885, 1894]: 322, 367, vol. 1).
12. Any increases in the intensity of work or lengthening of the work day are, in principle, capa-
ble of being matched by other similarly organized production units. Slight increases in turno-
ver times might also occur, but during the first stage of manufacture, where most production
was within the putting-out system, these were unlikely to be significant.
13. This is not the place to enter into the controversy surrounding Marx’s discussion of the
tendential decline in the rate of profit, or the more general controversy regarding analyses
in terms of “value.” In this essay, even recognizing its failings in certain contexts, I stick

Gould 23
reasonably close to Marx’s own position. Most of the critiques of Marx ignore the fact that the
neoclassical criticisms of his position are, in general, valid only within the context of ortho-
dox general equilibrium models that assume perfect information and no transaction costs (cf.
Mandel and Freeman, 1984; Okishio, 1961; Roemer, 1981; Salvadori, 1981; Shaikh, 1978,
1980; Steedman, 1977, 1980; Van Parijs, 1980, among many others of direct and indirect
relevance). In contrast, Marx’s own argument, at its core, in his discussions of the difference
between labor power (the capacity to work) and labor (work), presumes imperfect informa-
tion. See Gould (1990, 1991, 1992), and for a brilliant demonstration of this contention see
Bowles (1985) and less technically, Bowles and Gintis (1985).
14. In the second stage of manufacture, constituted through complex cooperation under a divi-
sion of labor, productivity will increase due to the “factor of production” Alfred Marshall
(1949 [1890]) labeled “organization.” Owing to an increase in relative surplus value and in
the intensity of labor, the rate of surplus value will increase. It is likely, however, that the rate
of profit will not decline, as the only major concomitant increase in constant capital will be
the circulating capital embodied in raw materials. Increases in iterative surplus value under
conditions of simple cooperation will leave both the rate of surplus value and the rate of
profit stable, while increasing the amount of both. This is the situation during the first stage
of manufacture, where there is a formal, but not a real, subsumption of labor under capital.
15. In Gould (1987), I provide extensive empirical documentation of the predominance of manu-
facture (in both agriculture and industry) in prerevolutionary, seventeenth-century England.
During this period, “Increases in the volume of production to meet increased demand at home
or opportunities abroad were generally made by increasing the numbers of people working
on the product involved” (Patten, 1978: 162). Thus, “it was not … the size but the num-
ber of enterprises which contributed to the multiplication of capital” (Kamen, 1971: 115).
Or as Supple put it, in discussing English cloth production, neither existing technology nor
potential demand normally justified large-scale units of production, and the possibilities of
cost-reduction by an expansion of output were severely limited. Correspondingly, industrial
expansion more often took place by a multiplication of units of production and an increase
in investment and the demand for labor, rather than by a relative increase in the allotment of
capital and an increase in productivity (Supple, 1977: 397).
16. This is a situation where the limits embedded within the economy are nearly determinative of
the structure of legitimating values.
17. Of course, Marx (1967 [1867, 1885, 1894]) recognizes that the capitalists’ revenue tends to
increase along with the increase in the amount of surplus value (vol. 1, pp. 445–447, 608).
Nicolaus (1967) provides a convenient collection of quotations dealing with this issue and
relating it to the growth of a middle class.
18. This form of analysis, which assumes an instrumentally rational response to a “given oppor-
tunity,” dominates not only utilitarian, neoclassical economics but also certain writings claim-
ing to be within either a Marxist or social historical tradition. See Brenner (1976, 1982) for
some general comments criticizing demographic and exchange interpretations of economic
development and Brenner (1977), Skocpol (1977), Dupuy and Fitzgerald (1977) for criti-
cisms of Wallerstein (1974). The Brenner essays are especially valuable in that they stress
the importance of agrarian social structure in the development of capitalism, as did Marx and
Lenin (1964 [1899]: vol. 3).
19. There are brilliant sketches of the legal, political and economic systems throughout Weber’s
writings, but the systematic discussions related to the development of capitalism are of reli-
gion (Weber 1964 [1951, 1920–1921], 1967 [1952, 1917–1919], 1967 [1958, 1920–21]; a
partial exception is Weber (1961 [1923]), a relatively neglected work meriting considerable
study; on pages 208–209 (of Weber, 1961), he lists the features of rational capital accounting,

