Marx, Weber, and Theoretical Perspectives on Modern Society

Introduction

In the world today, information societies — also referred to as digital or post-industrial societies — are among the latest developments, and are mainly founded on the generation of services and information. Information societies are powered by digital technology, and high-tech organizations like Microsoft, RIM, and Apple are their version of the steel and railroad production companies of an earlier era. Given that the information society's economy is steered by knowledge, great power lies among those who control the production, storage, and distribution of information (Steiner and Stewart, 527). Social classes are subdivided by people's access to education, because without communication and technical skills, individuals who are part of an information society have no reliable means to succeed.

Theoretical Perspectives on Modern Society

Whereas several sociologists have conducted research on social and societal interactions, Max Weber and Karl Marx established different theoretical strategies to help us understand the development and growth of the new capitalist society. Through culture, members of the same society come to share similar values and norms. With regard to modern society, both Weber's and Marx's analyses converge on another sociological concept: social structure (Lumen Learning; Little).

Social structures are general patterns of social behavior and organization that persist through time. Marx's analysis concentrates on capitalism's economic structures — class, crisis, competition, and private property, among others — while Weber's analysis concentrates on the rationalized structures of modern organizations. Although the aspects of modern structure that Weber and Marx each emphasize differ, their shared approach is to stress the effect that social structure has on culture and ways of living, rather than the reverse.

Karl Marx and Critical Sociology

According to Marx, the development of modern society is tied to the rise of capitalism as a universal economic system. During the mid-1800s, as industrialization accelerated, Marx observed that labor conditions became increasingly exploitative. The large steel producers were especially harsh, and their enterprises became popularly known as "satanic mills."

According to Marx, the fundamental structure of society and the forces behind historical change were both determined by the relationship between the "base and superstructure" of societies. In this model, the economic structure of society is the base upon which culture and other social institutions rest, forming the superstructure. Marx argued that the base determines a society's law, culture, political system, family form, and conflicts.

According to Marx, economic conflict is the primary engine of change in a society. Every mode of production in history carried its own characteristic type of economic tension. This was because a mode of production is composed of two elements: a society's means of production — anything used in production to meet needs and sustain existence, such as animals, land, factories, and machinery — and a society's relations of production — the subdivision of society into economic classes (Marx, Grundrisse 82–111). Marx observed that in every form of society since early communal hunting communities, a single class monopolized or owned the means of production (Marx and Engels, 109). Different historical eras are characterized by different forms of ownership and different class structures: capitalism (capitalists and "free" laborers), feudal (lords and peasants), agricultural (citizens and slaves), and hunter-gatherer (classless, common ownership).

The most recent revolutionary change brought feudalism to an end. A new revolutionary class emerged from among the middle-class citizens, small property owners, and freemen of the medieval era to contest and seize the power and privilege of the feudal nobility. Those who belonged to the capitalist or bourgeoisie class are considered innovative because they represented a redistribution of power and radical change in European society.

As Engels and Marx wrote in The Communist Manifesto:

"The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his 'natural superiors,' and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous 'cash payment.' It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation… The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society" (Marx and Engels, 111).

The emergence of the bourgeoisie and the growth of capitalism, however, also brought into existence "free" laborers known as the proletariat. They were composed mainly of guild laborers and serfs who were expelled or freed from indentured work in agricultural production and feudal guilds, and who moved to the growing cities where manufacturing was primarily concentrated (Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts 75–112). They became "free" workers in the sense that they were no longer bound to guild masters or feudal lords; they worked instead on contract. As Engels and Marx concluded, the result was that society was increasingly dividing itself into two hostile camps facing one another — the Bourgeoisie and the Proletariat (Marx and Engels, 109).

Conclusion

The responses given by both Weber and Marx to capitalism were similar: a mixture of admiration and repulsion. For Marx, capitalism destroyed the unproductivity of traditional society and challenged what he called the "idiocy" of peasant and village life. It propelled humanity along the path of modernization, though at a massive cost in terms of collective and individual suffering — including alienation and dehumanization. For Weber, capitalism dismantled the securities of belief and disrupted the natural rhythms of pre-modern production and consumption within the customary household. Rationalization destroyed the authority of enchanted powers, but it replaced them with the machine-like control of bureaucracy, which ultimately challenges all systems of belief. The ironic product of rationalization was the emergence of a world in which systems of meaning no longer held any secure authority.

Works Cited

Gerth, H. H., and C. Wright Mills. "Politics as a Vocation." From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (1946): 77–128.

Little, William. "Chapter 4. Society and Modern Life." Introduction to Sociology – 2nd Canadian Edition. (n.d.). Web.

Lumen Learning. "Theoretical Perspectives on Society." Society and Social Interaction. (n.d.). Web.

Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. "The Communist Manifesto." Selected Works by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. New York: International Publishers, 1848. 108–127.

Marx, Karl. "Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts." Early Writings 333 (1844): 75–112.

Marx, Karl. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. Penguin UK, 2005. 82–111.

Steiner, Pierre, and John Stewart. "From Autonomy to Heteronomy (and Back): The Enaction of Social Life." Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 8.4 (2009): 527.

Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. New Introduction and Translation by Stephen Kalberg. Roxbury Publishing Company, 2001. 13–37.