system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Marx said in Capital that "Wherever the want of clothing forced them to it, the human race made clothes for thousands of years, without a single man becoming a tailor".Is this true? How exactly did production take place in such an economy?
gpt
Marx is referencing the fact that craft specialisation didn't come about until relatively late in human history, which is true. As best we can tell from archaeological evidence, it wasn't common until the Neolithic period (8,500–3,000 BCE) or later. Before that, most societies will have used what's called the domestic mode of production, where each household was essentially a self-sufficient economic unit. In other words, if you needed new clothes, you spent the day making clothes. There was probably some division of labour within households (e.g. women make the pots) and to a lesser extent amongst extended families (e.g. cousin Ed is really good at making polished stone axes), as well as limited exchange within and between groups, but prehistoric societies simply weren't set up in such a way that one person could specialise in one thing and have others provide for all their other needs. So no tailors. And if you went back even further, into the Palaeolithic period (before 8,500 BCE) you'd see more of an "individual mode of production", where the average person's toolkit was so simple that they could just make everything in it by themselves.

Note Marx didn't actually know how long craft specialisation had been around. It wasn't until after his death that prehistorians, influenced by his work, started asking these questions about prehistoric societies. But he was very interested in ethnography, and at the time people thought that accounts of so-called "primitive" people around the world could also be windows into the past.