which he views as “the most general presupposition for the existence of this present-day capi-
talism” (cf. Collins, 1980). The literature on the so-called “Weber-Thesis” is too extensive to
catalogue. For a sampling, see Chalcraft and Harrington (2001), Eisenstadt (1968), Gorski
(2003), Lehman and Roth (1993), Marshall (1982), Poggi (1983), Turner (1974). For a bril-
liant, constructive discussion of Weber’s understanding of The Rise of Western Rationalism,
see (Schluchter, 1981 [1979]). The second most important weakness in Weber’s discussion,
after the one I highlight in this article, is his misunderstanding of the common law and its
efficacy in the construction of rational expectations in situations where the nature of long-
term economic goals was unclear; when controlled by honoratiores, common law was more
effective than Continental law in facilitating the incremental development of legal regulations
that were adaptive of economic developments.
20. Weber (1958 [1904–1905]) noted the criticism of circularity (p. 198, fn. 13). This criticism is
sometimes grounded in a failure to distinguish between the Protestant ethic and the spirit of
capitalism.
21. A rudimentary manufacturing economy is characterized by pockets of manufacture, regulated
by traditional controls and situated within the context of a non-capitalist social formation.
Such pockets are not predominant and, whatever their basis, show no tendency to develop
other than in response to exogenous pressures. They do not, in either the short or the long
run, undermine the constitutive structure that surrounds them, even when they are embedded
within extensive networks of merchant and/or usury capital.
22. As written, this statement is too bald-faced, ignoring, as it does, other relevant variables.
Marx (1973 [1939]) makes the same analytical point, for example, in discussing the differ-
ent impacts of an influx of money within two different types of economic structures (pp.
233–235; cf., on merchant capital, Marx, 1967 [1867, 1885, 1894]: 332–333, vol. 3).
23. This is not the place for a discussion of the logic of religious commitments in ascetic
Protestantism (see Gould, 1986, 1997). Above I have emphasized, with Weber, the impor-
tance of predestination in their construction, but this focus does not explain the inner-worldly
ascetic consequences of forms of ascetic Protestantism not grounded in predestination. I have
addressed this problem in Gould (2005, 2014), where I emphasize the uncertainty of salvation
constituted in all forms of ascetic Protestantism. The characterization of God as transcend-
ent in ascetic Protestantism is also crucial; in contrast, God is immanent within the Catholic
Church, which enables the Church to tell believers authoritatively what they must do to be
saved and this can result in a weighing of discrete good versus bad deeds (Gould, 2014).
24. On value-commitments and their sanctions, see Parsons (1969: ch. 16).
25. A number of the people who have read this essay in an earlier version suggested that Weber’s
arguments were culture bound and that other sources of economic rationality might be found
if one looks outside of the North Western European context. The latter contention is, of
course, correct. Weber, however, insisted on two points: (1) He argued that the controls essen-
tial to sustaining capital accumulation in manufacture had to be grounded in moral obliga-
tions. Thus, ideas favoring instrumentally rational actions were not seen to be functionally
equivalent to ascetic Protestantism in motivating the development of the spirit of capitalism
(assuming the existence of rudimentary manufacture) unless they were grounded in value-
commitments. Weber did not discount other sources of rationalizing interests in the first stage
of manufacture; he simply suggested that their effect would be situationally limited and that
they would not have the capacity to initiate the self-sustaining tendential growth of manufac-
ture into machine capitalism.
(2) Weber was concerned with the first genesis of machine capitalism as a self-sustaining
system. Once this system was developed, it generated competitive constraints that progres-
sively impinged upon the remainder of the world (with various consequences, depending on

