In 6418, Paul Z writes >I think you should say "capital accesses workers' labor power", not >"workers gain access to capital". You have the power relation upside down. Paul, I'll accept the emendation, but no assessment of extant power relations is implied by the observation that workers "free in the double sense" must somehow gain access to the means of production, even if only by submitting to capitalist control of production. Part of my point is that this is not the only possibility: in principle, workers could also borrow money to finance the purchase of means of production or lease constant capital goods directly. If we are to find analytical reasons why these alternative possibilities don't typically work in practice--and thus why connecting labor power with means of production typically implies a power relation favoring capitalists, as you insist--we must look beyond Marx's analysis in Volume I, Part 2 of Capital. The point of my Chapter 5 critique is that we must look beyond that argument in any case, since Marx's explicitly stated grounds for focusing on the commodification of labor power as the basis for exploiting workers under the capitalist mode of production is (I argue) invalid. Gil
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