"The exchange of commodities begins where communities have their boundaries."

[Chris Burford <cburford@xxxxxxxxxx>]

The one sidedness in this long extensive debate hovers between being
creative and destructive. It is not always clear whether people are
contributing factual points or using the issues as proxies to expose what
they see as errors of opportunism, or other ideological failures.

But one form of one-sidedness I think I notice is a counterposing
of  internal origins of capitalism (that is within the community, eg
England) and the external origins or at least motor of capitalism (as in
colonialist and imperialist plunder).

Although in Capital Marx unfolded his exposition from  an ontological
dialectical and not a historical perspective, he nevertheless makes some
historical remarks. One of these demonstrates his assumption that from the
very beginning of commodity exchange, exchange between communities was
integral to commodity production, let alone industrial capital.


Chapter II Exchange, Vol 1


>>>
Things are in themselves external to man, and therefore alienable. In order
that this alienation [Veraeusserung] may be reciprocal, it is only
necessary for men to agree tacitly to treat each other as the private
owners of those alienable things, and, precisely for that reason, as
persons who are independent of each other. But this relationship of
reciprocal isolation and foreignness does not exist for the members of a
primitive community of natural origin, whether it takes the form of a
patriarchal family, an ancient Indian commune or an Inca state. The
exchange of commodities begins where communities have their boundaries, at
their points of contact with other communities, or with members of the
latter. However, as soon as products have become commodities in the
external relations of a community, they also, by reaction, become
commodiites in the internal life of the community. Their quantitative
exchange- relation is at first determined purely by chance. They become
exchangeable through the mutual desire of their owners to alienate them. In
the meantime, the need for others' objects of utility gradually establishes
itself. The constant repetition of exchange makes it a normal social
process. In the course of time, therefore, at least some part of the
products must be produced intentionally for the purpose of exchange."



Although wars, natural disasters and the collapse of economies can stop
individual trade routes I suggest the implication of Marx's reference to
history is that once commodities have emerged in the trade between
different communities, it must be expected that the development of
commodity exchange within communities may at any stage of history be
influenced powerfully by trade and intercourse with other communities
outside it. The external context can never be ignored.

There will therefore be a dialectical interaction between internal and
external factors in the origin, development, and acceleration of the rise
of capitalism.

I am not sure that I am arguing against Mark here, because Mark has very
much emphasised England's position on trade routes from the time of the
earliest historical records.

It may be another contradiction: given that external relations are
inseparable from internal economic development. how much are those external
relations characterised by oppression and plunder, and how much by exchange
of commodities. And if the latter, to what extent is that exchange unequal,
and how is it unequal?

I have waited 20 years for the courageous third world political economists
to produce a definitive theory of unequal exchange, and I am beginning to
think there is not one, and that from a marxist point of view unequal
exchange is integral to all exchange. Further that inequalities will in
fact multiply under capitalism even without continuing the appalling
historical record of plunder and oppression (which also of course also
occurred before capitalism, and even before commodity exchange itself).

Chris Burford

London