Paul Phillips wrote:
Imperialism backed by state coercive power, and after all, the origin of the state is to protect private property. The use of the British/Canadian military to defeat the Metis settlers at Batoche is hardly a definition of 'efficiency'. Nor was the sending in of land surveyors into Manitoba in the late 1860s to survey for privatisation the metis lands leading, eventually, to the state murder of the Metis leader, Louis Riel, an example of capitalist efficiency but rather of capitalist brutality and greed which is what Bill was suggesting but which you apparently misunderstood.
I disagree. Precisely, because human brutality is not an anomaly in history (not mere de-contextualized evil), violence, war-making and the development of productive force proper -- as Engels emphasized -- must be seen as socially related. After all, the former is nothing but the destructive use of potentially productive force. We need to think of efficiency in the broadest sense, as optimal human wellbeing. If protecting oneself against violence is not unrelated to human wellbeing, then the efficiency criterion is germane to the ability to wage war, defensive and offensive -- just as it is to the ability to satisfy hunger or the desire for beauty. It is contradictory to claim on one hand that certain state violence and capitalism are related and then, on the other hand, view such violence as extraneous to the "economy" -- and therefore beyond the purview of the efficiency criterion. The "economy," in Marx's tradition at least, is the reproduction of material life *as a whole*, in and through society. So, I stand by what I wrote: There's no divorce between "economic" efficiency and the ability to inflict violence. The use of labor power, the application of the productive (or destructive) force of labor (purposeful human activity), is fungible. It's proved to be so in history.
In short, the victory of the capitalist market system had precious little to do with efficiency and a lot to do with military/police force in enforcing private property rights over collective economic institutions.
It's a historical fact that violence played a big role in the birth of capitalism. It continues to play a large role in the reproduction of capitalism today and will retain a large role in times to come. But I claim that violence is not the main explanation for the robustness of modern capitalist societies, their ability to reproduce themselves and invade new areas of social life and territories. I think the latter has to do mainly with capitalist *production* proper. Not seeing this (overemphasizing the role of violence) weakens our ability to overthrow capitalism.
