Actually I think of Marx's deepest points is that capitalism can't eliminate what you call direct discipline, what I call in some old papers I once wrote domination (at the point of production) as opposed to coercion (exercised by the market). (Will provide these on request to any interested persons.)
The requirement for domination addresses the question What Do Bosses Do?, why there is management of traditional wage labor, rather than mainly piecework or payment for the completed job, at all, why that wage labor supervised by managers is overwhelming the dominant form of extraction of surplus value under capitalism.
I trace it to the fact, underlined by Marx, that human labor is intrinsic variable, you cannot specify in contractually advance how the job shall be done, how fast and in what manner, because unforeseen circumstances will always arise and require exertion of the worker's intelligence and creativity; moreover workers can vary the intensity of their labor and ensuring the exercise of creativity and initiative and maximal effort requires the employment of layers of managers to supervise, monitor, and control the rate and nature of expenditure of labor power.
Market discipline is insufficient, or the existence of a managerial caste would be an economic irrationality. So I don't think that direct discipline is, contrary to the neoclassicals or neoclassical Marxists that were, like John Roemer, are right in treating domination as extrinsic.
--- Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
>
>
> Dmytri Kleiner wrote:
> >
> > andie nachgeborenen wrote:
> >
> > > Right. It's called market discipline.
> >
> > However, harsh discipline is not a unique feature
> of Capitalism nor is
> > it essential to it.
>
> Your post is irrelevant to _market_ discipline. The
> discipline is that
> if you lose your job, and can't get another, you end
> up on the streets.
> No one is talking about the kind of direct
> "discipline" you seem to have
> in mind (orders enforced by coercion). Capitalism in
> principle (not in
> practice) eliminates direct coercion. No one is
> forced to work. They
> just starve if they don't. If by State Capitalism
> you mean the USSR,
> they did pretty much eliminate market discipline --
> that is, no one ever
> got fired. And they did have good social services.
> Hence they did have
> to resort to coercion often.
>
> Carrol
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