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I have managed to find someone using Marxist terminology to support the view we've both now rejected about "simple commodity production" leading to capitalism  — the Stalinist economist, A. Leontiev in  his Political Economy. A Beginners' Course that first came out in 1936:

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Wherein lies the difference between simple commodity production and capitalism? The artisan, handicraftsman, small-scale farmer own their tools, raw material and means of production. They work by themselves, producing their goods with the aid of these means of production. Under capitalism it is different. There the plants and factories belong to the capitalist and in them work hired labourers who do not have their own means of production. Simple commodity production always precedes capitalism. The capitalist system could not arise without simple commodity production. The latter prepares the way for capitalism.In its turn the development of simple commodity production inevitably leads to capitalism. Small-scale commodity production gives birth to capital.One of the misinterpretations of Marxism is the attempt to deny the existence of simple commodity production as the historical precursor of capitalism. The political significance of this distortion of Marxism is clear.

Leontiev went on to explain:

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The distortion of the role and significance of simple commodity production forms a basis for the negation of the role of the basic mass of the peasantry as an ally of the proletarian revolution. This distortion lies at the basis of the counter-revolutionary theory of Trotskyism.

Now we know. We're Trotskyites !

Dave B wrote:

you are a rotter again!

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Here's the view of one of John McDonnell's economic advisers, Professor Danny Blanchflower, writing in today's New Statesman on this idea:

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The new Labour leaders are not economists and are going to have to learn fast. They will have to accept the realities of capitalism and modern markets, like it or not. No more silly stuff about companies not being able to pay dividends if they don’t do X or Y. If companies are not allowed to pay dividends, share prices will potentially rise instead. If you raise corporate taxes too high, companies may move to Ireland or elsewhere, where they are lower.

Every time there's been a Labour government they have learned this. So would Corbyn and McDonnell if they get the chance (though I doubt they will, get the chance that is).

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Dave B wrote:

Hi AdamYou seem to making two points;“that capitalism was not preceded by a non-capitalist exchange economy”“And a non-capitalist economy composed entirely of simple commodity producers never existed historically.”On the second point first, that I will return to later; I do not argue that there was ever an ‘economy’ or for that matter more narrowly an exchange economy, that was entirely composed of simple commodity producers.

Very gracious of you to concede my point.

Dave B wrote:

What my Hienrichain friends have said to me is, after eventually accepting that simple commodity production did exist, was that it was never a pan-economic system.Even though I never contested that.

My misunderstanding. I thought you did. Anyway, of course commodity production existed before capitalism. Whoever said it didn't?

Dave B wrote:

And then as the argument goes because it was never a pan-economic system Karl would never have started his analysis from that, why would he?Like capitalism itself was a pan-economic in the mid 19thor even early 20th century?

That's the whole point of Marx's method (and not just Marx's of course). He was developing an ideal model of the capitalist economic system so as to try to better understand the more complex real world(and a "simple commodity production" economy was also an ideal model on the way to this).

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Dave B wrote:

Hi AdamThere is I suppose two essential and equally interesting arguments here;One; is what Karl was on about and what he really meant etcTwo; what early Marxist theoreticians thought he meant.I would like at the moment first to look at how early Marxist theoreticians interpreted what they thought Karl was on about.

How second generation Marxists (amongst which the founding members would have been) saw "simple commodity production" would be interesting but I don't think that Luxemburg would be the best example as she differed from Marx in arguing that capitalism could not exist with external, non-capitalist markets. She actually says so in the quote from her you give:

Rosa Luxemburg wrote:

Capitalist production as proper mass production depends on consumers from peasant and artisan strata in the old countries, and consumers from all countries; but for technical reasons, it cannot exist without the products of these strata and countries. So there must develop right from the start an exchange relationship between capitalist production and the non-capitalist milieu, where capital not only finds the possibility of realizing surplus value in hard cash for further capitalization, but also receives various commodities to extend production, and finally wins new proletarianized labour forces by disintegrating the non-capitalist forms of production [are these your bolds or hers?]

