>Excuse me. Like you I enter this debate in the middle without having
>followed all of it. But it seems to me you are addressing a different
>question than was Charles and Ange. To put the difference starkly, they are
>discussing the cause of poverty--why are people poor--and you are discussing
>why people acquiesce (that's a better word than cooperate, I think) in
>their poverty.
Yes, those two questions are analytically separate but not unrelated. A good chunk of the "cause" lies in the "acquiescence" - since the acquiescence of the massess allows the few keep their riches.
>the playing out of the forces and social relations of production. Cultural,
>physical, or cognitive explanations have no bearing on this root cause, but
>are instead a bourgeois diversion. They only affect the distribution of
>poverty; they don't cause it.
Good point. The fact that being a college educated professional, I know a few tricks (such as not to use vernacular, behave "professionally" etc.) that can get me an income above, say, federally defined poverty line - does not mean that I not "poor" in the sense of having little control of the surplus value (if any :-)) I generate. Stated differently, it does not change my essentially working class status and as a members of that class I have little control of the product of my labor. In that sense, my culture matters very little - all that is important is my relation to the means of production.
On the other hand, my culture makes all the difference in the world in dividing the scraps working class as a whole gets under the rule of capital. And that is a non-trivial difference, one between living in a ghetto or in the streets versus living in a decent home, having a job that pays a living wage versus not having enough to pay th erent or having to live off other people, and so on.
>
>social interaction. But the use of culture is only one of many weapons
>capital has to reproduce capitalist relations (earlier you had said that the
>culture of poverty argument is the only explanation of how capitalist
>oppression can reproduce itself without the use of overt force).
No question about that. If "culture" fails - they will send the Marines. But as Napoleon once commented, you can do many things with bayonettes, except to sit on them. An elite that has to live in a bunker become prisoners of their own class status - so the idea is to get the massess accept the legitimacy of that status, so the lites can sit down, relax, and enjoy it instead of being constantly on guards.
wojtek