Gould 25
the nature of the social formation impinged upon). Using the terms in my argument, his con-
tention was that the conjunction of the Protestant ethic and embryonic manufacture leads to
the development of the economic value-commitments he labeled the spirit of capitalism and
thus to the rationalization of manufacture and to its development into machine capitalism. He
did not contend that there could be no functional substitutes for the Protestant ethic. Thus, his
argument is not culture bound, except insofar as the question of the emergence of machine
capitalism required him to focus on a socially and culturally specific set of issues.
26. Brenner (1977) argues for the existence of competitive constraints where I do not feel they
can be shown to have existed, in English agriculture in the early seventeenth century. Thus,
while he clearly understands the issues I discuss in this essay, he does not see the need for the
Weberian argument (cf. Brenner, 1977: 75–77, with Gould, 1987: ch. 4).
27. These failures are found in neoclassical, world systems and “Analytical Marxian” arguments,
all of which are grounded in utilitarian assumptions. In the first and the last, as manifest in
Arrow–Debreu general equilibrium models, it is irrelevant whether one views labor hiring
capital or capital hiring labor; thus no meaningful conceptualization of capitalism is possible.
In the second (and logically in the others as well), capitalism may be defined without refer-
ence to wage-labor.
28. I do not mean to suggest that the pre-bourgeois state never acted in the interests of capital
accumulation, only that systematic economic calculation was impossible within the context
of the arbitrary actions of a patrimonial state (see Weber, 1968 [1925]: 239–240, 1094–1095;
and for England, Gould, 1987: chs 4 and 5).
29. This argument is elaborated and documented in Gould (1987).
30. Smith’s discussion ignores the distinction between discrete capitalists’ desires for increased
profits and institutionalized obligations resulting in regular and disciplined capital accumu-
lation in a situation of manufacture; thus, he must ignore the distinction between episodic
capital accumulation when manufacture is present and the systematic accumulation of capital
in manufacture due to the spirit of capitalism.
31. In perfect-information Arrow–Debreu models, as Koopmans’ (1957) demonstrated, an
increase in profits is the same as an increase in efficiency. In Marx’s imperfect-information
model, capitalists are constrained to increase profitability, which is not necessarily the same
as efficiency.
References
Althusser L (1970 [1967]) For Marx. New York: Vintage Books.
Birnbaum N (1953) Conflicting interpretations of the rise of capitalism: Marx and Weber. British
Journal of Sociology 4: 125–141.
Bowles S (1985) The production process in a competitive economy: Walrasian, neo-hobbesian and
Marxian models. The American Economic Review 75: 16–36.
Bowles S and Gintis H (1985) The labor theory of value and the specificity of Marxian econom-
ics. In: Resnick S and Wolff R (eds) Rethinking Marxism. New York: Autonomedia, 31–44.
Braverman H (1974) Labor and Monopoly Capital. New York: Monthly Review Press.
Brenner R (1976) Agrarian class structure and economic development in pre-industrial Europe.
Past & Present 70: 30–75.
Brenner R (1977) The origins of capitalist development: A critique of neo-Smithian Marxism. New
Left Review 104: 25–93.
Brenner R (1982) Agrarian class structure and economic development in pre-industrial Europe:
The Agrarian roots of European capitalism. Past & Present 97: 16–113.
Brighton Labour Process Group (1977) The capitalist labour process. Capital & Class 1: 3–26.

Burawoy M (1985) The Politics of Production. London: Verso.