This is her famous/notorious underconsumption theory (that capitalism cannot realise all the surplus value created) and the basis for her mistaken theory of imperialism. She has to posit the existence of a non-capitalist commodity producing sector to explain why capitalism has not collapsed and in fact how it ever got off the ground in the first place.  But we can leave that for the others on this thread to argue about.The point at issue is not whether or not petty independent producers owning their own instruments of work and producing goods for sale (commodities) existed but whether a non-capitalist economy composed entirely of such producers ever existed historically. There is no evidence that it did. Of course this sector of a wider exchange economy was outcompeted by larger capitalist enterprises employed wage labour, so it could be said that in this sense simple commodity producers were replaced historically by capitalist enterprises but that's not the same thing as saying that capitalism was preceded by a non-capitalist exchange economy.

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We've got some copies at HO for sale to members for a fiver (post included) or less if you're poor if anyone wants one (not to be resold on EBay)..

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Actually, the Pirate Party stood against us in Vauxhall in last year's general election but their manifesto wasn't all that different from the other parties — local candidate, sending his kids to the local school, would judge what reforms to propose or support by consulting people by email or whatever. Didn't get the response they seem to be getting in Iceland. They got 201 votes to our 82. So we're both non-league clubs at the moment. But then they're not the answer in Iceland either even if they've got promotion to the First Division there.

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What is interesting about these developments in Spain and Italy as well as it seems Iceland is thast dissatisfaction with the way the "old gang" of politicians (for not being able to live up to their promises) is not taking the form of blaming political democracy and going for dictatorship or that of anarchist anti-electoralism, but of using the electoral system. A confirmation that, when the movement to replace capitalism with socialism takes off, it too will express itself electorally.  Of course neither the Pirate Party, nor Podemos nor the Five Star Movement will be able to manage things any better since it's capitalism, not the politicians who run its government, that's to blame.

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Be interesting to see if this materialises and Podemos follows Syriza in joining a government that will have to end up governing capitalism on capitalism's terms:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/spain/12116384/Spains-anti-austerity-Podemos-proposes-forming-government-with-Socialists.html

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Actually, it's yellow lettering. Red and yellow, also the colours of the Labour Party…..

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Dave B wrote:

Hi Adam.For what it matters to start with; the theory, category and concept of simple commodity production, whatever that maybe, was fully embraced by all the major Marxist theorists in the first half of the 20thcentury.  Eg Rosa, Lenin, Kautsky, Rubin et al.For them it was historically pre capitalist and later co-existed within capitalism.You have the common view on this, re opening chapter not being about simple commodity production, that you also share with Professor Michael Heinrich and his Die Linke friends.I know because I have debated with them at length on libcom.They take umbrage in particular, logically enough, at the statement from Fred that I agree with;“This makes clear, of course, why in the beginning of his first book Marx proceeds from the simple production of commodities as the historical premise, ultimately to arrive from this basis to capital — why he proceeds from the simple commodity instead of a logically and historically secondary form — from an already capitalistically modified commodity. To be sure, Fireman positively fails to see this.”https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/pref.htm(They don’t dispute that ‘simple production of commodities’ and ‘simple commodity’ that Fred was on about is all part of  the ‘simple commodity production theory’.)

Nor do I. There is no argument about the nature of the concept of "simple commodity production" (an economy of independent producers working with their own instruments of production and exchanging their products with each other). The argument is about whether such an economy ever existed historically or whether this was just a logical model employed by Marx in developing his analysis of capitalism, the highest form of commodity-production.It is a historical fact that independent producers owning their own instruments of production did exist. It is also a fact that some one them evolved into capitalists employing wage-workers. But that's not the same as saying that a market economy of independent producers ever existed or that capitalist commodity production developed out of simple commodity production.I suppose that the nearest there might have been to an simple commodity production economy might have been New England, New York and Pennsylvania for a while in the 17th and 18th centuries but even then there were already wealthy landowners and merchants and instrument-less workers.Another difficulty of assuming chapter 1 of Capital as a historical description rather than the logical development of an argument is that a simple commodity production economy would have to have existed on the basis of barter before money evolved. And there's certainly no historical evidence for saying that anything like that ever happened. There never was a whole economy based on barter.In any event, the development of capitalism presupposes the existence of a landless and instrument-less class and there's no logical reason why simple commodity production should lead to this. It clearly had another cause,  set out by Marx in Part VIII of Capita on "The So-Called Primitive Accumulation", chapters 26 to 33 with the self-explanatory titles such as:

Quote:

Expropriation of the Agricultural Population from the landBloody legislation against the Expropriated, from the End of the 15th Century. Forcing Down of Wages by Acts of ParliamentGenesis of the Capitalist FarmerReaction of the Agricultural Revolution on Industry. Creation of the Home-Market for Industrial CapitalGenesis of the Industrial Capitalist.

There are many books by those in the Marxist tradition going into this in more detail. I don't think even any non-Marxist or pro-capitalist historian has been able to describe a peaceful evolution of capitalism from simple commodity production. They couldn't. It just didn't happen.

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We've missed out this significant one for us: the 500th anniversary of the publication of Thomas More's Utopia:http://utopia.somersethouse.org.uk/

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Costas Lapavitsas was one of the Syriza MPs who left and who has always argued that the "solution" was to leave the euro and restore the drachma. He stood against Syriza  in the elections in September and wasn't re-lected. So there might be a bit of sour grapes there too. In any event, as you point out, leaving the euro wouldn't have meant that the government could have abandoned austerity.

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There are plenty of articles in the Archive section of our website on why we think Russia was capitalist and not socialist and that state ownership does not abolish capitalism. For instance:http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/1990s/1997/no-1119-november-1997/russia-was-never-socialist-%E2%80%93-and-why    http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/1980s/1985/no-975-november-1985/nature-russian-state-capitalism    http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/1980s/1987/no-992-april-1987/state-capitalism

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Dave B wrote:

Then Karl himself, I think, takes his eye off the ball and starts to subliminally associate value with exchange value, as Adam and his common fellow Hienricians  do;evidenced by the progressive disappearance of exchange value in the three volumes.

You are trying to argue that "value" exists independently of exchange. If you define "value" as the labour-time content of a product then it does. It's a definition as any other but does it help us understand how capitalism works, eg why in capitalism it manifests itself as exchange value/price but not in other societies? I don't think so.It's a rather peculiar use of the word "value" (even more abstruse than Karl's). It would be much simpler to talk in terms of something being the product of so many hours of work, as I'm sure people did in non-commodity societies. "Value" more naturally means use-value. People only begin to talk of value in another sense when the products are exchanged.

Dave B wrote:

The opening chapter in volume one is not in fact about capitalism, it is about ‘Proudhonist like’ simple commodity production; and Silas Marner, the linen weaver.And actually a critical appraisal of that ‘rudimental’ economic system which was the ‘starting point’ of capitalism or the economic system from which it emerged or evolved out of.   Wage labour, ie capitalism ‘as a category had no existence’ in chapter one!

I don't think chapter 1 of Capital is meant to be a description of an economic system that ever existed. So-called "petty commodity production", where independent producers owning their own tools and equipment exchange their products on the market, was a theoretical concept created as part of the development of an argument. Wage-labour, where the actual producers no longer own their instruments of production but sell their ability to work, is introduced later.

Dave B wrote:

The ‘bourgeoisie’ quite literally emerged from the Proudhonist and artisan ‘guild socialists’; fertilised admittedly with  capital from the merchants and the enlightened intellectual section of the aristocracy. 

I don't think this is historically accurate. It's once again misunderstanding the steps in the development of Marx's argument from "petty commodity production" to capitalism as the highest form of commodity-production. This was a logical development not a historical one. How Marx thought that capitalism really developed is set out in the historical chapters at the end of the book( which are far from describing a peaceful economic  evolution from petty commodity production).

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Missed this at the time. One of the components of TUSC breaks away to join (rejoin, in many cases) Labour under Corbyn:http://www.independentsocialistnetwork.org/independent-socialist-network-agrees-new-direction-agm/Some of the names mentioned here stood for TUSC at the general election as well as at local elections. But in this year's elections they'll out be campaigning for Labour. Mind you, they can only bring Labour a hundred or so extra votes.

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