Charles:
> Marx's discussion of universal equivalent and pre-money forms of value in
> early _Capital_ I is a discussion of the "barter" systems or "simple
> commodity production" that Engels refers to.
Incorrect. There **is no** discussion of pre-money forms of value in Chapter One of _Capital_, because as Marx himself states, there is no value without reference to money. I already quoted this passage from the _Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy_ for Shane, but I will do it again for you:
"Since labour-time is the intrinsic measure of value, why use another extraneous standard as well? Why is exchange-value transformed into price? Why is the value of all commodities computed in terms of an exclusive commodity, which thus becomes the adequate expression of exchange-value, i.e., money? This was the problem which Gray had to solve. But instead of solving it, he assumed that commodities could be directly compared with one another as products of social labour. But they are only comparable as the things they are. Commodities are the direct products of isolated independent individual kinds of labour, and through their alienation in the course of individual exchange they must prove that they are general social labour, in other words, on the basis of commodity production, labour becomes social labour only as a result of the universal alienation of individual kinds of labour. But as Gray presupposes that the labour-time contained in commodities is
immediately social labour-time, he presupposes that it is communal labour-time or labour-time of directly associated individuals. In that case, it would indeed be impossible for a specific commodity, such as gold or silver, to confront other commodities as the incarnation of universal labour and exchange-value would not be turned into price; but neither would use-value be turned into exchange-value and the product into a commodity, and thus the very basis of bourgeois production would be abolished."
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/ch02b.htm
Charles, the fact that you defend this notion of a pre-monetary commodity is kind of ironic, given that this was actually the basis of Marx's critique of Proudhon.
The value-form analysis of Chapter One is not a historical account of the emergence of money, but a logic analysis of the commodity form. Even a toolbox like Julio Huato grasps this.