By Shahab Sabahi
Energy and Environment - Policy analysis research group
According to decentralized economic theory that assumes as a fact that man as a rational profit-maximizer, raising the piece-work rate should increase labor productivity. However political economy has more insights to share. Max Weber, in his book “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism” notes that, in fact, in many traditional peasant communities, raising the piece-work rate actually had the opposite effect of lowering labor productivity: at the higher rate. A peasant accustomed to earning few dollars per day found he could earn the same amount by working less, and did so because he valued leisure more than income. The choices of leisure over income, cannot possibly be explained by the impersonal working of material forces, but it should come out of the consciousness sphere - what philosophers has labelled broadly as ideology .
It was Weber's view in contrary to Marx’s view. Weber argued that the emergence of modern capitalism and the profit motive had rooted in the past history and the realm of the spirit, world-view and culture.
Think of the current affairs of the world today, in one part of the world the ideological and value seeking struggle that in the past pulled forth courage, imagination, and idealism, is now replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands.
Yet the other part, nations engage in the struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk their life for an abstract goal. There would still be a high and perhaps rising level of ethnic and nationalist violence, since those are impulses incompletely played out, even in parts of the post-historical world. They will continue to have their unresolved grievances.
It seems that in the post-historical period there will be neither art nor philosophy to fuel competition in the post-historical world for some time to come.
A powerful nostalgia may be felt for the time when history existed.
Energy and Environment - Policy analysis research group
According to decentralized economic theory that assumes as a fact that man as a rational profit-maximizer, raising the piece-work rate should increase labor productivity. However political economy has more insights to share. Max Weber, in his book “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism” notes that, in fact, in many traditional peasant communities, raising the piece-work rate actually had the opposite effect of lowering labor productivity: at the higher rate. A peasant accustomed to earning few dollars per day found he could earn the same amount by working less, and did so because he valued leisure more than income. The choices of leisure over income, cannot possibly be explained by the impersonal working of material forces, but it should come out of the consciousness sphere - what philosophers has labelled broadly as ideology .
It was Weber's view in contrary to Marx’s view. Weber argued that the emergence of modern capitalism and the profit motive had rooted in the past history and the realm of the spirit, world-view and culture.
Think of the current affairs of the world today, in one part of the world the ideological and value seeking struggle that in the past pulled forth courage, imagination, and idealism, is now replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands.
Yet the other part, nations engage in the struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk their life for an abstract goal. There would still be a high and perhaps rising level of ethnic and nationalist violence, since those are impulses incompletely played out, even in parts of the post-historical world. They will continue to have their unresolved grievances.
It seems that in the post-historical period there will be neither art nor philosophy to fuel competition in the post-historical world for some time to come.
A powerful nostalgia may be felt for the time when history existed.
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