As Marx describes, in Capital III, labour exists in all modes of production. It is this free labour that is the essence of value.
“In so far as it has the specifically social character of wage-labour, it is not value-creating. It has already been shown in general that wages of labour, or price of labour, is but an irrational expression for the value, or price of labour-power; and the specific social conditions, under which this labour-power is sold, have nothing to do with labour as a general agent in production...
Labour is also materialised in that value component of a commodity which as wages forms the price of labour-power; it creates this portion just as much as the other portions of the product; but it is materialised in this portion no more and no differently than in the portions forming rent or profit. And, in general, when we establish labour as value-creating, we do not consider it in its concrete form as a condition of production, but in its social delimitation which differs from that of wage-labour.”
(Capital III, Chapter 48)
Labour is qualitatively different in different modes of production. The labour of members of the primitive commune, directly producing products for consumption, is different to slave or serf labour, just as it differs from wage labour. Each produces individual value, but, it is only in commodity production that these individual values are aggregated and reduced to universal labour by competition.
Popular works on political economy often start with a general section under the heading Production. Its precisely here that the trivial commonalities, in each mode of production, are brought together. This has the effect of suggesting that there is something eternal about these categories. That is they are distinguished from Distribution. Distribution, the allocation of revenues, is presented as something independent of production, and over which society itself can express free will. Such is the ideological basis of vulgar economy, and of vulgar socialism, represented by social-democracy and reformist socialism, liberal welfarism and power of redistribution.
It is what Marx describes in The Critique of the Gotha Programme.
“Any distribution whatever of the means of consumption is only a consequence of the distribution of the conditions of production themselves. The latter distribution, however, is a feature of the mode of production itself. The capitalist mode of production, for example, rests on the fact that the material conditions of production are in the hands of nonworkers in the form of property in capital and land, while the masses are only owners of the personal condition of production, of labour power. If the elements of production are so distributed, then the present-day distribution of the means of consumption results automatically. If the material conditions of production are the co-operative property of the workers themselves, then there likewise results a distribution of the means of consumption different from the present one. Vulgar socialism (and from it in turn a section of the democrats) has taken over from the bourgeois economists the consideration and treatment of distribution as independent of the mode of production and hence the presentation of socialism as turning principally on distribution. After the real relation has long been made clear, why retrogress again?”
In addition to these generalities, such texts also set out the basic requirements for production and its development. Marx refers to Adam Smith's description of progressive and stagnant societies. This is also the basis upon which he himself analysed the Asiatic Mode of Production, and Engels took up the ideas in The Origin Of The Family, Private Property and the State, to examine why industrial development arose in Europe, whereas it did not in North America, prior to European settlement.
“To give this, which in Smith's work has its value as an aperçu, to give it scientific significance, research into the degree of productivity at various periods in the development of individual nations would have to be conducted; strictly speaking, such an investigation lies outside the framework of the subject, those aspects which are however relevant to it ought to be mentioned in connection with the development of competition, accumulation, etc. The answer in its general form amounts to the general statement that an industrial nation achieves its highest productivity when it is altogether at the height of its historical development. (In fact, a nation is at the height of its industrial development so long as, not the gain, but gaining remains its principal aim.” (p 191)
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