Chalcraft D and Harrington A (2001) Protestant Ethic Debate: Max Weber’s Replies to His Critics,
1907–1910. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.
Collins R (1980) Weber’s last theory of capitalism. American Sociological Review 45: 925–940.
Dupuy A and Fitzgerald P (1977) A contribution to the critique of the world system. Insurgent
Sociologist 7: 113–124.
Eisenstadt SN (1968) The Protestant Ethic and Modernization. New York: Basic Books.
Giddens A (1970) Marx, Weber and the development of capitalism. Sociology 4: 289–310.
Gorski PS (2003) The Disciplinary Revolution: Calvinism and the Rise of the State in Early
Modern Europe. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Gould M (1976) Systems analysis, macrosociology and the generalized media of social action. In:
Loubser JJ, Baum RC, Effrat A, et al. (eds) Explorations in General Theory in Social Science,
vol. 2. New York: The Free Press, 470–506.
Gould M (1982) Parsons versus Marx: “An earnest warning …” Sociological Inquiry 51: 197–218.
Gould M (1986) Puritanism and the English revolution. Presented at the Princeton University
Mellon colloquium, “religion and political culture.”
Gould M (1987) Revolution in the Development of Capitalism. Berkeley, CA; Los Angeles, CA:
University of California Press.
Gould M (1990) The problem of order in perfect and imperfect information theories. Delivered at
the annual meeting of the American economic association, Washington, DC.
Gould M (1991) Parsons’s economic sociology: A failure of will. Sociological Inquiry 61(1):
89–101.
Gould M (1992) Law and sociology: Some consequences for the law of employment discrimina-
tion deriving from the sociological reconstruction of economic theory. Cardozo Law Review
13(5): 1517–1578.
Gould M (1997) Puritanism and the English revolution: The role of social values in the constitution
of the economic tendencies leading to a political revolution. Presented at the annual meeting
of the American sociological association, Toronto, ON, Canada.
Gould M (2005) Understanding Jihad. Policy Review 129: 15–32.
Gould M (2014) Natural law, human fallibility, and the transcendence of god: Islam, Christianity
(Confucianism, Judaism) and democracy/human rights. Presented at the human rights pro-
gram, Harvard Law School, Cambridge, MA.
Kamen H (1971) The Iron Century: Social Change in Europe, 1550–1660. London: Weidenfeld
& Nicolson.
Koopmans TJ (1957) Three Essays on the State of Economic Science. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Lehman H and Roth G (1993) Weber’s Protestant Ethic: Origins, Evidence, Contexts. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Lenin VI (1964 [1899]) Collected Works, Vol. 3: The Development of Capitalism in Russia.
London: Lawrence & Wishart.
Mandel E and Freeman A (eds) (1984) Ricardo, Marx and Sraffa. London: Verso.
Marglin S (1974) What do bosses do? The origins and functions of hierarchy in capitalist produc-
tion. Review of Radical Political Economics 6: 60–112.
Marglin S (1984) Knowledge and power. In: Stephen F (ed.) Firms, Organization and Labour.
New York: St. Martin’s Press, 146–164.
Marshall A (1949 [1890]) Principles of Economics, 8th edn. London: Macmillan.
Marshall G (1982) In Search of the Spirit of Capitalism: An Essay on Max Weber’s Protestant
Ethic Thesis. New York: Columbia University Press.
Marx K (1967 [1867, 1885, 1894]) Capital, 3 vols (trans. S Moore, E Aveling). New York:
International Publishers.

Gould 27
Marx K (1971) Un chapitre inédit du Capital. Paris: Union Générale D’Editions.

