Economic class divisions emerged about 10,000 years ago roughly in tandem with agriculture. From the beginning, class-divided economies have been organized around the private appropriation of accumulated surplus wealth, accomplished through the production of storable, exchangeable goods—salt, grains, coffee, iPads, cars, and so on.

It is under capitalism that these goods have assumed the commodity form, and that exchange value has become distinct from (yet still tenuously connected to) use value.