Tom Warren wrote:
> even though the Protestant Ethic predates the theory
> of capitalism by some years,
It is going to be hard for marxists and you to find common ground. Regardless of
whether the Protestant Ethic is or is not linked to capitalism, this argument is
false because it jams together quite different things. The Protestant Ethic is
of course not a theory at all -- it is a label placed (after the fact, whether
correctly or not I don't know) on a whole web of social relations and the
ideology which spontaneously developed in response to those social relations.
And I can't for the life of me grasp what you mean in this phrase by "theory of
capitalism." Is there such a thing? Capitalism was already a triumphant system,
on the verge of conquering the earth, when someone first called it capitalism.
Capitalism, the mode of production characterized by a huge complex set of social
relations, came well before any "theory" of it developed. (Quesnay, Smith, and
Ricardo didn't know they were developing capitalist theory, incidentally.)
I haven't been keeping up with this thread, and perhaps my next question has
been explored already. Is there such a thing as the Protestant Ethic? These
various "ethics" that go bruited about beginning in the late 19th century (when
did "work ethic" get coined) have always seemed to me to be excellent examples
of the tendency to mistake a description of what needs to be explained for such
an explanation.
Carrol
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