My point has been missed (I refer to 492). My reference in writing
about the USSR was to restricted markets: i.e. politically regulated
access to certain classes of goods, which in part took the form of
valuta vs. Rubel stores, but also took that of straightforward
restriction of certain goods to the nomenklatura. More fundamental:
the absence of a market for means of production.
The general point was obviously not the absence of commodities and
money in precapitalist systems, but the difference in function. The
missing element is the function of money as capital, which spelled
the non-universal character of money and the non-commodity character
of most goods.
Though land is not strictly speaking a commodity (in the Vol. I
sense) the commodification of land was a crucial element in the
creation of wage labor and in the extension of the money
economy--thus in the creation of the universal equivalent.
P. Mattick