As Marx and Engels describe, in Capital, this transition from isolated communities, producing products for their own consumption to communities producing commodities for exchange, occurred around 7-10,000 years ago. With this development of commodity production and exchange, The Law of Value, which previously took the form of individual value, now assumes the form of exchange-value.
“That this necessity of the distribution of social labour in definite proportions cannot possibly be done away with by a particular form of social production but can only change the mode of its appearance, is self-evident. No natural laws can be done away with. What can change in historically different circumstances is only the form in which these laws assert themselves. And the form in which this proportional distribution of labour asserts itself, in the state of society where the interconnection of social labour is manifested in the private exchange of the individual products of labour, is precisely the exchange value of these products.”
(Marx – Letter to Kugelmann)
“the exchange of commodities dates from a time before all written history — which in Egypt goes back to at least 2500 B.C., and perhaps 5000 B.C., and in Babylon to 4000 B.C., perhaps to 6000 B.C.”
(Engels – Supplement to Capital III)
Again, as Marx and Engels describe, this initial commodity production and exchange is undertaken only by one community with another. The development of commodity producing households, within each community, and of commodity exchange within the community comes much later, as Lewis Morgan identified, and Engels discusses in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and The State. Each community appoints merchants to undertake trade with other communities, and, as Marx describes, these merchants are the means by which average social labour-times for each commodity become identified.
So, Marx begins with the commodity, because, before capital can be considered, it is, first, necessary to analyse this historical evolution of the commodity, of trade, and the evolution of value into the form of exchange-value. Only then can the evolution of money be understood, and then capital be considered, for two reasons. Firstly, the elements of capital are themselves composed of commodities. Without commodities there is no capital. Secondly, before there can be capital, there must first arise the general commodity, money. Only when money exists can it be hoarded. Once its hoarded it can be used as merchant's capital to buy low and sell high, thereby, obtaining merchant's profit, or it can be loaned out at interest, becoming interest-bearing capital. Finally, when labourers become separated from their means of production, as a result of competition between them, as independent commodity producers, they are led to sell their own labour-power, itself, now as a commodity. The owner of money can, now, buy their labour-power at its value, and employ it to produce a new greater value, so appropriating surplus value. Now it becomes industrial capital.
This is also the sequence of Marx's analysis in the Critique – commodity, money, capital.
Marx explains the reason for his economic studies being an inability to discuss practical issues of the day without it, as he had discovered as editor of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. Having withdrawn from that position, the first area of study, however, was not political-economy, but a critical re-examination of the Hegelian Philosophy of Law, the results being published in the Deutsch–Französische Jahrbücher, in 1844. It contains other articles by Marx and Engels, which indicated that they had already adopted a materialist stance.
“My inquiry led me to the conclusion that neither legal relations nor political forms could be comprehended whether by themselves or on the basis of a so-called general development of the human mind, but that on the contrary they originate in the material conditions of life, the totality of which Hegel, following the example of English and French thinkers of the eighteenth century, embraces within the term “civil society”; that the anatomy of this civil society, however, has to be sought in political economy.” (p 20)
Engels was later, in his letter to Bloch, to clarify this well known passage from Marx, to indicate that they were not crude economic determinists. Its not just economic factors that form material conditions, and institutions themselves, once they have arisen, on these social foundations, become a part of the material conditions.
“According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life. Other than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted. Hence if somebody twists this into saying that the economic element is the only determining one, he transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, senseless phrase. The economic situation is the basis, but the various elements of the superstructure — political forms of the class struggle and its results, to wit: constitutions established by the victorious class after a successful battle, etc., juridical forms, and even the reflexes of all these actual struggles in the brains of the participants, political, juristic, philosophical theories, religious views and their further development into systems of dogmas — also exercise their influence upon the course of the historical struggles and in many cases preponderate in determining their form. There is an interaction of all these elements in which, amid all the endless host of accidents (that is, of things and events whose inner interconnection is so remote or so impossible of proof that we can regard it as non-existent, as negligible), the economic movement finally asserts itself as necessary. Otherwise the application of the theory to any period of history would be easier than the solution of a simple equation of the first degree.”
(Engels Letter To J. Bloch, 1890)
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