Reflections on the social relations of simple commodity production

Abstract

Concepts from political economy have been used in a number of recent articles to clarify the essential characteristics of Simple Commodity Production (SCP). Here, for heuristic purposes, the author attempts to make a number of similarly general claims for the element of SCP not susceptible to the concepts of political economy. The article eschews any historical evidence and merely expands from the observation that few if any real situations of SCP occur without non‐commodified social relations playing a significant role in their reproduction. This is because SCP relies in one form or another on ‘unpaid’ labour and because it never entirely revolutionises the social relations from which it emerges. It is proposed here that, in connection with large, more capitalised enterprises, SCP may gain much of its competitive edge from the use it makes of the non‐commodified social relations in which it is enmeshed. This in turn is used to suggest that much of the developmental characteristics of SCP are as much to d...