Wood article in ATC

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

The latest issue of Against the Current has an article by Ellen Meiksins 
Wood that makes many of the same points in her radio interview that I 
commented on last week and which are developed at length in her new book 
"Empire of Capital".

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

---

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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