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Though these theories are essentially sociological in nature, they are described by their originators as ontological--that is, inherent and thus inevitable. This is the source of their great insights and also their fundamental weakness. Thus while Marx claimed the mantle of "scientific socialism," he provided no evidence for his "end of history" stateless "dictatorship of the proletariat." This was in essence an idealized fantasy of the sort which Marx had vehemently criticized in others' conceptions of socialism.

Ironically, the ideals propounded by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and others (worker co-ops, credit unions for the non-elites, income taxes on the wealthy, etc.) whom Marx criticized were far more practical and "scientific" (that is, backed by experience) than his own vague, generalized descriptions of a worker-ruled post-capitalist Utopia.

Marx's chief accomplishment was his economic analysis of capitalism's internally contradictory forces--a critique which continues to provide insight. As I have described in this analysis, capitalism requires competition and transparency to function yet the highest, lowest-risk profits are gained from secrecy, collusion, fraud, monopoly and cartels and a partnership between the financial-rentier private-sector Elites and the parasitic Elites which control the State: the precise stage of Capitalism we find dominates the present era.

Marx also identified the scalability trap of industrial production in which factories displace labor, creating poverty, and the ontological nature of capitalist over-production (windfall exploitation of new markets) and the resultant collapse which leads to Monopoly/Cartel Capitalism. In this mature stage of capitalism, the means of production and vertical-market, integrated, scalable benefits end up concentrated in the hands of one dominant corporation or a cartel.

These insights continue to play out in our own era, as I show in Chapter Sixteen, The Crisis of Neoliberal Capitalism.

Max Weber codified many sociological insights in his analysis of capitalism, religion, the State and bureaucracies; his book Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology is generally held to be the best summary of his work.

Weber identified three basic types of social authority--charismatic, traditional, and rational-legal--which can be characterized thusly: charismatic--what I term the "Big Man" form of leadership and authority; traditional--value-oriented organization (obey your tribal leader, your parents, your church, etc.), and rational-legal--goal-oriented bureaucracy.

Weber traced the development of capitalism from traditionalist Feudalism and Christian Protestantism (which some later revised to the more neutral "work ethic") to a fully rationalized economy which Weber described as a "polar night of icy darkness." In his view, an over-bureaucratized, rules-based capitalism essentially imprisons individuals in what he termed "an iron cage."

Weber showed that capitalism cannot be adequately described by Marx's purely materialist view of history, as it grew out of specific religious and cultural ideals which extend beyond ownership, technological advances and other metrics (what I term the quantification trap--see Chapter Fifteen, Interlocking Traps.) His analysis of why medieval China, despite its great technological advantages and bureaucratic expertise, failed to develop capitalism, is a masterful display of integrating history, anthropology, economics and sociology.

Advancing Marx's critique of "free-market" capitalism to socialist capitalism, Weber saw that when socialism appropriates privately owned means of production (productive land, factories, labs, etc.), it necessarily abolishes market calculations of cost and profit, thus leaving any "centrally planned economy" with no experiential (supply-demand) basis for setting production, prices, wages, etc. The ontological consequence (i.e. the inevitable result) is the gross inefficiency, corruption and mispricing of labor and assets which led to the demise of the Soviet and Maoist-era