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?