Free Custom «Comparison of Ideas of Marx and Weber» Essay Paper

Marx as The Founder of the Class Approach

The Marxism as an ideology has appeared in 40s of the last century. Karl Marx (1818-1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820-1895) tried to find out conditions and to specify ways of real clearing of workers from any operation, from any forms of social oppression, lawlessness and inequality. They have set a problem to plan contours of a system, which can overcome alienation of the worker from the property and the power and will organize a public life with free harmonious development of the person.

The Marxist approach to state and right studying is the analysis of the phenomena of a political and legal life, first of all as organic components (moments) of a class socio-historical formation. It is also a refusal of the discretion of political and legal institutes of religious, psychological, ethnic phenomena and to that of a similar order. The mentioned approach is based on the idea of dependence of the state and the public division of labor, class structure and a parity of class forces in a society.

The doctrine of Marxism concerns substantive provisions about the basis and the superstructure. The basis is the economic structure of a society, set of people relations of production that are not dependent on will, in which lies the pattern of ownership. These relations correspond to a certain step of development of productive forces. There is also legal and political superstructure, to which the corresponding forms of public consciousness are defined. The state and the right always express as a superstructure part of will and interests of a class, which economically dominates at the given system of manufacture.

 

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Proving necessity and affinity of violent communistic revolution, Marx and Engels proved that in 40-s of XIX century capitalism already became a social development brake. The force to resolve the contradiction between growing productive forces and capitalist relations of production working their growth, and the proletariat is capable of fulfilling it. Proletariat, having carried out the world communistic revolution, will construct a new, progressive society without classes and political power.

The class approach to the state and the right in the Marxist theory is connected with idea of proletarian communistic revolution: "The proletariat goes through various stages of development. With its birth begins its struggle with the bourgeoisie". In "Manifesto of the Communist Party" the program of proletarian revolution is stated: "The first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class to win the battle of democracy”.

The proletariat uses the political domination to pull out step by step all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in state hands. Thus, the proletariat is organized as a ruling class, and probably more quickly will increase the sum of productive forces.

It can occur, of course, at first only by means of despotic intervention in the property right and in the bourgeois relations of production. At the same time, the concrete actions are necessary for revolution in all way of manufacture (cancellation of the right of succession, the high value-added tax, confiscation of property of emigrants and rebels, monopolization of the state bank, submission of manufacture are listed the plan, establishment of industrial armies, etc.).

As a whole, considering Marxism, it is possible to allocate some of the basic ideas of the given theory. First of all, the discussion about an essence of the communistic political doctrine needs to be provided. According to K. Marx and F. Engels, this doctrine is anti-capitalist. Capitalism is a free competition to the public and political system. It is a question of such condition of a society, in which everyone has the right to be engaged in any branch of industrial activity and nothing can prevent one from it­, except the absence of the necessary capital. At the same time, consecutive realization of the principle put in a free competition, is the war of all against all.

The capital becomes solving force, and capitalists, the bourgeois, thereby appear to be the first class in a society. Besides, in a capitalist system the bourgeoisie has proclaimed itself the first class also in a political sphere. It has made it by introduction of the representative system, which is based on the bourgeois equality of all citizens of the state before the law, on the basis of a legislative recognition of a free competition.

According to K. Marx and F. Engels, the competition and conducting industrial production by separate persons have turned for large-scale industry to fetters. The large-scale industry necessarily needs to create absolutely new, communistic society organizations, in which the management of industrial production is carried out not by separate manufacturers competing between self. However, all society needs to be under the firm plan and follow the requirements of all members of a society.

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Transition to a communistic system, as K. Marx and F. Engels believed, at all does not mean rupture with all basic principles of the organization of a capitalist society. For example, the characteristic principle for the taxation, according to F. Engels, in effect is purely communistic principle as the right of collection of taxes in all countries is deduced from the so-called national property. The first step in communistic revolution is transformation of hired workers of a capitalist society into a ruling class. Their class domination can be reached by applying either democratic methods or violence.

Second of all, dialectics of development private and a state ownership during evolution of the bourgeois state is an important part of the ideology. K. Marx and F. Engels ascertained that with development and accumulation of the bourgeois property, i.e. with trade and industry development­, separate persons grew richer, while the state ran into debts. At the same time, even having been on sale, the state still requires money and consequently continues to depend on the bourgeoisie. However, the state can, when it is demanded by interests of the bourgeoisie, receive in the order the big means less developed, and consequently, states are less burdened with debts.

The third principle is about political centralization at the bourgeois system and during communistic transformations. As noticed by K. Marx and F. Engels, the bourgeoisie destroys dissociation of means of production, properties and the population. It has condensed the population, centralized means of production, and concentrated the property in hands of the few. Political centralization was a necessary consequence of this phenomenon. The independent areas connected almost only by allied relations with various interests, laws, the governments and the customs duties have appeared rallied in one nation with one government, legislation, national class interest, with one customs border.

