Yoshie, this is a Weberian point extraneous to Marx's political economic analysis of capitalism. Of course there is a sense that all systems of productive relations and any political system ultimately rely on force. Marx knew this, which is why he expected a transition to socialism to be bloody anyplace where there was a strong state, likewise any nonsocialist threat to the existing order, like the Paris Commune. ("This civilization and this justice stand forth and unbridled savagery and lawless revenge," I paraphrase The Civil War in France closely from memory).
But this changes the subject. (There seems to be a lot of that going around.) As I indicated in the heading and in my carefully worded argument, the political economic analysis of capitalism that is the core of Capital poses and purports to answer the puzzle, how do capitalist productive relations succeed in promoting exploitation, producing surplus value for the bourgeoisie to expropriate, _without_ reliance on brute force immediate threat of physical coercion, apparently with the free consent of all parties trading equal for equal?
It is precisely this illusion, one of the central illusions of the fetishism of commodities (others include the apparently independent behavior of of commodities and their animation and mastery over their human producers), that makes capitalism so strong. That is why the workers of the advanced capitalist countries rarely if ever think of the force which capital can invoke if threatened. But like all of the fetishistic illusions, it is not exactly false. The reason that it has a grip is that it is not a lie, the wage contract is in a very important sense free and unforced compared to the naked force that much more often and openly keeps slaves and serfs in line.
If you don't see this, you cannot understand Capital. Capital (the book, the analysis) is based on the premise that wage labor is really free labor in a critical sense, specifically that it does not depend on force to be exploited, and the analysis of Capital is meant to solve the puzzle, How Can That Be?
I think a lot of self-styled Marxists, and I don't count myself among them (that is, I don't claim to be a Marxist, and I don't accept crucial details of Marx's analysis -- but I think he was right about the problem he posed), are really Proudhonists who maintain doctrines that Marx impatiently rejected and considered himself to have refuted, that property is theft, that labor produces all wealth, that justice or right requires that property belong to its producers, that the wealth of the wealthy derives most centrally from the exercise of brute force. Each of the points is not merely dismissed but excoriated by Marx repeatedly and at great length in many different writings, and his masterwork, Capital, is devoted to an alternative account of how capital really operates.
--- Yoshie Furuhashi <critical.montages at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 3/6/07, andie nachgeborenen
> <andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com> wrote:
> > 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.
>
> Force is also necessary for the maintenance of
> capitalist productive
> relations on the global scale, so no nation will
> think of transition
> to socialism or even a social state that seeks to
> benefit the nation
> more and foreign capital less under the same
> capitalism (the history
> of Iran is a very good example of this fact --
> neither Mossadegh nor
> Khomeini sought to end capitalism, but the former's
> government was
> overthrown by the Anglo-American coup, and Iran
> under the latter's
> government was invaded by Iraq, which was armed by
> just about all
> major powers of the world).
>
> If workers of the West ever think of doing away with
> the source of
> their economic insecurity, they will be no doubt
> subject to the same
> force. It's just that here in the relatively richer
> West most workers
> never think of that.
> --
> Yoshie
> <http://montages.blogspot.com/>
> <http://mrzine.org>
> <http://monthlyreview.org/>
> ___________________________________
>
http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>
____________________________________________________________________________________ Don't get soaked. Take a quick peek at the forecast with the Yahoo! Search weather shortcut. http://tools.search.yahoo.com/shortcuts/#loc_weather