Durkheim had a broader vision, a form of guild socialism with the occupational associational as its elemental form. While he advanced the idea of a regulatory state to minimize unjust inequality, he argued that occupational corporations would organize production and inherit property, supplanting the family as the basic unit of society. Durkheim’s utopian “normal” division of labor emerged from his anti-utopian analysis of the actually existing “abnormal forms” that impose external constraints on human action. The abnormal forms included not only the forced division of labor rooted in the unjustified and unequal distribution of resources, but also the anomic division of labor in which rapid social change gives rise to states of disorientation (normlessness) and a third abnormal form in which the different parts of society are badly coordinated.
Karl Marx, who never knew Durkheim, would have brought his own anti-utopianism to bear on the idea of organic solidarity and evolutionary progress. He would scoff at the very possibility of realizing such a fantasy under capitalism. The obstacles to organic solidarity, namely, the “external” inequalities of power and wealth, are deeply inscribed in the structure of capitalism: they will not dissolve without a revolution that would overthrow vested interests, especially class interests, in defending capitalism. Durkheim has no way of getting from here to there, from the abnormal to the normal division of labor. Such would be the critique of Karl Marx.
Marx would turn his anti-utopianism against Durkheim’s project, but he would also offer an alternative utopia. Thus, Durkheim’s guild socialism should not be confused with Marx’s communism. Where Durkheim was concerned to perfect the division of labor by slotting people into their appropriate places, Marx wanted to abolish the division of labor altogether. Slotting people into places crushes their potential to develop rich and varied abilities. They are alienated from their essential being: they don’t control what they produce or how they produce it; they don’t control the relations through which they produce things. They cannot, in other words, develop their humanity, what Marx and other critical theorists of his time called their “species being.”
The barrier to such a world of emancipation is capitalism itself, the incessant pursuit of profit through novel ways of exploiting workers. If they are to survive, capitalists have to compete for profit. They are as trapped by the market as workers who have to sell their capacity to work, their labor power, by the minute, by the hour. His critique of the forces that have hitherto imprisoned humanity led him to conceive of an alternative world of communism that supersedes capitalism – a world free of unnecessary products, from automobiles to nuclear weapons, a world free of unnecessary labor of control and surveillance, a world free of the excessive waste built into capitalism. Freedom from all of these would allow us to reduce the length of the working week, leaving us ample time and space to develop those rich and varied abilities in what he called the “true realm of freedom.” As is increasingly recognized, only such a radical transformation of capitalism can avoid the impending human extinction that will come with global warming.
Marx and his lifelong collaborator, Friedrich Engels, clearly saw the virtues of capitalism whose dynamism generated the technology – the forces of production – that made the reduction of the working week possible. Over time, again by its own logic, capitalism destroyed small businesses and concentrated ownership into the hands of large conglomerates and the state, creating the foundations of a planned economy – an economy that would be run and owned collectively, superseding markets and private property. Equally important, capitalism also creates its own gravedigger, in the form of a working class determined to overthrow capitalism and end alienation. The genius of Marx was to discover the laws that bring about the self-destruction of competitive capitalism: competition among capitalists would intensify the exploitation of labor, which would, on the one hand, lead to crises of overproduction and a falling rate of profit, and, on the other hand, assure the organizational ascendancy of the working class. In other words, as economic crises deepened, capitalism enlarged, deskilled, homogenized, and impoverished the working class, forging it into a revolutionary movement that would seize power and turn capitalism into socialism. The utopian and anti-utopian moments finally converge in the miraculous transcendence of capitalism.
Despite their homage to capitalism, Marx and Engels still underestimated its resilience. Their mistake was to believe that the end of competitive capitalism was the end of all capitalism; they failed to anticipate the transition to a new form of capitalism, organized capitalism, orchestrated by a regulatory state that counteracts the crisis tendencies of capitalism – regulating competition, limiting exploitation, and absorbing surplus. Today, there are forces within capitalist society trying to cast off the encumbering state – the very entity that protects capitalism from itself – thereby restoring capitalism’s self-destructive tendencies that are as likely to lead to some form of barbarism as communism. Marx’s anti-utopian thinking, founded in the atrocities of nineteenth-century textile factories as well as the slavery upon which the cotton industry depended, both of which fed the inexorable expanded reproduction of capitalism, has gained the upper hand as his utopia recedes from the public imagination. Yet we are living in a time when his utopian vision is so desperately needed. As Fredric Jameson (2003: 76) has said, it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.
We seem, therefore, to be living more in the world conjured up by Max Weber, who mobilized his immense erudition to trace the origins of modern capitalism, precisely because he saw it as an all-conquering expression of a largely irreversible rationalization. Focusing on the obstacles to radical change, he was explicitly skeptical of all utopias, but specifically the Marxist variety. Any attempt at overthrowing capitalism would lead to a horrific world, a dystopia. For Weber the irony of history was the inverse of Marx’s optimistic thesis of capitalist self-destruction leading to emancipation. On the contrary, in Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, for example, individuals start out by acting freely but in the process unintentionally create iron cages for themselves, epitomized by his notion of bureaucracy, the most efficient organization ever invented but also the most indestructible form of domination. Weber was prophetic in anticipating the spread and resilience of institutions bound by rules, discipline, hierarchy, and linear careers. Seeking to overthrow bureaucracy only gives rise to a stronger bureaucracy, endangering liberal-democratic safeguards against its expansion. Socialism, Weber anticipated, would not be the democratic dictatorship of the working class but the authoritarian dictatorship of officials.
Even as he was anti-utopian, Weber, too, harbored a concept of his own utopia – although it was far less radical than the utopias of Durkheim and Marx. According to Weber, it was not possible to perfect the division of labor by securing to each their appropriate place, nor was it possible to abolish the division of labor through transcending capitalism. The best one can do is to treat one’s occupation with total devotion. His model was the seventeenth-century Calvinist who considered such devotion to one’s occupation as a necessary part of their calling to glorify God on earth. Facing predestination – not knowing whether one was among the damned or the elect – created a deep anxiety, only alleviated by searching for signs of a job well done. In the case of the capitalist, it entailed that most “irrational” of pursuits, accumulation for accumulation’s