Chapter 7 Section 4 Limitations of Commodity Economy Development

During the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period, the commodity economy developed at an astonishing speed, which was closely related to the weakening of the natural economy (slavery, lordship era), the formation of the feudal landlord economy, and the rise of the individual small peasant class. of.But this is still far from being able to decompose the natural economy in the early stage of commodity economy, commerce, and its development still shows great limitations after all. In feudal society, the natural economy dominated; the commodity economy was like some islands scattered in the vast ocean, but in fact it only accounted for a small proportion; this was especially true in the early stages of feudal society.The family economy of serfs and even individual farmers is a small-scale peasant economy in which men plow and women weave, agriculture and family handicrafts are combined.They basically rely on their own hands for the two important things of eating and clothing. In addition, they can also make some handicrafts for their own use. The only commodities that need to be supplied by the market are salt, ironware, and pottery.The surplus products they produce and sell mainly for their own use—surplus millet, surplus cloth (linen), surplus silk—are often determined to be commodities only after exchange. Conversion; even if there are not many commodities produced exclusively (or mostly) for the purpose of sale in rural areas, the money obtained after the sale is mainly used to pay taxes and buy back the required means of production and daily necessities , it is still a production of use value (simple commodity production, small commodity production) that is "sold for buying".Peasants seek more exchange value - currency, and it is difficult to talk about commodity production for the purpose of making a fortune.At the same time, individual small handicraftsmen in the cities produce for survival, not for getting rich.Therefore, in that period, commodity production and commodity circulation were still quite different in nature from the "developed" commodity economy whose starting point and end point were the realization of exchange value, and were still in the underdeveloped stage of the commodity economy. [chichu reprimands, walks slowly] Go forward. "Guanzi" said: "The city can't be prosperous, and the family is enough." ("Guanzi Quanxiu") "Salt and Iron Theory" said: "The ancients were a city of thousands of rooms, a home of hundreds of vehicles, cultivating business and industry, and living for the small people. Seek enough to change. Therefore, the peasants do not leave the mu but have enough for the field tools, the workers do not cut down but have enough for the wood, and the edifiers do not plow the field but have enough for the corn." ("Salt and Iron Lun·Flood and Drought") These two passages explain in Within a family, or even within a small area, the means of living and production can basically be self-sufficient.The natural economy is so strong that the activities of commerce and merchants have not had much room for development.A trickle of water becomes a torrent.Leaving rural areas and small areas, entering cities and making large quantities, the channels are firstly tax payment, and secondly commodity exchange (including products sold for payment of currency tax).Land rent, taxes, and interest are the income of the exploiting class, and they never return. They are one-way outflows.The real two-way trade of selling agricultural products and buying handicraft products will greatly reduce the amount.Therefore, the prosperity of urban commerce during the Warring States period certainly reflected certain developments in the feudal society’s commodity economy, but it also exposed the growing feudal antagonism between urban and rural areas and between rich and poor.This situation will last for a long time.

Precisely because most of the products were seized by the exploiting class, they accumulated a large amount of food and cloth, so that they could not consume them, so they had to exchange them for luxuries that could meet their higher-level needs. Therefore, until the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period However, business is mainly based on catering to the extravagant consumption of the rulers.Liancheng handicraft industry, with competition as "the end of the art", produces luxury goods that are "happy to play well".Although some grains also participate in the trafficking trade, and there are also merchants who operate "Xiagu", the emphasis of the trafficking trade is still on the transshipment of luxury goods, handicrafts and land that are expensive when they are away from home. Specialty products, especially pearls and jade, still occupy the primary position in commercial operations. "Han Feizi" has the stories of "buy a basket and return the pearl" and "destroy the rough and get the jade".One said: Zheng people who did not know the goods bought gorgeous and fragrant bead boxes at a high price, and returned the beads to the merchants ("Foreign Reserve Says Upper Left"); the other was a Song merchant who taught treasures Competing with others to buy raw materials priced at hundreds of gold, pretending to miss and break them, and losing the price of raw materials, go back and carve them into exquisite jade articles, worth thousands of gold ("Shuo Lin" part 2). "Warring States Policy" also records Lu Buwei's saying that "the victory of pearls and jade" is "hundred times" its benefits.All of these are the portrayal of merchants in the Warring States Period doing their jewelry business.The profit of pearls and jade is not the same as the price of native products.Therefore, businessmen are all flocking to [wuwu, wild duck]. "The independent development of merchant capital is inversely proportional to the general economic development of the society." This law is most obvious in the history of "transshipment trade." ("Das Kapital") The situation in China is also the same.The fact that commerce is independent of production and develops into trafficking trade, especially the narrow focus on luxury goods such as pearls and jade, just shows that the commodity economy still has a certain limit. There is not much real commodity production, and the natural economy still dominates.This situation will continue for a long time to come.