There is nothing simple about simple commodity production

This essay offers a theoretical rethinking of simple commodity production that avoids two extreme notions of capitalism: one which readily embraces all relations of production found in the pervasive world system, and another which produces a rigidly eroded model to which everything else is externally articulated. It is argued that some specific forms of SCP can be treated as variations of capitalism integral to its polymorphous logic, and therefore as subjected, under determinate conditions, to a flexibly defined process of labour's subordination (formal and real) to capital. Self‐employed labour is also re‐examined in the light of (a) the basic exigencies of capital accumulation, (b) the contradictions inherent to capitalism, especially those pertaining to the confrontation between intraverted and extroverted economies, and (c) the active struggle of all working classes against their total dispossession from commodified wealth.