It would take too long if we wanted to cite the Marxist passages directed against Proudhon,
Lassalle, Rodbertus and many others, denouncing any attempt to reconcile commodity
production with the socialist emancipation of the proletariat.
For Lenin, this is the cornerstone of Marxism. It would be quite difficult to reconcile it with
Stalin's current thesis: “Why then, one asks, cannot commodity production similarly serve our
socialist society for a certain period” or “Commodity production leads to capitalism only if
there is private owner-ship of the means of production, if labour power appears in the market
as a commodity which can be bought by the capitalist and exploited in the process of
production, and if, consequently, the system of exploitation of wageworkers by capitalists
exists in the country.” This hypothesis is, of course, absurd; in the Marxist analysis, any
existence of a mass of commodities suggests that reserve-less proletarians had to sell their
labour-power. If in the past there was commodity production limited to a few branches, it was
not because the labour-power was sold "voluntarily" as it is today, but rather because it was
squeezed by force of arms from enslaved prisoners or serfs in personal dependency.
Do we have to quote the first two lines of "Capital" again? “The wealth of those societies in
which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as ‘an immense accumulation
of commodities’”.
