Carrol wrote:
> And note how much dispute there is over whether a "simple commodity
> economy" is a hypothetical construct or actually existed in history!
And I actually, after a month or so, still owe it to Charles to write my concluding post in favor of my position on that question.
Except that, lazy and self-indulgent bastard that I am, I went to consult the Urtext for arguments, and instead of mining it for arguments, I got sucked into reading the Urtext. I think the Urtext supports my position, but I would've never gotten around to actually reading it if not for Charle's constant needling on the question of simple commodity production.
So, at least, thanks Charles for pushing me to get around to reading the Urtext.
Note to readers: the "Urtext" is the short name for the so-called "Urtext zur Kritik der politischen Ökonomie" ("Original Text of the Critique of Political Economy"), one of those many unpublished manuscripts that Marx produced during his life as a preliminary work towards _Capital_. Only a fragment survives from this manuscript, the content roughly corresponds to the same content of Chapters 2-3 of Vol. I of _Capital_. In other words, the original raw draft of the value-form analysis never survived the gnawing criticism of the mice, but the stuff on money did. It is available in the MEGA2 edition, in one of those expensive volumes. However, in the 1950s, the official publication of the Grundrisse in the GDR had the Urtext as an appendix. Frustratingly and irritatingly, the official publication of Vol 42 of the Marx-Engels-Werke (the "Grundrisse") no longer has the Urtext as an appendix, which really pisses me off. Luckily I found an old copy of
the Grundrisse with the appendix at the bookstore in Karl-Liebknecht-Haus.
Anyway, it is available online here for anyone who is interested: http://www.marxists.org/deutsch/archiv/marx-engels/1858/urtext/index.htm