this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2026
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Great, thanks so much! Respect for working through some less glamorous material. I believe that a lot of the sexy revolutionary theory has been worked out already, and that the intellectual work that really needs doing (besides, of course, practical organizing and agitation) is the less sexy empirical analysis and extending the historical understanding for which Marx only laid the foundation. There are a lot of interesting threads that should be pulled, like this question on class society, but I also would like one day to read more on the Christianization of Europe and indeed the world, and how that interacted with the development of capitalism via the suppression of paganism etc.
I have one minor hesitance, not to say a challenge, but a nagging question impelling me to learn more —
Your description of the commodity seems a little anachronistic, doesn’t it? Certainly commodities existed incidentally in precapitalist societies, and so did money. But it was not predominating production until the capitalist era; Marx writes about this in several places, which I can dig up if you would like. Money, too, was not money in its fully developed capitalist form, until the capitalist era. For example, money could not represent abstract labor until the commodity figures as the general form of the product of labor, which doesn’t happen until capitalism; money also would need to be generally exchangeable for any commodity whatsoever, but I thought that money was limited to a unit of account, accounting for unpaid taxes, in some of these ancient societies? not generally used for exchange of any two commodities?
Thanks! Yeah the more I read Marx the more all the more theoretical stuff seems settled to me. Europe's christianization is a really interesting topic imo, though I'm more familiar with things on the christian side of the border. There's a lotta simularities in early christianity to other revolutionary movements (including its eventual co-optation, and even the posthumous co-optation of "anti-revisionist" priests and monks who opposed e.g. the increasing wealth of the church
No need to dig up the Marx quotes
On commodities, I thought I made it explicit but I might have been unclear: i am not saying there was predominant commodities(either in the sense of most goods being produced as commodities or in the sense of commodities dominating people) in the mesolithic or palaeolithic. I am saying the commodity-form emerges in these periods, but stays marginal.
By around the early-mid second milleniumBC, i would describe these societies as being dominated by commodities' circulation and production, including for social necessities (most notably producing textiles to exchange for copper, tin, slaves, and wood). There is no money at this point, and most of the necessities of life (food, clothes) are still locally produced as use-values. But commodity production and exchange play a large role in determining where labour surplus to subsistence is directed. These exchanges are framed in texts as generous gifts; in reality the giftgiver expects something back of similar value and might invade if insufficiently pleased.
Those "money" tokens are actually what I had in mind when saying most scholars of the period (bronze and early iron ages) dont understand the commodity and its effects. I do not think they can be called "money". They were, as far as we can tell, non-exchangeable, and not even used as money of account, let alone as physical money. Rather than using them to measure value, they were used to represent specific quantities of use-values. Standardised ingots of metal are getting close to being used as a universal commodity at this point, but nothing has been formally baptised money. Money arises near the beginning of the classical period in western anatolia (lydia iirc but dont quote me on that) and spreads around the eastern mediterranean from there.
The classical period and rome (until the collapse of its monetary economy in the 3rd and 4th centuries) i would be comfortable describing as capitalist with generalised commodity production: land was alienable, everything (even food by non-peasants) was produced for exchange, everything was saleable for money. After rome's collapse, it took a few hundred years for a similarly commodity and money focusses society to emerge in the west (the most successful being England under Alfred and Edward, which had money-rents and kicked people off their land if they couldnt pay leading to re-concentration of wealth).