[Note: I fell way behind in reading posts, & given the limited stress I'm willing to put on my eyes, I'm not even going to try very hard to read all of that backlog, or almost any of it very closely. This will probably lead to (has led to) blunders, but I imagine they will come out in the laundry.]
No. It has nothing whatever to do with the bourgeoisie being more slick. (And incidentally, I no logner regard the "slavd-owning" classes as classes but merely as statuses; ditto feudal lords, serfs, etc. The first and last class society is capitalism. Don't take the rhetoric of the Manifesto as developed theory. Capitalism developed behind the backs of the proto-capitalists, and no one knew it was capitalism until after it had blossomed into full-blown capitalism a couple centuries later. And unlike feudalism (which is a term that should be applied only to some sectors of medieval Europe and perhaps Japan) or other tributary social orders, the laws of capitalism continue to operate behind the backs of both capitalists and workers. Property is NOT theft, and the capitalists are NOT robbing the workers. Let's keep such ahistorical value judgments out of this.
They use the doubly "free" labor
> trick.
No they don't "use" it; free labor is not a wrench or a tractor or a mixing bowl. It is a social relation. Capitalism is _constituted_ by free labor, and it is totallyu confusing to see this as a capitalist "trick."
> Because wage laborers are "free" of ownership of means of
> production, they _must_ get a job to make a living
Yes, this is true. But it is ALSO true that the capitalist MUST hire free labor in order to be a capitalist. Neither capitalist nor worker is free.
> , so the employers
> have indirect coercion on them,
This is playing with words. Coercion MEANS direct coercion; both capitalist and worker are forced (passive voice essential here) by the relations of production under capitalism to perform ans capitalist and worker. Because of the immense role of contingency in human affairs the former statement is only abstractly true, but it is an abstraction which has to be grasped to make any sense whatever of capitalism.
It's beginning to become clearer to ne how important it is to see social systems as historical rather than "just" or "unjust." Those terms are meaningless as applied to whole historical periods or a whole mode of production.
> sort of veiled coercion, in contrast
> with feudal lords and clergy sending knights out to brutalize the
> peasants if they don't give tribute and tithes of surplus product.
Footnote: As Fields notes, when only force is left, nothing is left. That is, the brutalizing of the peasants by itself was powerless but had to be grounded in a legitimizing common sense (i.e., ideology).
> However, that doesn't get around the transhistorical claim that Marx
> and Engels explicitly make in the first sentence of _The Manifesto_.
> The problem with all these claims that _Marx_ doesn't make a
> transhistorical generalization on class struggle, exploitation and
> oppression is that he very clearly does make a transhistorical
> generalization in that sentence.
The word , "generalization" (as opposed to "abstraction") gives this a minimal but trivial accuracy. As a sloppy and untheorized generalization that sentence from the Manifesto holds, but it is a generalization of no real theoretical importance. Moreover, it would be more correctly (but less usrfully for original purposes) as all history is a history of struggle over the surplus product. (Suplus labor is a feature of capitalist society only.) Some (much) of Althusser's terminology is misleading, but his central point that Marx went on thinking after 1848 and that that thinking bore _very_ important results - that point has to be the point of departure for making sense of what Marx has to say to us.
One can make all sorts of empirical generalizations about human history, but none of those genralizations, in and of themselves, have any theoretical status: they don't explain anything or identify the importance of anything but merely note the existence of the thing. People living in cold climates wear clothes. Big deal. That's a generalization which is, if you will, transhistorical, but uninterestingly so, having not theoretical value in undrstanding history. Marx in several places comments that men [sic] must first produce a product before it can be used or plundered, which is of course true and transhistorical but has nothing whatever to do with the _theoretical_ analysis of abstract labor, which exists only in relation to the capitalist market and is NOT a generalization about all history but part of an analysis of capitalism.
I'll continue with Charles's post later. I have some other exignencies now.
Carrol