> >Though I could be wrong, my understanding is that Roemer would have >accepted >Marx's story (of capitalist exploitation as based on structural coercion) >when he developed his own story, but saw the structural coercion as >unnecessary to the existence of exploitation. >
That is exactly correct. jks ^^^^^ Charles: On this Roemer makes the understanding of capitalism less exact than Marx's, yet he crtiques Marx under the rubric of making him more exact. Marx developed nice empirically based differentia specifica for capitalist exploitation; Roemer seeks to make the understanding more blunt, less sharp. The mass of consumers have to be free enough to receive wages and buy the great mass of commodities for capitalism to function. This status is not compatible with being coerced as slaves or serfs were in exploitation. So, the "structural coercion" of being also "free" of ownership of the means of production _is_ necessary for capitalist relations of production. Jim Devine has often discussed the doubly "free" complex. Marx was aware that within capitalism , slavery is constantly being reproduced as a minor division of labor as a historical tendency of capitalist accumulation ( see below), but wage-labor is its characteristic form of exploitation. The paradox of coercion and voluntariness is captured in the slang expression "wage-slave" for wage-labor. The notion that "structural coercion is unnecessary to the existence of exploitation" is evidence of an ahistorical approach in Roemer's method. The overthrow of capitalism is not aided by dumbing down from Marx's insights. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch32.htm "As soon as this process of transformation has sufficiently decomposed the old society from top to bottom, as soon as the laborers are turned into proletarians, their means of labor into capital, as soon as the capitalist mode of production stands on its own feet, then the further socialization of labor and further transformation of the land and other means of production into socially exploited and, therefore, common means of production, as well as the further expropriation of private proprietors, takes a new form. That which is now to be expropriated is no longer the laborer working for himself, but the capitalist exploiting many laborers. This expropriation is accomplished by the action of the immanent laws of capitalistic production itself, by the centralization of capital. One capitalist always kills many. Hand in hand with this centralization, or this expropriation of many capitalists by few, develop, on an ever-extending scale, the co-operative form of the labor-proces! s, the conscious technical application of science, the methodical cultivation of the soil, the transformation of the instruments of labor into instruments of labor only usable in common, the economizing of all means of production by their use as means of production of combined, socialized labor, the entanglement of all peoples in the net of the world-market, and with this, the international character of the capitalistic regime. Along with the constantly diminishing number of the magnates of capital, who usurp and monopolize all advantages of this process of transformation, grows the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation; but with this too grows the revolt of the working-class, a class always increasing in numbers, and disciplined, united, organized by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself. The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production, which has sprung up and flourished along with, and under it. Cent! ralization of the means of production and socialization of labor at la become incompatible with their capitalist integument. Thus integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated. "
