Once Upon A Time...

[Orwellian_Ghost]

Once upon a time, there were just people and they produced things. That those things were useful is self evident or else people would not have produced them. The nature of their wants, desires or needs is not at issue here. Suffice it to say that the things produced by people had no quality other than that of being useful to themselves. It is also important to note that "people", here, refers to the tribe or clan as there is no basis for distinguishing "atomic" units (self, "immediate" family, etc.) nor is there any foundation for "property", within the tribe or clan. All of that comes later and "trade" always develops between groups of people and not within them.

There is always the possibility, and indeed the likelihood that what one produces for oneself, is also useful to others. There is also the likelihood that the specific territory of one group of people or the specific skills learned by that group or something else unique to it, allows that group to produce a surplus of a particular thing or set of things. That establishes the basis for "trade" between groups. The preconditions for trade are that both have something useful not just for themselves but for the other and that it is sensible to produce more of the one thing within the tribe than it would be practical or even possible to produce the other thing that is being traded for. Early candidates for this trade may be salt or specific types of tools, or whatever.

The conditions for that original trade are incidental. How much of one thing “trades” or exchanges for how much of another may be entirely arbitrary in the first instance. It does not take long, however, for the things that are produced in surplus to be gauged in relation to one another. It may be that the trade becomes regularized or the number of things being traded increases or the number of peoples engaged in this trade itself grows. The result is that the things traded now acquire an exchange value, or a quantitative measure of what things of one type trade for things of another type. It is important to note that this value has nothing to do with the intrinsic qualities of the things being traded as these qualities are often entirely different. Instead, this exchange value is a social measure lent to those things by those who would trade them.

What is the basis of exchange value? The basis for exchange value is the amount of labor time spent in producing the products being exchanged. More, this labor time is not measured in terms of labor of a specific type because that is as varied as the specific types of products being produced. This is a peculiar kind of abstract labor which reduces multiple skill levels and the effectiveness of the individual producers to a quantity of abstract social labor congealed in the products themselves. Of course, no trace of that congealed abstract labor is detectable in any of the products themselves, because it is a creation of the social act of exchange itself.

What we have described above is not capitalism. In fact, ancient peoples live with this type of trade for thousands of years. No surplus value has yet been “invented”, no exploitation is implied, nor are the things being produced necessarily commodities because to assume that form, products must be produced explicitly for exchange. This trade lives typically at the margins of society and remains incidental in its importance if not in its terms. It is also true that of all the things produced, relatively few become candidates for trade and thus acquire an exchange value.

The problem arises when...