{"id":12565,"date":"2023-02-02T15:43:47","date_gmt":"2023-02-02T13:43:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.liberalglobe.com\/?p=12565"},"modified":"2023-02-02T15:43:49","modified_gmt":"2023-02-02T13:43:49","slug":"why-do-people-accept-the-web-of-social-relations-that-defines-their-lives-while-feeling-wronged","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.liberalglobe.com\/?p=12565","title":{"rendered":"Why do people accept the web of social relations that defines their lives while feeling wronged?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

“The dumb coercion of economic relations seals the rule of the capitalist over the worker. Extra-economic, direct violence continues to be used, but only exceptionally. In the ordinary course of things the worker can be abandoned to the ‘natural laws of production’, i.e. to his dependence on capital, which springs from the very conditions of production which they guarantee and perpetuate.’<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This phrase of Marx, from the first volume of Capital, is used by the young Danish researcher S\u00f8ren Mau as a starting point for his book “Mute Compulsion. A Marxist Theory of the Economic Power of Capital”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dissatisfaction and acceptance<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mao confronts a question that has preoccupied Marxist theory from the beginning. On the one hand, although we can see many manifestations of violent coercion in the history of the rise of capitalism (e.g. in colonialism), the very everydayness of the wage relationship and the market seem to be reproduced without anyone forcing them to do so. People feel resentment or feel wronged, but they accept that this is the web of social relations that defines their lives. For classical and neoclassical political economy, the question obviously does not arise: people’s economic relations are fundamentally economic transactions between subjects who decide freely. For Marxists, however, who treat the wage relation as a relation of exploitation, the question of the power that ensures the reproduction of these relations is important.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The problem that arises is precisely how one can define a version of power that does not seem to operate simply as violence and that at the same time cannot simply be described as the combination of violence and ideology, with the latter defined as either “false consciousness” , either as a form of socially necessary misrecognition, precisely because the way subjects are ‘forced’ to engage in these economic practices cannot simply be described as ‘delusion’ or ‘illusion’.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Economic power<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mau thus tries to formulate a theory that concerns a specifically economic version of power. To do so, it tries to delimit itself both from positions that would insist on direct violence and from schemas that present both capitalists and workers as subject to the same systemic coercion. Rather, Mau wants to maintain the relationship between the rule of exchange value and a form of class rule that does not end up being mere imposition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Two divisions<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mau argues that the key lies in two critical divisions. The first concerns the way the proletariat emerges as “bare life,” as a labor force that has no choice but to submit to the machinery of surplus value extraction, even without the mediation of some violent coercion. The other is the way in which producers are fragmented into private units that compete with each other in the market, in a process that turns social relations between people into “real abstractions”, standing against them as alien forces, allowing the logic of the market and accumulation to be imposed. This forms a particular version of power that is also reflected in the real subjection not only of labor but also of the environment to the logic of accumulation, “real subjection” which is a rather better description of the way capitalism transforms social life in relation to e.g. with the Subeterian “creative destruction”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The synthesis that Mau makes is extremely interesting, because he manages to move not only in the usually highly abstract discussion of the value form or the philological issues of Marx’s own text, but also to combine it with the more specific discussions of the developments as to labor relations, forms of organization of production, logistics, environmental issues and the social reproduction of gender roles. He thus achieves an interesting dialogue with Foucault’s researches on the biopolitical dimensions of this “mute coercion”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The contradiction<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

But more importantly, Mau’s book reopens the debate on the basic contradiction that permeates modern societies and modernity as a whole: the way that expanding forms of freedom of movement and economic activity are combined not only with an intensifying inequality , but also with an ever-increasing people’s sense that they are confronted by a highly complex but no less hostile social mechanism that makes their lives indeed poorer and certainly not more free.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The other face of Janus<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In order to build his argument, Mau largely abstracts the permanent presence of the state. However, if one observes the continuous expansion of states’ ability to monitor, control, discipline, prosecute, repress, war, it becomes clear that “dumb coercion” is highly effective, but always needs as a complement the state’s ability to resort to direct violence and coercion wherever and whenever necessary.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“The dumb coercion of economic relations seals the rule of the capitalist over the worker. Extra-economic, direct violence continues to be used, but only…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":12566,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[988,7],"tags":[2679,4107,4095,4106],"class_list":["post-12565","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-political-science","category-research","tag-capitalism","tag-marx","tag-political-sciences","tag-social-relations"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.liberalglobe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12565","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.liberalglobe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.liberalglobe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.liberalglobe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.liberalglobe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12565"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.liberalglobe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12565\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12567,"href":"https:\/\/www.liberalglobe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12565\/revisions\/12567"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.liberalglobe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/12566"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.liberalglobe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12565"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.liberalglobe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12565"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.liberalglobe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12565"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}