> However, I can't imagine a society that "eliminates the independent of will
> phenomenon". All societies have social structures that exist prior to the
> individual and shape individual's lives above and beyond any personal
> choices. Examples: language, norms, economic mode of production. Getting
> rid of the technical division of labor simply means that other forms of
> social structure with different emergent properties would assert an
> independent effect on individuals' lives.
Neither can I - which implies, to me, that I'm misinterpreting what people mean when they say that capitalist but not precapitalist societies operated independently of human will. So, people who endorse that statement: in what way were precapitalist societies dependent on human will?
(Actually, my real intuition is that to describe a society (any society) as independent of human will is like describing a macroscopic object as independent of the behavior of atoms. For a great many purposes it can be described without reference to atoms, but that doesn't mean it's no longer a supervention over atoms.)