I don’t think that is quite right; commodity production is production for exchange, but things can become commodities without having been produced as such. Though Marx sometime uses ‘commodity’ to specifically refer to the products of commodity production, and those are the kinds of commodities that he is most concerned with in Capital (with one very significant exception), at other times he uses it to refer to anything that has entered into a certain kind of exchange relation.

The very significant exception: Marx refers to labour power as a commodity.

Le Rouge: I think the distinction between commodity production and other forms of production is still important. Capital is totalising, but not total.

People still make shirts for their own use, and as gifts–which is an important thing in its own right, and gives us all warm fuzzy feelings. But also, if Andrea didn’t make the shirt for Robert, he might freeze to death on his way to work in the shirt factory.

Emphasis on “wonder” — I’m not sure.

Uh…no. It doesn’t become a commodity because someone decides to exchange it. That transforms it’s use-value into exchange value, but doesn’t make it a commodity. It was a commodity if it was produced to be exchanged. Our point here is is to define the commodity.

As for Marx, I think he would have been incredibly excited by Lenin’s analysis of the stage of capitalism marked by the domination of finance capital.

Andrea may produce an article for use, but the giftee has the opportunity to exchange it, thus granting commodity status.

It points out one of the great difficulties we have in explaining Marx–you’re literally talking about a different world. Modern-day examples don’t necessarily fit neatly into his categories.

For instance, one could regard eBay as the greatest socialist tool ever invented (setting aside the fact that every transaction makes Elon Musk & friends a little richer) because it cuts out the middle man and allows the worker direct access to consumers.

Show me Karl Marx trying to assimilate the entire computer age into his analysis, and I’ll show you a truly perplexed man.

I think Marx would be the first to say that his work is a beginning, not an end, if Engels hadn’t said it first.

Circling back to the original point–I’m not sure your example of Andrea’s shirt best exemplifies Marx’s ideas–but it may be the closest we can get in today’s society.

I’m still chewing on this one.

I don’t believe I ever said that production for exchange was the only time labor has been appropriated. If I did, shame on me. Production for exchange (on a broad scale, as the dominant mode of production in a society) is barely 400 years old; appropriation of labor goes back more than ten times longer.

“On the flip side, excess labor on a small family farm would very likely be turned toward some production for exchange. ”

Absolutely! But society did not base itself on production for exchange until rise of capitalism.

Some of this confusion is perhaps a product of the particular critical method that Marx deploys in Capital—starting from and deconstructing the assumptions of the bourgeois political economy of the time. I would guess that most readers these days would be starting off with somewhat different assumptions, which means that certain gaps—many of which Marx will later crack open—appear as oversights or even fatal flaws at this point in his argument. It seems that this can lead to a certain impatience with Marx’s initial schemas, especially when you’re doing such a close reading.

However, I do think that the appropriation of external values—things like ‘undeveloped’ land which have not been produced as commodities—is a somewhat underdeveloped problem in Capital, even though it is quite key to the whole system (eg. ‘primitive accumulation’ and enclosure, not to mention labour itself). Still, these issues are addressed later on, and feature quite prominently in Marx’s thought as a whole. More recent Marxist theory often places even more emphasis on processes of enclosure (eg. David Harvey, the autonomists).

No one said anything about money. It is the difference between production for use (I’m making a shirt for my kid to wear) and production for exchange (I’m making a shirt to trade for some shoes my kid needs). The difference is huge. When production in society started being based on exchange rather than use, we entered a different sort of world.

For one thing, as soon as we have production for exchange, we immediately have the next step–appropriation of labor on a massive scale.

It was produced from a commodity (cotton, wool, spandex, or some such) with labor (Andrea’s work) and is available on the market should the capitalist (Robert in this case) choose to market the item.

I’m not suggesting Robert is that crass, but we’re edging towards the appropriation of labor that our dear friends on Wall Street hold as their God-given right and prerogative.