----- Original Message ----- From: "Gordon Fitch" <gcf at panix.com>
> > There's no *necessary* connection between coercion and force
when it
> > comes to appropriability; and whatever modes of appropriability
a
> > society chooses, groups who think they are made worse off by the
> > transactions relative to some other feasible arrangement of
> > appropriability will be able to assert that coercion was
involved.
>
> If everything is coercion, then nothing is coercion, and the
> recent apparent objections to Pol Pot, as well as the likening
> of anarchists thereto, seem to be vacuous. I actually meant
> to refer to something, however.
>
> -- Gordon
================
So you're an incremental eliminativist then? Again, we're quibbling over the contested contexts of coercion and how to undo the processes that generate and perpetuate them. Every single context in which one could claim coercion had been eliminated or mitigated could be contested is all I'm saying if someone is *disadvantaged*. Exhaustion by contesting the specificity of whether or not coercion has been undone at any scale of observation/description is always an option.
If all the weapons enabling coercion were dispensed with tomorrow the *legacy* of coercion would persist for indefinite *periods* of *time* and it would be contested as to when the absence of all coercion obtained. Agreement as Utopia.....or not?
Can you trace where and when Boeing or Airbus' supply chain manifests direct 'gun to the head' coercion? If so what's your specific, at the point of contestation, recommendation for conflict elimination. Then pick all the other supply networks of contemporary commodity production and see whether the solution[s] you think you've come to is transposable into other contexts without the proposed solution[s] themselves becoming a potential source of conflict and coercion .
Clearly there are domains of human communication where/when coercion is absent; how to enlarge the scale and scope of those practices is part of a *practical* agenda. It remains to be seen whether we can predict/mitigate the cessation of all forms of coercion any more than we can predict/mitigate all the typhoons of the 21st century.
Ian
ps I'm totally against labeling ChuckO as a neo Pol Pot.....Email has it's limits