Food for thought.Why is it that any advanced thinking about capitalism brings us square to Marxism?

Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic famously seeks out what he terms a “spirit of capitalism” in the development of “duty in a calling.” For Weber, the peculiarly unfulfilling experience of living to work rather than working to live could not become a “way of life” solely by brute force. Instead, he contends, an emergent capitalism required a compelling “psychological motive” to wrestle us into quiescent acceptance of our lot, a motive force he claims capitalism found in Protestant theology and practice.1 “Capitalism at the time of its development needed laborers who were available for economic exploitation for conscience,” he argues. Only the promise of a richly compelling psychological and spiritual reward would persuade individuals to commit to tireless, endless, and often meaningless labor. By the twentieth century, Weber writes, “the impersonality” and “joyless lack of meaning” inherent in work was fully “in the saddle” and hence needed no such “transcendental sanction.”2

For Marx, of course, the idea that workers willingly “adapt themselves to the discipline of their new condition” is a fiction: in fact, he argues, the “silent compulsion of economic relations sets the seal on the domination … of the worker.”3 This compulsory force operates primarily through the wage relation. Wages first “save” the dispossessed from an imposed starvation and later, in the absence of other means of self-reproduction, yoke them to a system of capitalist labor in perpetuity