Marx K (1973 [1939]) Grundrisse (trans. M Nicolaus). Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.
Marx K (1976 [1867]) Capital, vol. 1 (trans. B Fowkes and R Livingstone). Harmondsworth:
Penguin Books.
Marx K and Engels F (1965 [1955]) Selected Correspondence (trans. I Lasker; ed S Ryazanskaya),
2nd edn. Moscow: Progress Publishers.
Marx K and Engels F (1975) Collected Works. New York: International Publishers.
Nicolaus M (1967) Proletariat and middle class in Marx. In: Weinstein J and Eakins D (eds) For a
New America (reprinted). New York: Vintage Books, 253–283.
Okishio N (1961) Technical change and the rate of profit. Kobe University Economic Review 7:
85–99.
Parsons T (1949 [1937]) The Structure of Social Action, 2nd edn. New York: The Free Press.
Parsons T (1969) Politics and Social Structure. New York: The Free Press.
Patten J (1978) English Towns 1500–1700. Hamden, CT: Shoe String Press.
Piaget J (1962 [1932]) The Moral Judgment of the Child (trans. M Gabain). New York: Collier
Books.
Poggi G (1983) Calvinism and the Capitalist Spirit: Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic. Amherst, MA:
University of Massachusetts Press.
Roemer J (1981) Analytical Foundations of Marxian Economic Theory. New York: Cambridge
University Press.
Roth G and Schluchter W (1979) Man Weber’s Vision of History. Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press.
Salvadori N (1981) Falling rate of profit with a constant real wage: An example. Cambridge
Journal of Economics 5: 59–66.
Schluchter W (1981 [1979]) The Rise of Western Rationalism: Max Weber’s Developmental
History (trans. G Roth). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Schluchter W (1989) Rationalism, Religion and Domination: A Weberian Perspective (trans. N
Solomon). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Schluchter W (1996) Paradoxes of Modernity: Culture and Conduct in the Theory of Max Weber
(trans. N Solomon). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Shaikh A (1978) Political economy and capitalism: Notes on Dobb’s theory of crisis. Cambridge
Journal of Economics 2: 233–251.
Shaikh A (1980) Marxian competition versus perfect competition: Further comments on the so-
called choice of technique. Cambridge Journal of Economics 4: 75–83.
Skocpol T (1977) Wallerstein’s world capitalist system: A theoretical and historical critique.
American Journal of Sociology 82: 1075–1089.
Smelser N (1962) Theory of Collective Behavior. New York: The Free Press.
Smelser N (ed.) (1965) Readings in Economic Sociology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Smith K (2012) A Guide to Marx’s Capital, vols 1–3. London: Anthem Press.
Steedman I (1977) Marx after Sraffa. London: New Left Books.
Steedman I (1980) A note on the “choice of technique” under capitalism. Cambridge Journal of
Economics 4: 61–64.
Stone K (1974) The origins of job structures in the steel industry. Review of Radical Political
Economics 6: 113–173.
Supple B (1977) The nature of enterprise. In: Rich EE and Wilson CH (eds) The Cambridge
Economic History of Europe, vol. 5. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 393–461.
Thomas K (1964) Work and leisure in pre-industrial society. Past & Present 29: 60–63.
Thompson EP (1967) Time, work–discipline and industrial capitalism. Past & Present 38: 56–97.
Turner BS (1974) Weber and Islam. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Van Parijs P (1980) The falling–rate–of–profit theory of crisis: A rational reconstruction by way
of obituary. Review of Radical Political Economics 12: 1–17.
Wallerstein I (1974) The Modern World System. New York: Academic Press.
Weber M (1958 [1904–1905]) The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (trans. T Parsons).
New York: Scribner’s.
Weber M (1961 [1923]) General Economic History (trans. F Knight). New York: Collier Books.
Weber M (1964 [1951, 1920–1921]) The Religion of China (trans. H Gerth). New York: Macmillan.
Weber M (1967 [1952, 1917–1919]) Ancient Judaism (trans. H Gerth and D Martindale). New
York: The Free Press.
Weber M (1967 [1958, 1920–1921]) The Religion of India (trans. H Gerth and D Martindale). New
York: The Free Press.
Weber M (1968 [1925]) Economy and Society, 3 vols (ed G Roth and C Wittich). New York:
Bedminster Press.
Williamson O (1985) The Economic Institutions of Capitalism. New York: The Free Press.
Wright EO (1979 [1978]) Class, Crisis and the State. London: Verso.
Author biography
Mark Gould teaches sociology at Haverford College, Haverford, PA. USA.

Gould, M. - Marx and Weber and The Logic of Historical Explanation - The Rise of Machine Capitalism

Caricato da

Informazioni sul documento

Titolo originale

Copyright

Formati disponibili

Condividi questo documento

Condividi o incorpora il documento

Opzioni di condivisione

Hai trovato utile questo documento?

Questo contenuto è inappropriato?

