Re: Max Weber's Genteel Racism (was Re: weber)

[Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1@xxxxxxx>]

Wojtek:

> Kelley: Contrary to some opinions, Max Weber' theories pretty much in line
> with Karl Marx's view of capitalism, excpet that Weber focuses on the role
> of state in capitalist development, which btw latter-day-marxists also
> recognize.
>
> Yoshie: You do not understand, comrade.  Weber was a racist pig who used
> the word "negro."  We must condemn his blasphemous theories.

The problem is that Max Weber argues that rationality peculiar to the
so-called "Occident" gave rise to the modern state: "[One who is] a
product of modern European civilization, studying any problem of
universal history, is bound to ask himself to what combination of
circumstances the fact should be attributed that in Western
civilization, and in Western civilization only, cultural phenomena
have appeared which (as we like to think) lie in a line of
development having _universal_ significance and value....[The] feudal
state...has only been known to our culture...In fact the State
itself...is known [in the full sense] only in the Occident.  And the
same is true of the most fateful force in our modern life,
capitalism" (Weber, _The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of
Capitalism_).

It is anachronistic & culturalist to make capitalist rationality --
racialized into "European rationality" by Weber & Co. -- the cause of
capitalism.  It is likewise anachronistic & culturalist to make an
idea -- rationality -- the cause of the modern state.

The "East" used to be a career, as Disraeli said.  Now, the "West" is
a fetish of intellectual investors in the
Blessings-of-the-Civilization Trust.

Yoshie

P.S.  The role of the state in capitalist development is well
recognized by our contemporary Marxists such as Robert Brenner
(_Merchants & Revolution_), Michael Perelman (_The Invention of
Capitalism_), & Doug Henwood (_Wall Street_) and variously studied in
a non-Eurocentric fashion.