The forth principle is mutual operation of people in the state. The authors wrote that in the state the organization of general mutual relation between all individuals is based on mutual operation. Here, each active display of a being of the person, their property, their vital aspiration becomes requirement, which does their self-love by love to other things and other people who are out of it. Moreover, as the requirement of one individual, he or she has no egoistical individual possessing means for satisfaction of this requirement, any self-evident sense each individual should create this communication, becoming in turn the procurer between another's requirement and subjects of this requirement. Thus, requirements of individuals are unique communication between them. Everyone looks at each other only as on object for use; everyone maintains another one. However, it turns out that the stronger tramples on the weaker, and that the small group of the strong appropriates everything, and the weak hardly remains on a life.

The fifth principle is related to the participation of citizens of the state in its common causes. According to K. Marx, the state includes each of the citizens as the part of state representation. However, if they represent state parts, it is clear that their social life already is the valid participation in the state.

However, state sometimes causes visibility of representation, as if common causes of citizens are effective in the state organization. It is not so common if the state also causes of its citizens.

So, K. Marx in the concept confirmed the necessity of clearing the proletariat from the power of the bourgeoisie and an establishment of the power of working class with "the national" power.

Representation about the State and Power of Max Weber

The German author M. Weber was the outstanding political scientist of the beginning of XX century. The part of the Weber’s scientific ideas formulated in the field of the theory of the state and policy has received a general recognition in a world science.

Speaking about the Weber’s theory of the state, it is possible to specify the characteristic lines. According to M. Weber, the state, and also the political unions, represents the relations of domination of people over people. If to ask a question that in the empirical validity corresponds to the idea of the state and these unions have the infinite set of actions, either in the individual’s character or regularly repeating will be found out. Under a policy, it is necessary to mean only a management or rendering of influence on a management of the state, no less than the organizations replacing it in pre-statist epoch.

The state cannot be sociologically defined. Preceding the maintenance of its activity, some problems cannot be taken in hand by the performance of the state. At the same time, there is no such problem, about which it would be possible to tell that it at any time completely and exclusively is inherent in the states. That is why Weber says that to make sociological definition of the state it is possible only by proceeding from applied of the achievement of own purposes of specific means, which is physical violence. The state is human community, which applies for monopoly of physical violence with success.

Political domination, as considered by M. Weber, assumes presence of staff of the management with submission to the governor of the state. This submission is caused by the means appealing to personal human interest: material compensation and social honor. Depending on character of this staff, all states in the history can be divided into two types. The first type includes officials or any person, on whom the obedience should be counted by the owner of the power. He is the independent proprietor of control facilities and, consequently, he divides domination with members of a staff. For example, in the period of feudalism, the vassal of the Supreme seigneur paid expenses on management and justice in the district, welcomed to it in flax, from own pocket. He was equipped and provided itself with provisions in case of war; his vassals did the same­. Naturally, it had consequences for power of the Supreme seigneur, which was based only upon the union of personal fidelity and that possessing flax and social honor of the vassal conducted the origin from the seigneur.

Fuller concentration of imperious powers in own hands of the governor is peculiar to the second type of the states­. It operates through personal servants or regular officials or at least by means of favorites and entrusted, which do not lean on any power belonging to them that could compete with the domination of the master. Here the staff of a political management is separated from control facilities in the same sense that employees and the proletariat in the capitalist enterprise are separated from material means of production­. Contrary, in the second type of the states, the supreme political leader dominates, leaning against the levels of population deprived of own social prestige, which completely depend on people. The bureaucratic political system is that, in particular,  which is characteristic for the states with the developed capitalist economy in the most rational form. The similar states­, as M. Weber wrote, usually differ in terms of  leaders, who due to to illegal actions or elections have seized power and have come to power and had an opportunity to dispose of a staff of political domination, and also the device of its material means, deducing own power from will of those who is under domination ­.

As M. Weber marked, as far as the state existed, the people, who are under domination, should submit to authority, which is applied by those who dominate now. It is possible to allocate three reasons for obedience of citizens to the state and to the persons concentrating in the hands of the government. Such reasons operate one by one and also in the most different combinations, including the prevalence of one or two in a total sum. The first thing that leads to the obedience is the authority of custom to submit to the political leaders, generating habitual orientation to observance of this custom. Secondly, authority of extraordinary personal gift fills personal fidelity and the personal trust caused by presence of qualities in the leader. The individual of this kind is considered obeying by internally called head of people. They submit to it because they trust in a person. Thirdly, as the reason of obedience for governors of the state, the authority acts as a power to correct behavior, which are lawfully established on belief submitting to political domination. In the presence of such belief, people recognize the necessity to obey the persons proclaimed political leaders by specified rules if they are carried out by these chiefs.