Copyright:

Formati disponibili

Gould, M. - Marx and Weber and The Logic of Historical Explanation - The Rise of Machine Capitalism

Caricato da

Copyright:

Formati disponibili

656271

Marx and Weber and

Downloaded from jcs.sagepub.com at UNIVERSITE LAVAL on July 13, 2016

Downloaded from jcs.sagepub.com at UNIVERSITE LAVAL on July 13, 2016

The logic of historical explanation

As each variable is introduced, “the explanation of the outcome becomes increasingly

In a value-added process … we must distinguish between the occurrence or existence of an

Downloaded from jcs.sagepub.com at UNIVERSITE LAVAL on July 13, 2016

Marx, Weber, and the value-added model

Downloaded from jcs.sagepub.com at UNIVERSITE LAVAL on July 13, 2016

From manufacture to machine capitalism

Downloaded from jcs.sagepub.com at UNIVERSITE LAVAL on July 13, 2016

manufacture in addition to his own analysis of the value-commitments that rationalize

A reconstruction of Marx’s position6

Downloaded from jcs.sagepub.com at UNIVERSITE LAVAL on July 13, 2016

(Marx, 1967 [1867, 1885, 1894]: 335, vol. 1)

(Marx, 1967 [1867, 1885, 1894]: 1023)

Downloaded from jcs.sagepub.com at UNIVERSITE LAVAL on July 13, 2016

(Vol. 1, p. 510; my italics – M.G.)

Downloaded from jcs.sagepub.com at UNIVERSITE LAVAL on July 13, 2016

I am concerned with the conditions of the predominance of manufacture, where its

Downloaded from jcs.sagepub.com at UNIVERSITE LAVAL on July 13, 2016

(pp. 980 and ff.)

In Manufacture, the organization of the social labor-process is purely subjective; it is a

(Marx, 1967 [1867, 1885, 1894]: 386, vol. 1 – my italics)

Downloaded from jcs.sagepub.com at UNIVERSITE LAVAL on July 13, 2016

This distinction between subjective motivation and objective constraint is crucial,

Downloaded from jcs.sagepub.com at UNIVERSITE LAVAL on July 13, 2016

(Marx, 1967 [1867, 1885, 1894]: 79, vol. 1)

He explicitly notes the importance of Protestantism in eliminating traditional holidays

A reconstruction of Weber’s position

Downloaded from jcs.sagepub.com at UNIVERSITE LAVAL on July 13, 2016

Downloaded from jcs.sagepub.com at UNIVERSITE LAVAL on July 13, 2016

(Weber, 1958 [1904–1905]: 67)

Downloaded from jcs.sagepub.com at UNIVERSITE LAVAL on July 13, 2016

(pp. 54–55; see 72; 181–182; 282, fn. 108)

Downloaded from jcs.sagepub.com at UNIVERSITE LAVAL on July 13, 2016

Three possible objections

Downloaded from jcs.sagepub.com at UNIVERSITE LAVAL on July 13, 2016

Downloaded from jcs.sagepub.com at UNIVERSITE LAVAL on July 13, 2016

as a form of capitalism, and by patrimonial political legitimation, which Weber treats as

Downloaded from jcs.sagepub.com at UNIVERSITE LAVAL on July 13, 2016

Downloaded from jcs.sagepub.com at UNIVERSITE LAVAL on July 13, 2016

Downloaded from jcs.sagepub.com at UNIVERSITE LAVAL on July 13, 2016

Downloaded from jcs.sagepub.com at UNIVERSITE LAVAL on July 13, 2016

Downloaded from jcs.sagepub.com at UNIVERSITE LAVAL on July 13, 2016

Downloaded from jcs.sagepub.com at UNIVERSITE LAVAL on July 13, 2016

Downloaded from jcs.sagepub.com at UNIVERSITE LAVAL on July 13, 2016

Downloaded from jcs.sagepub.com at UNIVERSITE LAVAL on July 13, 2016

Burawoy M (1985) The Politics of Production. London: Verso.

Downloaded from jcs.sagepub.com at UNIVERSITE LAVAL on July 13, 2016

Marx K (1971) Un chapitre inédit du Capital. Paris: Union Générale D’Editions.

Downloaded from jcs.sagepub.com at UNIVERSITE LAVAL on July 13, 2016

Downloaded from jcs.sagepub.com at UNIVERSITE LAVAL on July 13, 2016

Potrebbero piacerti anche