CB: I don't understand why you are asking about commodities - use-values that are exchanged - when Novus is talking about abstract Value which relates to socially necessary alienated/waged labor, tied to but veiled by political economy's focus on exchange.
Novus is talking about what is unique to capitalism, you are talking about the exchange of commodities which is not unique to capitalism at all.
Refusing to be Marxological, it matters not an iota whether or not some pre-capitalist production of commodities was for exchange, or if some of it was waged, or if some of it was monetized, Marx's argument is that capitalism is not defined by commodity markets, it is defined by a particular mode of waged production... a mode defined by the dominance - and, no, I am not interested in determining when and where the exact qualitative change occurred and the world became capitalist - of alienated wage labor and the particular, associated form of commodified need satisfaction.
Sure, some people were waged across a raft of precapitalist modes of production, abstract Value existed and deeply conditioned material and social relations in none of them, however much folks bartered, trucked and paid for stuff with money. Appadurai was wrong, in a manner very similar to the way Weber was, capitalism is not defined by exchange and not all exchanges are markets. There is no ancient vs. modern capitalism, there are modes of production where abstract Value does not rule the day and one where it does. The exchange element of markets surely contains a great deal more than the exchange of equivalent use-values but, while Appadurai makes some interesting ethnographic points, his project is basically to refute economistic Marxists - which is important - by claiming to find market homogenieties across qualitatively different cultures/modes of production... a move so anti-anthropological it made me throw the book down in disgust. I don't mind formal analysis - Simmel generated some really interesting insights - but some stuff's just ridiculous - Simmel, smartly, never made the kinds of over-reaching claims folks like Appardurai initially made (and 90% of the folks in the literature on consumption continue to make).
On Thu, Jul 15, 2010 at 5:23 PM, c b <cb31450 at gmail.com> wrote:
> ^^^^^
> - Value as socially necessary abstract labour time is only meaningful
> with reference to capitalist society mediated by money. There is no
> such thing as pre-monetary "value".
>
> ^^^^^^^
> CB: So, your position is that there was no pre-monetary,
> pre-capitalist production of commodities ?
>
> 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 ?