ABSTRACT
Weber’s framework for the analysis of capitalism modifies Marx’s model of capitalist dynamics. While Marx’s analysis is a guide to the development of a capitalist labour process, it says little about the apparatus of bureaucratic control which develops to dominate it, both at the site of production and in the constitutive framework of the state (but see Perez-Diaz, 1978, for a construction of this theoretical ‘lapse’). Bureaucracy is the inevitable fate of our times, inasmuch as these remain predicated on large-scale productive organizations and centralized nation states (as anti-bureaucratic socialists such as Castoriadis (1982) would be among the first to admit). Opposition to bureaucracy, for Weber, can only be the mark of a certain dilettante illusion. Bureaucracy, both in the state in particular and in organizations in general, becomes the basis for the normal exercise of rule in any large organization or nation (see Clegg and Dunkerley, 1980, chapter 6, for a discussion of empirical verifications of this hypothesis).
