Alan Rudy wrote:
>
> 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.
Nonsense. Serious nonsense. There was _no_ competition among "commodity produceres" in medieval or ancient Eeurope or anyplace in Asia. The productivity of pot makers in a given location had no effect whatever on the "value" of pots anyplace; that was because value didn't exist. Even grain, which was produ ed for marketing in cities, was not a commodity because no competition to reduce costs existed among the producers of grain to lower labor costs.
This goes back to a disagreement expressed casually by you and me a couple years ago without either of us developing the point. I had said something about relations in pre-capitalist europe not being internal relations. You commented something to the effect that of course there were internal relations in feudal europe. (Both yur expression and mine were better worded then.)
I'll reassert the point. Aall non-capitalist production is of use values, not exchange values. No increase in labor productivity on the domain of Baron A could have any effect whatrever on the (non-existent) "value" of grain produced by the serfs of Baron B. That is because only use 'values' were being produced, and a peck of grain produced in3 hours had no less caloric use than a peck of grain produced in one hour. Hence the labor of the serfs on the estates of Baron A had no internal relations with the labor of the serfs on the estates of Baron B. Similarly, in China, the rice purchased and transported to a city by Merchant A had no value because he was not competing with Merchant B. Perhaps the rice purchased by Merchant B had been produced with less labor than that purchased by Merchant A -- it made no difference to anyone. There simply was no market in the sense of a market tht equalizes all labor. The relations were external, not internal. There can be no useful dialectical analysis of European feudalism or of imperial China.
Carrol