The Parity and Differentiation in Ideas of Marx And Weber about the State

Giving crucial importance in sociology to individual behavior, Weber does not ignore social stratification. Its representations in the society structure disperse from Marxism­. For Weber, a class is an economic category before everything else. The accessory to a class is defined by the way of economic activities connected with the property. Weber writes about possessory class (investor), a commercial class (businessman­) and a social class, for which mobility is characteristic, with the reference to different ways of maintenance of means of existence. However, a class in economic sense for Weber is not the unique form of definition of a social status. Along with a class, he speaks about the public status or status groups. This special social generality is defined by different factors: a style of life, an origin, political or spiritual influence. The accessory to economy class always defines the status.

The basic divergences between Weber and Marx are reduced to that the accessory to a social class is not defined exclusively by the position in manufacture process that the class structure at all is not a basis for all public life­, including character of the government. Contrary to Marx, Weber asserted that capitalism conducts not to polarization, but rather to the diffusion of classes. In this case the author leant against the real changes occurring in social structure of the Western Europe from the middle XIX century prior to the beginning of XX century.

Weber is the opponent of class struggle. He supported efforts on improvement of economic and cultural position of workers, but at the same time he appeals to revolution, attempts of sweeping changes are considered silly and dangerous by Weber. In his opinion, the working class future is connected with capitalism. In peasantry, petty bourgeoisie and constantly growing layer of administrative employees the writer saw a reliable obstacle for realization of the proletarian revolution in the Central Europe. Weber sneered at weakness of the German social democracy and, of course, did not share Marxist representations about a messianic role of proletariat­. From his point of view, speech followed a message not about class, as in Marxist theory, but about national interests. Moreover, any class by itself is not capable to preside at the country according to national interests: Cadets (landowners) have turned to capitalist businessmen and have lost leisure necessary for political activity, the bourgeoisie eulogized the state only as the tool of struggle against working class, and proletariat people with petty-bourgeois ideals headed.

Weber defines a policy as the effort directed on participating in the power or on affect power distribution between the states or between groups within the limits of the state­. Weber associates the idea of the power with overriding. The special form of the power is domination as defined by Weber. It is understood as the ability to provide an order and obedience by application or threat of physical or mental violence. In domination structure three elements are distinguished: dominating minority, management personnel and subordinates to domination of minority of weight.

The state represents the form of the political domination as an integral sign that the violence serves. Distinctive property of the state is the monopoly for application of lawful violence in certain territory.

Weber is the sociologist of typology of the state. Formal legal characteristics give way to the analysis of specific forms of maintenance of political domination. Stability of the state, argues Weber, depends on the ability of the power to inspire to weights consciousness. Thus, the existing system is in the given circumstances can be the best or at least comprehensible­. Weber names recognition of the power of people as legitimacy­. This concept should not be identified with legality. It is a question of approval of the power by citizens. Any new power faces a problem of legitimacy, i.e. maintenance of the people’s support.

Legitimacy is reached by the power (or it is attributed to it in weights) following four ways:

1) owing to tradition, belief in legitimacy of that always existed;

2) by means of the emotional relation, legitimizing the new phenomenon or the offered sample for imitation;

3) by means of rational conviction in absolute value of this or that power;

4) owing to that, the power has been established in shape, which admits lawful (the voluntary agreement of interested parties or the decision of the power that admits legitimate).

Four named ways of legitimacy of the authorities are taken by Weber as a principle typology of the state or, more precisely, the analysis of the nature of the power. He speaks about three types of the legitimate power: rational-legal, traditional and charismatic.

The majority of the modern states are rational-legal. These societies obey norms instead of persons. The power is legitimated by the system of rational norms and it is lawful only if it corresponds to these norms. In case of these societies, legitimacy coincides with legality. For the rational state, the bureaucracy, professional management personnel­, structure and powers are defined by the rules of law.

Thus, Weber noticed that for state development and the class structure, which implies the power concentration in hands of a group with narrow interests, is not required (the class, party) and cannot lead to state growth.

Wider conclusion of the theory of Marx consists from the emancipation of the person, his or her clearing of operation. These are possible only as ways of a social revolution, which assumes elimination of dictatorship of the bourgeoisie and an establishment of dictatorship of the proletariat, called to construct a classless society and in the long term to eliminate the state as political institute.

For Weber, the most important is the question on why people, citizens of corresponding community or the state, agree to submit to the state establishments. Thereupon, Weber develops the typology of political domination and shows the essential motives of political behavior within the limits of each of types.