69
Check In Thread: How Are You Doing, Comrade?
(hexbear.net)
Ask Hexbear is the place to ask and answer ~~thought-provoking~~ questions.
Rules:
Posts must ask a question.
If the question asked is serious, answer seriously.
Questions where you want to learn more about socialism are allowed, but questions in bad faith are not.
Try !feedback@hexbear.net if you're having questions about regarding moderation, site policy, the site itself, development, volunteering or the mod team.
You kind of have to talk about Weber in pol theory classes, it is foundational even though not the first person having thought about a lot of stuff. It also is good to be able to critique the conceptions as many pol sci people hear Weber, hear Carl Schmitt (right wing Max Weber for conservative authoritarians and Nazis basically) and a few others and then just repeat those points and look down on anyone having a wider set of political knowledge.
I view Weber as basically Marx but with bourgeois escape valves. "Marx failed to consider culture which is this vague thing that just sort of floats around in the air and gets involved in human affairs whenever the bourgeoisie (the people currently paying my salary) starts to look bad." Weber allows liberal academics to do something like historical materialism (even though it's nothing of the sort) and avoid relying too much on great man theory / divine intervention without risking their careers. Also, Weber's idea that Protestantism created capitalism has the entire base-superstructure backwards and is not dialectical.
I don't actually know that much about Weber so anyone who knows more should feel free to dunk on me. My history professor in college relied on him pretty heavily and stabbed me in the back and nuked my graduate thesis (after we had worked together really well for four years!) because I dared to express support for Students for Justice in Palestine, even though back then I was a lib. So I associate Weber with that guy. Always looking at interesting details, never considering the broader dialectical picture, and rarely mentioning Marx or Marxists except to say that they are wrong.
Your critiques are good places to start critiquing Weber from I feel. They are very accessible and especially the protestant -> capitalism thing shows the idealism that Marx and half the Hegelians fought so hard against.
I also see a couple things that Weber did well (especially review stuff which became important for later for myself), but Marx did quite a bit work on culture in his works, not only in the German Ideology in which he describes some conceptions of how the mechanism between modes of productions and class as well as super structure is, but also in later works. I always wondered why people would skip over that when Capital contains so many great critiques of capitalist culture that are used to this day in anthropology frameworks in some way or the other.