The exchange of the products of labour, or of any other possessions, is obviously one of the purest and most primitive forms of human socialization; not in the sense that ‘society’ already existed and then brought about acts of exchange but, on the contrary, that exchange is one of the functions that creates an inner bond between men—a society, in place of a mere collection of individuals. Society is not an absolute entity which must first exist so that all the individual relations of its members—super—and subordination, cohesion, imitation, division of labour, exchange, common attack and defence, religious community, party formations and many others—can develop within its framework or be represented by it: it is only the synthesis or the general term for the totality of these specific interactions. Any one of the interactions may, of course, be eliminated and ‘society’ still exist, but only if a sufficiently large number of others remain intact. If all interaction ceases there is no longer any society. In the same way, a living organism can continue to exist if one or the other of its functions—which is an interaction between parts—ceases, but it cannot live if all functions cease, because ‘life’ is nothing but the sum of interacting forces among the atoms of the organism. It is, therefore, almost a tautology to say that exchange brings about socialization: for exchange is a form of socialization. It is one of those relations through which a number of individuals become a social group, and ‘society’ is identical with the sum total of these relations.
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