iI am sorry Steve But you

iI am sorry Steve But you post looks too complicated for me to trawl through. Marcos is correct after a fashion Obviously merchants make a profit but it doesn’t mean necessarily they are exploiting workers. According to Marx; and he dedicated big chapters on it  in volume III. The manufacturing capitalist class will make stuff which say costs them $50 but which has a labour time value of say $100. The exploitation has happened there. Manufacturing capitalist class will however have to sell it $100 product to the capitalist supermarkets for $90. Who will sell it a $100. Thus they make $10 profit on the sale. $10 profit on the sale remains however a slice of manufacturing capitalist class surplus value; generated at the point of production. The supermarket profit or rate of profit has to be normal. The supermarkets have ‘non-working’ capital as a permanent stock, albeit rolling over, of commodities As well as buildings and sales infrastructure. The obvious problem of supermarket workers and the variable capital of the merchant capitalists is a bit difficult. Or in other words do they add or create value out of which the merchant capitalist class can take a cut. Or in other words do supermarkets workers produce something socially useful, albeit possibly abstract as a service?  The answer to the question would workers still be doing some of that in free access communism. Clearly workers wouldn’t be scurrying around all over the place picking stuff up from factory gates.  However! It is possible for the merchants to act as the de-facto ‘disguised’ employers of workers. Who may have a nominal employer (or not) but who in reality may actually just be supervising the work. Or as with small farmers say eg dairy they could be essentially making stuff for the supermarkets who are in essence their indirect employers and exploiters Thus; Capital Vol. III Part IVConversion of Commodity-Capital and Money-Capital into Commercial Capital and Money-Dealing Capital (Merchant's Capital)Chapter 20. Historical Facts about Merchant's Capital  This system presents everywhere an obstacle to the real capitalist mode of production and goes under with its development. Without revolutionising the mode of production, it only worsens the condition of the direct producers, turns them into mere wage-workers and proletarians under conditions worse than those under the immediate control of capital, and appropriates their surplus-labour on the basis of the old mode of production. The same conditions exist in somewhat modified form in part of the London handicraft furniture industry. It is practised notably in the Tower Hamlets on a very large scale. The whole production is divided into very numerous separate branches of business independent of one another. One establishment makes only chairs, another only tables, a third only bureaus, etc. But these establishments themselves are run more or less like handicrafts by a single minor master and a few journeymen. Nevertheless, production is too large to work directly for private persons. The buyers are the owners of furniture stores. On Saturdays the master visits them and sells his product, the transaction being closed with as much haggling as in a pawnshop over a loan. The masters depend on this weekly sale, if for no other reason than to be able to buy raw materials for the following week and to pay out wages. Under these circumstances, they are really only middlemen between the merchant and their own labourers. The merchant is the actual capitalist who pockets the lion's share of the surplus-value.[9] https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/ch20.htm