> Marx rejects the idea (advanced by Proudhon) that
> property is theft because he rejects the idea of
> rights and justice as "bourgeois right."
Only after Proudhon rejected Marx and Engels when they tried to recruit him into their project because of his aversion to their vangardism.
If you can logically refute the proposition that Capitalism can not exist without theft, please do, quoting Marx or whomever you like.
I have never seen this successfully refuted without resorting to incomprehensible allusions and mystification. Maybe useful or interesting within the context of academic discourse, but not much use to self-organizing workers.
I am a simple worker, not a scholar, for me to accept an argument it has to be made with clear logic, preferably in the language of classical economics, so that I can directly apply this knowledge in the organization of mutual capitalization, which I am committed to as the only feasible revolutionary tactic.
To me that Property is Theft has nothing to do with rights, justice or anything else one might write a poem about. It has to do with the simple economics of production. See my earlier comments about the mechanics of price and the forces that drive it either toward cost or toward utility.
[...]
> 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.
I have never seen a logical explanation of how an exploitive class can develop in the context of free production. This to me seems like an illogical proposition which is an object of faith for anti-market tendencies within Socialism. In my opinion, it is bunk.
In my limited knowledge, this seems more a project of Engels (i.e. anti-duehring) than of Marx, who as you note below illustrates his understanding that the proletariat did not spring out of any market conditions, but rather out of the "blood and fire" of terror, as mentioned, the enclosure laws, anti-combination laws, poor laws, and other anti-socialist laws backed in the force of the State.
> 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.
As I have noted, this is often claimed, though I have never see it logically defended in a compelling way.
How can any private interest capture surplus value in the context of free production?
> 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.
Once again, it is not the terror directly applied to making workers work harder that is the point, as I have said, this is neither unique to nor essential to Capitalism. It is the terror in preventing worker's from having independent access to the means of production that is the basis of the barbarism in Capitalism.
-- Dmytri Kleiner, robotnik Telekommunisten, Berlin.
dk at telekommunisten.net http://www.telekommunisten.net freenode/#telnik