Capatalism, Morality, and Max Weber

I am not sure how in all of this discussion about capitalism and morality I did not think of Weber. Max Weber's infamous work, "The Protestant Ethic, and the Spirit of Capitalism," attempts to understand the development of American capitalism. In the book, Weber claims that capitalism began with the protestant acetic ethic, which essentially said, "work hard, but don't enjoy luxury," and slowly transformed in a rationalization process whereby it lost its religious roots, and took on a life and a spirit of its own. Weber claimed that puritan religion, particularly Calvinist notions of predestination left people terrified and anxious. Essentially, God has already decided if you are damned or saved, and there is nothing you can do to change that designation. The thought of the time was that, there was not way of definitively knowing that one was saved, but one could look for evidence of God's favor. It was not that if one worked hard and acted right God would save one, but that hard work and good behavior were evidence of God's favor. This philosophy was also tinged with a lot of asceticism, it was considered bad to live a life of opulence, to enjoy oneself was sinful, and ultimately a sign of being dammed. This is where Weber's logic gets a bit shaky for me, but he goes on to claim that hard work plus a fear of enjoying it equals reinvestment equals more capital and more wealth. Weber understands institutions ultimately as self-perpetuating machines. So, as soon as capitalism became self perpetuating, it no longer needed the ideological support structure of the protestant ethic, in essence, it developed a spirit all its own. Rather than struggling and working hard while looking for god's favor, the originally unintentional result of struggle (money) becomes an end in itself. Weber concludes by famously describing capitalism as an "iron cage," meaning that now that the system is self perpetuating, it is very difficult to find a way out, because it has developed a logic and a moral framework all its own. In the Manuscripts, Marx claims that Political economy is a science of asceticism, and the science of morality, and when we think about it like that it begins to make sense. Dr. J claimed that capitalism does not tell us what to value but what we do value, but "we", as Marx clearly stated, are intensely social beings, we have not human nature, and if we do it is pointless to postulate about it, our We-ness is socially constructed. So by pointing out what we DO value, capitalism is really only pointing to something it placed inside of us.