[lbo-talk] Understanding _Capital_ (Was Re: barbaric)

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

On 3/8/07, Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
> andie nachgeborenen wrote:
> >
> > Yes, yes, primitive accumulation is in the antechamber
> > to capitalism. Once you get through the door, however,
> > guns are replaced by contracts.
>
> Yes.
>
> This thread has been jumbled by a sort of metanymic sub-text (intended
> or not) in too many of the posts. It is absolutely necessary to get
> absolutely straight as a point of DEPARTURE the absolutely peaceful
> nature of capitalist coercion. If you don't get that peaceful coercion
> straight to begin with you will never get a clear and powerful grasp of
> why capitalism is the bloodiest social system in human history. But to
> talk about that bloodshed in the same sentence or even the same
> paragraph or group of paragraphs as you talk about the horror of
> peaceful coercion is to confuse everything.
>
> Even the bloodshed in the colonies or the bloodshed in the prisons or
> the bloodshed of ww1 d& ww2 can't be understood unless you first and
> preeminently understand and discuss and analyze the peaceful non-violent
> horror of the system.

Grasping how surplus value is extracted peacefully doesn't
automatically let you grasp the bloodshed in colonies, prisons, wars,
and so forth.  If you directly extrapolate from the mechanism of
surplus value production to the reproduction of the capitalist mode of
production, as many do, most likely you get to the opposite
conclusion: capitalism can be developed peacefully, however bloody its
initial imposition may be, and capitalist development is in fact the
solution to bloody conflicts; if today's world still suffers from wars
and the like, that is due to too little development of capitalism,
rather than due to any essential feature of the capitalist mode of
production.
-- 
Yoshie
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