“Weber’s views about the inescapable rationalization and bureaucratization of the world have some obvious similarities to Marx’s notion of alienation. Both men agree that modern methods of organization have tremendously increased the effectiveness and efficiency of production and organization and have allowed an unprecedented domination of man over the world of nature. They also agree that the new world of rationalized efficiency has turned into a monster that threatens to dehumanize its creators. But Weber disagrees with Marx’s claim[1] that alienation is only a transitional stage on the road to man’s true emancipation”.

Weber believed that the alienation documented by Marx had little to do with the ownership of the mode of production, but was a consequence of bureaucracy and the rationalization of social life.

Marx asserted that capitalism has led to the “expropriation” of the worker from the mode of production. He believed that the modern worker is not in control of his fate, is forced to sell his labor (and thus his self) to private capitalists. Weber countered that loss of control at work was an inescapable result of any system of rationally coordinated production. Weber argued that men could no longer engage in socially significant action unless they joined a large-scale organization. In joining organizations they would have to sacrifice their personal desires and goals to the impersonal goals and procedures of the organization itself . By doing so, they would be cut off from a part of themselves, they would become alienated.

Socialism and capitalism are both economic systems based on industrialization—the rational application of science, observation, and reason to the production of goods and services. Both capitalism and socialism are forms of a rational organization of economic life to control and coordinate this production. Socialism is predicated on government ownership of the economy to provide the coordination to meet the needs of people within society. If anything, Weber maintained, socialism would be even more rationalized, even more bureaucratic than capitalism. And thus, more alienating to human beings as well.

It is often said that “Weber was in a running dialogue with the ghost of Karl Marx”. But contrary to many interpretations, Weber was not attempting to refute Marx, he was very respectful of Marx’s contributions to understanding human societies. But he did disagree with Marx’s assertion of the absolute primacy of material conditions in determining human behavior . Weber’s system invokes both ideas and material factors as interactive components in the sociocultural evolutionary process. He argued that Marx had presented an overly simplified theory that had unduly emphasized one particular causal chain, the one leading from the economic infrastructure to the cultural superstructure. This, Weber believed, could not adequately take into account the complex web of causation linking social structures and ideas.

Weber attempted to show that the relations between ideas and social structures were multiple and varied, and that causal connections went in both directions. While Weber basically agreed with Marx that economic factors were key in understanding the social system, he gave much greater emphasis to the influence and interaction of ideas and values on sociocultural evolution. It is highlighted in his study of “Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism“.