Yes, yes, primitive accumulation is in the antechamber to capitalism. Once you get through the door, however, guns are replaced by contracts. You Proudhonists have resisted this elementary Marxist point for over 150 years, insisting that capitalism is armed robbery (worse, calling this the Marxist view!), selecting quoting out of contexts the passages where Marx talks about force, and ignoring the analysis of Capital. Yes, Yoshie, I know that at the edges capitalism depends on armed force --as I said earlier, Weber, Nozick, Hayek, would all agree. But that's not how capitalism _works_. As Rosa Luxemburg said, we have not caught up with Marx yet. And that was 100 years ago! Thanks to you Proudhonists, we show no signs of doing so.
--- Tim <tim_boetie at fastmail.fm> wrote:
> On Thu, 2007-03-08 at 00:53 +0100, Dmytri Kleiner
> wrote:
> > As I have asked Tayssir, so I asked you, can you
> logically explain to
> > me, preferable in the language of classical
> economics, how an
> > exploitive
> > class can arise out of free exchange without
> resorting to force?
>
> Isn't this the wrong question, though? Maybe in some
> hypothetical world
> of free exchange and no force, there would be no
> exploitative class -
> but, getting a system of "free exchange" _in the
> first place_ requires
> force. One of the main things that Marx is trying to
> show in volume one
> of _Capital_ is that free exchange depends on
> approaching the world and
> other people in particular ways (seeing diverse
> things as being capable
> of exchange as equivalents), and that approaching
> the world in this way
> has certain material presuppositions (especially,
> making all human labor
> power equivalent and exchangeable).
>
> According to Marx's analysis, free exchange requires
> that workers be
> considered as separable from the means of production
> (otherwise, you
> couldn't have formally free labor, which underpins
> free exchange), and,
> furthermore, this separation has historically been
> accomplished by
> force. Hence free exchange has, as a precondition,
> the existence of an
> exploitative class.
>
> "The immediate producer, the labourer, could only
> dispose of his own
> person after he had ceased to be attached to the
> soil and ceased to be
> the slave, serf, or bondsman of another. To become a
> free seller of
> labour-power, who carries his commodity wherever he
> finds a market, he
> must further have escaped from the regime of the
> guilds, their rules for
> apprentices and journeymen, and the impediments of
> their labour
> regulations. Hence, the historical movement which
> changes the producers
> into wage-workers, appears, on the one hand, as
> their emancipation from
> serfdom and from the fetters of the guilds, and this
> side alone exists
> for our bourgeois historians. But, on the other
> hand, these new freedmen
> became sellers of themselves only after they had
> been robbed of all
> their own means of production, and of all the
> guarantees of existence
> afforded by the old feudal arrangements. And the
> history of this, their
> expropriation, is written in the annals of mankind
> in letters of blood
> and fire." (Marx, _Capital_, ch. 26
>
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch26.htm
> )
>
>
> --
> "Boredom is the threshold to great deeds."
> --
> Walter Benjamin
>
>
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>
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>
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