It's important to understand what makes capitalism what it is, to counteract commodity fetishism. That's where theory matters.
If you look at the real world empirically, though, many of the tactics that Marx relegated to the period of so-called primitive accumulation have been continually employed as capitalism has developed and they are still in use. For instance, Marx says in Capital:
Direct force, outside economic conditions,
is of course still used, but only exceptionally.
In the ordinary run of things, the labourer can
be left to the "natural laws of production," i.e.,
to his dependence on capital, a dependence
springing from, and guaranteed in perpetuity by,
the conditions of production themselves. It is
otherwise during the historic genesis of
capitalist production. The bourgeoisie, at its rise,
wants and uses the power of the state to "regulate"
wages, i.e., to force them within the limits suitable
for surplus-value making, to lengthen the working-day
and to keep the labourer himself in the normal degree
of dependence. This is an essential element of
the so-called primitive accumulation. (Vol 1, Ch 28, <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch28.htm>)
There is a secular tendency from the use of direct force to the enforcement of dependence on capital (as is shown in the end of chattel slavery in North America), but, contrary to what Marx says above, "conditions of production themselves" do not automatically perpetuate laborers' dependence, unless the state ceaselessly reproduces the conditions in question, sometimes using direct force, sometimes regulating wages, sometimes using other means of political coercion.
So, we need both theoretical and empirical lenses, the former to see what makes capitalism unlike any previous mode of production, the latter to see that force ultimately guarantees the reproduction of class society, including capitalist society.
On 3/7/07, andie nachgeborenen <andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Marx's rejection of Proudhon was not personal or
> political pique, he actually disagreed with P's ideas.
> He would not have greed with those ideas even if P and
> he had been able to cooperate. We know this because
> the whole of his life work was devoted to developing
> an alternative to the sort of ideas P and many other
> "popular" radicals put forward, alleging that labor
> creates all wealth, and is therefore entitled to own
> the property it creates.
However, you need what you call "'popular' radicals," or else your organization won't become big enough to matter politically. Splitting over mere theoretical differences in everyday politics (in contrast to starkly opposed political alternatives at the moment of truth, so to speak, like Bolsheviks vs. Mensheviks in 1917) tends to destroy the organization's potential, and it looks like that's what happened to the First International.
<http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0348/is_3_40/ai_55449363/print> Labor History, August, 1999
The Yankee International: Marxism and the American Reform Tradition, 1848-1876 - Review Sally M. Miller
The Yankee International: Marxism and the American Reform Tradition, 1848-1876 TIMOTHY MESSAR-KRUSE, 1998 Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press pp. xi + 319, $35.00
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Although confronted with the opposition of Friedrich Sorge, the corresponding secretary of the Central Committee, the leader of the German-speaking groups and the faithful spokesperson of Karl Marx, the English-speaking section nevertheless won a seat on the Central Committee. In their first year of operation, 1870-1871, these Yankees supported the Paris Commune (which Bernstein somewhat disputed) and built links to William Lloyd Garrison's Universal Peace Union as well to as other liberal groups. The Yankee Internationalists even welcomed to their fold the soon-to-be notorious Victoria Woodhull, who organized another English-speaking section and proceeded to try to politicize both her spiritualist colleagues and her women's rights co-workers. With English-speaking sections emerging in Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago and New Jersey, among other places, antebellum reform veterans dominated the Yankee component of the International and were prepared to initiate a new phase of its members' long struggle for universal reform as symbolized by their Equal Rights convention of 1872. Perhaps this author's most important contribution to his argument stems from the socioeconomic profile he develops of the membership of the Yankee sections. By exploiting their extant primary sources and cross-checking them against city directories and census data, he disproves the prevailing view of historians of a middle-class cast to those sections. Demonstrating that workers were indeed in the majority, he overturns the Sorgean-inspired view of a class division renting the IWA as the basis of expulsion. On less concrete grounds, the author defends the English-speaking sections against charges of ideological "softness" on the labor question, arguing that their theoretical flexibility, their wide definition of the working class, their faith in republican government and their avoidance of Marx's scientific concepts in fact reflected an absolute commitment to the workers. Continuous strife over a series of issues between the German-dominated Central Committee and the English-speaking sections seeking to function autonomously saw Sorge using every possible device to centralize control. While Yankee sections grew in membership, the division led to separate so-called Federal Councils representing each side. The Sorge-inspired and Marx-supported suspension of Woodhull's Section 12 and the censure of the English-speaking council were followed by the 1872 Hague Congress expulsion of all the Yankee sections and the transfer of the General Council to New York. The International had been purified in Europe as well as in the United States where Sorge then presided unchallenged. The so-called Yankee International had been eliminated even though a few individuals and a section or two tried to continue to wear the mantle of the IWA. The battle had been won by Sorge and Marx but the war lost as the International disintegrated. The defeat of the Yankees led not just to the ouster of these reformers but, the author argues, marked the start of what would be the Achilles' heel of the American left--an all-consuming faith in abstract social analysis which limited its potential appeal. Of special value is the author's focus on the Yankee Internationalists' treatment of the issues of race and gender. -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>