So I've been wondering why hold a conference on The Capitalist Mode of Power, instead of the Capitalist Mode of Production?
I'll assume Johnathan's intention was to ask how does capital actually control society and impose its will to benefit its class?
The abstract answer is that the interests of capital are imposed by its class control of time and space, which is manifest or made material in the control of the means of production in industry and in direct ownership of land and agricultural production. Capital owns and or controls land use through ownership, investiment, credit, loans, rents and or interest.
Land is equivalent to our concept of space. In cities the control of space takes different forms which are built upon the ownership of land, buildings, transportation systems, communication, and architectural design.
The control over time is more obivious in the direct control of worker's time, motion, and partitioning of skills, which creates the social hierarchy or social strata, usually based on wage differentials.
If you have never punched a time clock, and set to work at 8am working hard into a sweat in a tiny space with shit tools, on crummy flithy equipment, you have no idea what control means. It means literal control of your mind and body counted down to seconds of time, motion, thought, and space. You are a prisoner counting minutes toward a 10a break, long enough to smoke a cigarette while discussing anything but work. Another two hours goes by and you get a 30 minute lunch, time to buy a sandwich, gripe, smoke and go back inside to sweat it out toward 3:00p for another break. Then the long two hours starts in ernest.
5:00p the big pay off. You get to go home to either a screaming wife and children, with hungry pets winding in and out of your legs, a household in chronic chaos, or a dark apartment, of utter silence, numb resisting the overwhelming desire to just die on a flat surface. Resist. Fix dinner and listen to the obnoxious news from complete idiots on radio or tv. Drink you will, my comrade.
The analysis below is based on Harvey's seven elements of change that Capital performed in its historical evolutionary processes to revolutionize feudal societies.
Harvey's lecture class number 8, covers the third footnote of Chapter XV:
http://davidharvey.org/2008/08/marxs-capital-class-08/
Harvey lists them as follows.
1.) Changing our relation to nature, (Darwin) 2.) Changing our relation to technology, 3.) Changing our social relation (class, gender, race), 4.) Changing our organization of production, 5.) Changing our mental conceptions of the world, 6.) Changing our relation to daily life, 7.) Changing our relations to institutions.
CG