“Capitalist” as in merchants do exist in previous societies, but they are not part of a capitalist mode of production that is not dominant, they are just parts of feudal society,.

“Feudal society.” Friend, the same criticism I applied to ‘capitalist society’ or ‘capitalism’ applies here. “Feudal society” would be literally everything in whatever society you’re talking about, and so it would include merchant-capitalists, but this does not mean merchant capitalists are operating using the feudal mode of production; the merchant-capitalists are not land-owners, they do not get anything from the peasants on that land without trading for it (i.e. mediated through exchange value i.e. not feudal mode of circulation) because they are not land owners.The entire structure of feudal mode of production based on relationships and services explicitly defined in qualitative terms (as discussed by Marx in Volume One), merchant-capital operates very differently from that, even in this era. It has to interact with feudal mode, yes, the individual merchant capitalist can wear multiple hats, the individual merchant capitalist moves between different modes of circulation production distribution consumption because, in all societies, there exist multiple means of all of those things. In their role as merchant, however, the merchant would only be doing merchant things. If he manages to buy land, marry into the aristocracy and kept being a merchant while receiving tribute from peasants on that land, he would be engaging in two (many more actually bc domestic would be here too) modes of production at the same time, which is how it usually is (although from what I know, historically if they could become a noble, merchants would stop doing merchant things) in reality. In Capital Marx explicitly says, very early on (before he’s even discussed the working day), that he is only considering individuals in their roles in the capitalist mode of production; this is why he brackets out personal consumption and brackets out so much complexity (often explicitly saying he is doing so because Marx was not trying to describe reality, he was trying to describe the capitalist mode of production which is the prevailing mode of production in our society which means it has the largest influence on the structure of our society, but it is not the only structure (even the totality of volume 3 (production, circulation, distribution and credit) explicitly brackets out everything falling outside of that from the immediate analysis, he does not say they do not exist.

The reason why they operate “outside of production”, is because they only sell the surplus product of peasants, and do not dominate production,

Yes, this is partially correct. You’re neglecting the role of the cities in producing manufactured goods, however. Many peasants don’t make all of their own tools; generally they trade with other people, whether peasants in their or other villages or travelling merchants or some other such way, but they usually do have a lotta stuff that was produced outside their particular family (which is the basic unit of the peasant mode of production as I define it, production and consumption united in the family).

and they do not “prefer to produce use values “outside”” What?

Yeah my bad here. The phrasing was very bad I think. I mean to say that, when possible, capitalists would prefer to appropriate use values without providing what would be (in the capitalist mode of production/etc) an equivalent exchange value as possessed by the use value. I.e. they would prefer to take stuff and pay less, or even nothing for the use value. One example is something “furnished by Nature gratis”; i.e. the ideological belief of capitalists that they can consume the natural world with reckless abandon because it has no value unless altered by labour and as such can be appropriated for free. Similarly, as Delphy shows in Close to Home and Cowan shows in More Work for Mother, female coded/domestic labour is appropriated gratis, allowing for the production of use values with no “value” in terms of the capitalist mode of production. Another example is how the commute to work gets labelled as outside of your labour by your boss despite being a clear and necessary part of getting your work done; they’ve placed that labour, the labour of reproducing your labour power at the till at 5 AM, outside of the capitalist mode of production so that it becomes ‘natural’ that the commute is completed with no need to compensate the worker for the transportation.

This doesn’t mean anything, they do not chose whether they follow the law of value or not, it simply does not apply to them given the fact that capital cannot A. control production at this time and B. flow in and out of the different sectors, thus prices equal values, and prices of production do not exist.

Prices never ever equals value, it’s a reflection of exchange value which is the value of the labour that would be required to reproduce the commodity in given condition. Marx is very clear about this so I’m unsure where the confusion is coming from. Value can and does differ significantly from exchange value and price; that’s the basis of relative surplus value which is the basis of the constant search for new technologies. Capital not controlling production is irrelevant to the functioning of commercial capital; the basis of capitalist production is the profits from commercial capital and accumulation by dispossession. You don’t seem to realise that medieval and earlier societies can and did have different prices for given commodities at different cities, towns and villages based on the value required to produce (production includes transportation see vol2 ch6) that commodity in that place and time. A good book on how medieval English markets worked, for example, is Masschaele’s Peasants, Merchants and Markets (although i would disagree with classifying the peasants in this book as peasants in terms of using the peasant mode of production/etc) 3/3