A Contribution To The Critique of Political Economy, Chapter 1 - Part 29 of 29

The desire of existing ruling classes and castes for money rents and taxes, further stimulates commodity production and exchange, as its only by this means that the individual commodity producers can obtain money. The more favoured producers with larger families become wealthier and acquire better equipment and so on. They access more distant markets and become buyers up and merchants. So sets in the process of differentiation of the mass into bourgeois and proletarians in the towns, as described by Marx, Engels and Lenin, a process which, then, subsequently, is transferred into rural areas, as the subsidiary industrial production undertaken by peasants, in addition to their agricultural production, is undermined. The peasant, unable to compete with the capitalist industrial production in the towns must themselves, increasingly, become a wage worker, initially via The Putting Out System, as Lenin describes in “On The So Called Market Question”, and later in “The Development of Capitalism In Russia”,

Fully engaged in this industrial production, the peasants themselves are no longer able to be self-sufficient in food, and, now, creating the conditions for the expansion of the market for agricultural commodities, and so, at last, for capitalist production to enter agricultural production. Now, as Lenin describes, the same process of the more favoured peasants being able to engage in capitalist production of agricultural commodities occurs that previously happened in the towns, with industrial production, creating the same process of differentiation into agricultural capitalists and proletarians, and a new set of social relations along with it.

“The exchange of commodities is the process in which the social metabolism, in other words the exchange of particular products of private individuals, simultaneously gives rise to definite social relations of production, into which individuals enter in the course of this metabolism. As they develop, the interrelations of commodities crystallise into distinct aspects of the universal equivalent, and thus the exchange process becomes at the same time the process of formation of money. This process as a whole, which comprises several processes, constitutes circulation.” (p 51-2)

Back To Part 28

Forward To Chapter 1 A - Historical Notes on the Analysis of Commodities