>>Imagine how many Webers Lenin was worth. > >Depends on what you want one for. Weber is one of the towering >figures of western (ha!) untellectual hsitory; as a social theorist, >he stands with Marx and Durkheim in the usual classification; I >would say, raelly with Marx alone--I think Durkeim can't touch em. >Lenin isn't a bad social theorist in a pinch, and of course Weber >was no organizer, but Lenin can't claim a shred of Weber's depth and >breadth of learning and profound originality. These days, I am a lot >more likely to turn to Weber than to Lenin. --jks It seems to me that it doesn't take much originality to feel ambivalence about the status quo (rationalization, bureaucratization, etc.) & write about it engagingly; in contrast, to strike a blow against the status quo & revolutionize an ensemble of social relations in practice is hard work. Have you read Antonio Gramsci, "The Revolution against _Capital_," (originally published on 24 December 1917 in _Avanti!_, included in _The Antonio Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings 1916-1935_, ed. David Forgacs, NY: New York UP, 1999)? ***** This is the revolution against Karl Marx's _Capital_. In Russia, Marx's _Capital_ was more the book of the bourgeoisie than of the proletariat. It stood as the critical demonstration of how events should follow a predetermined course: how in Russia a bourgeoisie had to develop, and a capitalist era had to open, with the setting-up of a Western-type civilization, before the proletariat could even think in terms of its own revolt, its own class demands, its own revolution. But events have overcome ideologies. Events have exploded the critical schemas determining how the history of Russia would unfold according to the canons of historical materialism. The Bolsheviks reject Karl Marx, and their explicit actions and conquests bear witness that the canons of historical materialism are not so rigid as one might have thought and has been believed. And yet there is a fatality even in these events, and if the Bolsheviks reject some of the statements in _Capital_, they do not reject its invigorating, immanent thought. These people are not 'Marxists', that is all; they have not used the works of the Master to compile a rigid doctrine of dogmatic utterances never to be questioned. They live Marxist thought....This thought sees as the dominant factor in history, not raw economic facts, but man, men in societies, men in relation to one another, reaching agreements with one another, developing through these contacts (civilization) a collective, social will; men coming to understand economic facts, judging them and adapting them to their will until this becomes the driving force of the economy and moulds objective reality.... (Gramsci, p. 33) ***** In short, Gramsci is saying that the Bolsheviks collectively rescued, in practice, Marxist thought from rigid stagism & economism of the dogmatic Second International. While Gramsci often sounds a little too voluntarist for my taste, Marxist thought today, it seems to me, needs to be reinvigorated by an emphasis on _politics_, i.e. alertness to the _active_ side of human beings as _history-makers_, instead of being soothed & pacified by ambivalent Weberian laments on the mixed blessings of rationalization which reduce us to "cogs in a machine," for such Weberian jeremiads have become a dime a dozen -- Weber on the cheap, "buy one Weber get one free," as it were -- today. Yoshie
