The development of economic inter dependencies

The commodity exchange out of which, under certain conditions, the capitalist mode of production itself develops, has its historical origins in the exchange of surplus product between communities. In early trade, what changes hands is what each party finds superfluous to its own economic reproduction, the excess of use values that it produces.

With the emergence of capitalism, exchange comes to encompass on an extending scale items that are industrially and reproductively vital to the communities or to the segments of communities (for example, the town and the country) involved. However, even as recently as the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this system of productive interdependencies was still in its infancy. At that time, economic relations between Western Europe and the peoples of Asia and of Africa were still largely relations of the more ancient form – the obvious exception to this, from the standpoint of the latter parties, being the slave trade, in which a vital commodity was exported – and did not feature a notable sacrifice of what was reproductively vital to their own productive consumption. With the industrial and commercial expansions of the past two centuries, under the political auspices of the capitalist nation-state, the composition of trade begins markedly to shift. The division of international labor, like the division of domestic labor, involves an extending interdependence of industrial and agricultural elements required for economic reproduction.