>>5969That seems to effectively be saying capitalism will cease to exist when commodity production ceases to exist. The split between dead and living labor is in the commodification of labor’s product. You end that commodification, ie you end private appropriation of the product, then you’ve ended commodity production. You end exchange of commodities, dead labor can’t be hanging over us in the way it does now. But it’s only a part of the story, you haven’t necessarily ended surplus value extraction unless you end class. Value didn’t dictate the economy before capitalism, though it existed in limited commodity markets. But surplus extraction still existed, and it wasn’t based on the commodity markets. So class society is separate from commodity production, ending commodity production isn’t ending exploitation. But conversely, ending class exploitation isn’t ending commodity production, as exploitation is ended in the worker co-op form, but commodity production is maintained. So value still regulates human social reproduction.
These two things are in relation to each other. Commodity production is the means by which class exploitation occurs. Commodity production is downstream of exploitation, it is produced out of a historical searching for opportunity to exploit a surplus, and it was produced out of the given historical circumstances of that searching. Ending class exploitation opens the door to ending commodity production, though likely not all at once. Commodity production is a tool to exploit a surplus, so if you end the class doing the exploiting, the tool is only as valuable as it is useful to the continued existence of the classless society. Hence, worker cooperatives are a transitionary social form. Commodity production may still produce private incomes for classless producers, and therefore there will be divisions, but as long as the classless producers have relatively equal political access, then the private incomes of the few are subordinate to the interests of the many, which by nature of markets are always going to outnumber the wealthier few. However, the issue with capitalist social relations in this respect is that the rich few are a social class that has dispersed dictatorships within the economy. Political participation is limited to the state, which is actually an oligarchy of the private dictatorships, empowered by surplus extraction to rea
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