Actually, it's the entire point of Marx's critique of political economy that both of those propositions are false. It is crucial to an understanding of Marx to grasp these points even if you disagree with his analysis.
Marx rejects the idea (advanced by Proudhon) that property is theft because he rejects the idea of rights and justice as "bourgeois right." Communism (in its higher phase) does not create justice where there was none, it abolishes "the narrow horizons of bourgeois right." (Critique of the Gotha Program.) The ethical problem that Marx sees with capitalism is that it restricts freedom and inhibits self-realization, not that it involves depriving the rightful owners of their property. That's' for one.
Moreover, the object of the analysis of capital in Capital is to show how exploitation can occur in the normal operations of contracting for the sale and purchase of labor power. Force of the brute kind is relegated to the discussion of "primitive accumulation" and is analytically distinct from the expropriation that occurs in ordinary wage labor. It may be necessary for the creation of capitalist productive relations, but it is not part of them.
That is not to say that wage labor is free in the sense of there being no coercion or domination -- there is market discipline and managerial bossiness. But it quite different from unfree forms of labor where the price of disobedience is beating or branding and sending the digs to hunt you down. You want to quit? Be our guest.
--- Charles Brown <cbrown at michiganlegal.org> wrote:
>
> The answer is yes. Capitalism can not exist without
> barbarism because a
> Capitalist class can not exist without the theft of
> surplus value, and
> theft requires force.
>
> Dmytri Kleiner
>
> ^^^^^^a
> CB: You got that right, and that about settles it.
>
> Welcome to the list.
>
> ( Lots of newcomers overpost at first; you'll be
> fine)
>
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> ___________________________________
>
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