Charles:
> Marx refers to pre-capitalist historical periods. You have said nothing to > argue against their contradicting your claim here.
You are creating a straw man. Nobody is disputing that Marx uses historical illustrations. He uses many. Most of them drawn from English capitalism of the 19th Century. But _Capital_ is not a work of history, it is, as Marx himself states in the introduction, an analysis of the capitalist mode of production at its "ideal average".
> Are you saying that all production before capitalism was production for
> use and none of it was production for exchange ? Or are you saying there > was never historically existing barter , that all early exchange was
> mediated by money ?
I am saying that Value, as socially necessary abstract labour time, is not a social relationship that exists in pre-capitalist modes of production.
> How is it that this sentence that you quote doesn't contradict your
> claims and support the opposing arguments ?
You really should read it. Here, I'll post the key passage again, so that you can't overlook it:
"It would therefore be unfeasible and wrong to let the economic categories follow one another in the same sequence as that in which they were historically decisive. Their sequence is determined, rather, by their relation to one another in modern bourgeois society, which is precisely the opposite of that which seems to be their natural order or which corresponds to historical development. The point is not the historic position of the economic relations in the succession of different forms of society. Even less is it their sequence ‘in the idea’ (Proudhon) [21] (a muddy notion of historic movement). Rather, their order within modern bourgeois society."