The article is about the exposition of the Karl Marx's concept of production prices in his main work Capital. It focuses on the structure of the central text in question, Chapter 9 of the third volume, on "transformation [Verwandlung] of commodityvalues into production prices". The actual content and structure of the chapter has to some degree been overlooked or distorted in the literature. The aim of the article is to establish (or re-establish) a sound view of the chapter, freed from prejudices nurtured by-especially-a theory of price formation which, albeit "modernized" by i.a. Walras, dates back to Steuart and Ricardo. These prejudices have had an immense significance for misunderstandings of the Marxian theory of measure of value and standard of prices reflected in the text of the chapter mentioned. For this reason, the article is furnished with an Appendix, underlining the difficult situation for Marxistminded research today. It should be noted that it is not an objective of the article to discuss any extant interpretation of Marx's exposition. However, the paradigm of criticism that was introduced early in the 20 th century by Ladislaus von Bortkiewicz is used as a perspective. Specific references-other than to Marx's own texts-are held at a minimum in the article proper. I have chosen such a mode of approach because I find that misunderstandings of the chapter are evenly distributed among authors regardless of how their views on the "transformation" collide. On the other hand, such a consciousness of "misunderstandings" among commentators certainly does imply that the author should at least shortly clarify his own view of the main problems in the paradigmatic criticism mentioned above. In the first section, I point out the importance of Marx's way of presenting his concept of the composition of capital. In the next, I make some remarks on the concept of the socially necessary labour time and its relation to abstract labour. In the third and fourth, I investigate Marx's different models of analysis. In the fifth section, it will be shown how Marx, contrary to contentions of traditional criticism, but in harmony with his treatment of the
The Role of the "Organic Composition of Capital"In spite of endless discussions, the significance of the fact that Chapter 9 of Capital III starts with the definition of the organic composition of capital (OCC), is mainly over- (Table 1).To return to the OCC: As one can imagine, the weight that Marx puts on the technical composition, reflects the main definition made in Volume I, where he says that in order to express the interaction between use value and value, he "will call the value composition of capital insofar as it is determined by its technical composition and reflects its changes, the organic composition of capital" ([2], p. 640, italics added). This J. Sandemose 964 should be compared to a passage in one of his drafts, where the following, striking definition is given:The organic composition can be understood as follows: Different relation, in which ou...
