ABSTRACT
In all social circumstances, material reproduction involves the generation and disposition of particular products by means of an allocation of available resources—natural and produced physical resources, but also, crucially, human labors. Capitalist production is production for exchange: outputs are consciously and intentionally produced as commodities, produced in order to be exchanged, and thus production and exchange are interacting phases of the broader process of social reproduction. The early essays of Isaak Rubin emphasize Karl Marx's repeated invocations of exchange when considering the concept of abstract labor. Individual acts can be seen as social when they are viewed as parts of a broader whole, and so a private and individual act of labor "is social if it is examined as part of the total mass of homogeneous social labor or, as Marx frequently said, if it is seen in terms of its 'relation to the total labor of society'".
