Simple commodity production

The simple commodity production is an alleged historical period and phase that precedes capitalism, according to the subsequent interpretation of his friend Friedrich Engels, the economist Karl Marx should have begun the capital with which the representation of the capitalist economic system at the beginning of 1867, published the first volume of his work.

This term refers to Engels in 1894 in the preface of the third volume of capital a form of production of goods, which precedes in logical and historical sense of capitalist commodity production:

"It goes without saying that there are, where things and their mutual relations are conceived not as fixed, but as changing, their mental reflexes, the terms, also the change and transformation of subject; that they are not encapsulated in rigid definitions, but in their historical resp. logical formation process develops. Then it will probably be clear why Marx at the beginning of the first book, where he starts from the simple commodity production as its historical condition, and then continue to come from that base to the capital - why he as just starting from the simple commodity rather of a conceptually and historically secondary form of the already modified capitalist commodity "

Several times before, since his review of 1859 in Marx's writing to the Critique of Political Economy, Engels was his conception of Marx's illustrated presentation method as a logical- historical.

After Engels idea the owners of commodities exchanged their goods conscious on the amount of money invested in the production of each commodity working in the historic pre-capitalist agrarian societies. In this respect, Angel represents a Premonetary theory of value.

This view was taken from orthodox Marxism and Marxism -Leninism, but also the Trotskyist Ernest Mandel and Western Marxists such as Wolfgang Fritz Haug, but is considered by authors of the new reading of Marx as Michael Heinrich as a misinterpretation of Marx's approach.