Simple Commodity Production, production of goods for exchange via purchase and sale, based on the private property of small commodity producers and their personal labour. It arose in antiquity, when the primitive communal system disintegrated and slave-owning society just began to emerge. It exists in the form of artisan economies and peasant farms in all antagonistic socio-economic formations and in the period of transition from capitalism to socialism. Simple commodity economies produce in order to satisfy the vital needs of producers. Artisans make all of their products and peasants some of them for the market in order to exchange them for products made by other people’s labour which they need to meet their personal and production requirements. For this reason, the commodity producers’ labour is social in nature. The small commodity producer, as an owner, creates the products of his labour independently of others, setting his sight at the unknown purchaser. The social nature of his labour is therefore hidden in the process of production and it appears as directly private. Thus, the commodity producer’s labour is at the same time both private and social, and the contradiction between these two aspects is the principal contradiction in simple commodity economy. The social character of the commodity producer’s private labour is manifested spontaneously, in the process of exchange. The law of commodity production is the law of value. Its operation and the competitive struggle turn simple commodity production into capitalist commodity production. Simple or direct commodity producers have a dual nature. On the one hand, they are workers who obtain their means of livelihood through personal labour and are exploited. This brings them objectively close to wage workers and explains the unity of their vital interests in the struggle against the capitalist system and for the creation of a new social system. On the other hand, simple commodity producers as private owners of the means of production create products for the market and strive to realise them to benefit themselves and to the detriment of other commodity producers. In the period of the transition from capitalism to socialism, the dictatorship of the proletariat changes small commodity production along socialist lines, transferring it onto a cooperative basis.