Wood:
In capitalism, it's economic imperatives, the compulsions of propertylessness, that force workers to sell their labor power for a wage and make it possible for capital to exercise power over them. The capitalist mode of exploitation operates not by means of direct coercive power but through the economic medium of the market.
Obviously there's a lot of coercion in the workplace, but the distinctive characteristic of capitalist domination is power exercised not directly by masters but by markets; and what makes it possible is the market dependence of direct producers.
So that's the specific nature of class domination in capitalism, which differentiates it from other forms. And there's an analogous difference between capitalist imperialism and precapitalist forms. Precapitalist imperialism, to put it simply, was the direct exercise of coercive force to capture territory, to extract labor or resources from subject peoples, or to gain control of trade routes.
full: http://solidarity.igc.org/indexATC.html
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This is obviously a bid to systematize the Brenner thesis and apply it across the board to various types of societies. I would only say that the phrase "capitalist domination is power exercised not directly by masters but by markets" is singularly undialectical as this item from the latest Village Voice should indicate. In Central America, excluding Costa Rica, it has been power exercised by masters and not by markets from the very beginning. If Del Monte is not a capitalist firm, then the term has no meaning.
Guatemalan peasants murdered on Del Monte banana plantation Strange Fruit by Matt Pacenza October 1 - 7, 2003
MORALES, GUATEMALA—Florinda Lollo Martínez lost her job so your bananas could stay cheap. And now she's so desperate to provide food for her family that she's risking her life to grow corn on a former banana plantation, even though thugs linked to her former employer, Fresh Del Monte Produce, have been accused of murdering eight of her fellow farmers in the past two years.
(clip)
Local ranchers first started raising cattle on Del Monte land in the 1970s, says Annie Bird, the co-director of Rights Action, which released a report on the Izabal violence this year. She says the arrangement here is hardly unique. "There is an industry-wide practice, not just by Del Monte, of using cattle ranching as a way of maintaining control over land," she says, speaking from her office in Guatemala City. "Cattle ranching has been not just an *economic activity, but a form of policing*." (emphasis added)
These ranchers, particularly the Mendoza Mata and Ponce families, have reputations and influence that go far beyond their official business. They own nightclubs and hotels and bus lines. They fund political campaigns. In sworn testimony after the Lankin killings, a local policeman described Obdulio Mendoza Mata as "one of the most powerful people in Izabal."
full: http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0340/pacenza.php
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