I think Rakesh, Hoe and Jim are all right. 1. Market exchange makes individual labor into social labor. 2. While the market for the products of independent commodity production (call it merchant capitalism) presuppose isolated individuals-producers (remember Marx's discussion why the French peasantry didn't constitute a social class), the market for goods produced by wage labor presupposes workers already socialized in the capitalist (say) factory, i.e., presupposes a division of industrial labor. Which makes it possible for the division of social labor (between factories) to flourish, just as the division of social labor in independent commodity production helps make the division of industrial labor flourish. There's a dialectic here. 3. When Marx sez that "labor is always social" (Rakesh's words), this is true. Early on, we have a division of household labor, a division of tribal labor, etc., etc. No Robinson Crusoes, as Rekesh sez (check out Steve Hymer's magnificent interpretation of the novel in an old MR). 4. To make sense of the discussion, I have to distinguish the division of industrial labor (in a factory, say) which is obviously social and the division of social labor (between independently owned factories, say) which is social only to the degree that people exchange their labor via the exchange of products. I do believe that Rakesh's point is that for wage labor to develop, the productive forces must be developed to a certain level -- a level that can support the move to industrial capitalism. And since the productive forces, whether seen over time or across space at any moment in time are and have to be social in nature (here I'm not speaking of labor per so but rather the product of labor). 5. Marx's idea that "labor becomes privately organized and undertaken in the most developed social relation" means, I think, that with wage labor, the family/village/tribal collective labor (i.e., visibly social labor) is broken up by capitalism, and individuals, finally, become isolated monads, which is the precondition of the capitalist labor market. 6. As Jim sez, the private labor of anyone producing the universal equivalent, e.g., gold under the gold standard, is directly social labor. One can imagine unsold produced stocks of widgets, which, finally, have no value because they aren't exchanged (hence the labor to produce them does not enter into socially necessary labor time). But not gold. In the gold standard, gold will always be worth something, unless a general glut of commodities is so vast that no one wants or needs gold to buy anything. Am I sure about this? No way. Jim O'Connor