#transformation problem

To add — for self-clarification as much as anything: Marx notes that even in “simple” seller-buyer exchanges, the seller “might” receive a surplus (an amount greater than what was socially necessary to replace the objectified labor in c & v.) However, this surplus accrues to the producer/ seller, without much if any, accounting, regularity or, in particular, intent. This, I believe, is key to understanding/defining “value” in pre-capitalist societies. Here, “s” (surplus value) is not separated from v and c+v as value is not “converted” to c+v+s in any regular or meaningful way. However, the production/ raison d’etat of “value” in capitalism is (increasingly) an interest in surplus value — not, as before, to merely replace socially necessary labor time and produce commodities/ “values” with a primary interest in exchanging for different use values.

I was about to write yesterday — but thought I would delay until today — what is “on-point” in the last chapter (X) I just finished in Vol. III. At the end of the chapter Marx asserts that no previous political economist has “revealed the difference between price of production and value”. For example, others see market prices of commodities revolving around market values — instead of their value, i.e. the labor contained in them. As I indicated in a previous post, Marx indicates in Chapter IX:III that in “Book I & II” he was concerned with the “value of commodities”/ the cost price (or c+v). However, now in Vol. III he will explain how this is “converted” to the price of production (c+v+s). Thus, in Chapter X, the discusses how “individual values” of various producers of the same commodity — under less vs more favorable conditions — averages out to “market value” as capitalism and associated competition as well as supply and demand (which dominates the chapter and represents a scathing critique of how economists misunderstand supply and demand) develops and converts value to prices of production and market value. (Thus, as he suggests, things are more likely to exchange on the basis of individual values rather than market values in less developed — or, I believe, in pre-capitalist societies). In Chapter X he also mentions how (qualitatively) different a “simple” relation/ exchange is between a seller and buyer (which I understand as closer to an exchange based on a C’s value c+v) opposed to their relation in capitalism with the development of prices of production/ market values — and where, for example, supply is determined by an interest in producing for surplus value, etc.