What We Think About Surplus Value


Marx didn’t create dialectical materialism. Dialectical materialism created Marx.

Rather than defining ourselves by attaching the three letters “ism” to the end of any fellow scientist’s name, no matter how famous or long dead, we would prefer simply to directly practice dialectical materialism ourselves in our own time, while also affirming that many others, including Karl Marx, have achieved great breakthroughs in knowledge by practicing it in their times.

We believe that by far Marx’s most important contribution to the practice of dialectical materialism, and particularly to its practice by and in the interests of the laboring classes, was the development of the economic concept of Surplus Value, a concept which did not pre-exist his contributions in any recognizable form, and which he developed and refined over several long decades. Like any complex concept, it can never fully be finished so long as the universe itself remains larger than any model built by humans to further our constant goal of understanding this universe. (This is why ALL scientific knowledge is referred to by scientists as “theory”, rather than as “prophecy” or “scripture”, which belong to an entirely different arena of human endeavor.) For us, the fact that dialectical materialists still have arguments and disagreements and must struggle for unity around precisely how to interpret and apply the concept is a good thing. This indicates to us that the science is still a live ongoing process, rather than a stagnated dogma.

What makes Surplus Value such an important concept for us is that it enables us to concretely identify and study (to hopefully influence and transform) the primary material human conflict underlying the historic and ongoing events of our epoch: the conflict of labor versus capital. The better we understand Surplus Value, the better we will understand this conflict, and the better we will understand these events.

Therefore, any group of people honestly claiming to put forward theories and ideas about how to lead the laboring classes in struggle today, let alone to lead the working class in particular, should clearly state, and update if/when necessary, what it believes to the concept of Surplus Value to mean, and how it applies the concept of surplus value to the formulation of its proposed line of march in our struggle.

Since we are such a group of people, we are going to do so.

Here is a summation of what we presently think about Surplus Value.

You are welcome to disagree with it, either in whole or in part, and to tell us about how and why you do so.

Our Historic Conceptual Reference Points

One book we would encourage you to read and discuss with us is Socialism Utopian & Scientific by Marx’s comrade Friedrich Engels. We do not claim by any means to agree with everything in this book, nor is it our ambition to create an exhaustive list of our reactions to each of its chapters or paragraphs. We are laboring people with lives, like you, and our time is more valuable than that. However, we have general unity/agreement with comrade Engels that any proposed steps to move toward socialism which are not based on an accurate and current material analysis of the production of value in the human economy are utopian rather than scientific, and therefore will fail (rather than succeed) in moving humanity any closer to socialism and any further from capitalism.

Another book we would encourage you to read and discuss with us is Capital Volume 1, by Karl Marx.

(In fact, if you have quite a bit of time, we would encourage you to read all the volumes of what is today considered to be the “complete” set of his “Das Kapital”, and to study which versions of which volumes were published when, by whom, and why. But we know, realistically, that many laborers don’t have the time to read all that very soon.)

While all his volumes are worth reading, if possible, we believe it is his 1867 Volume 1 of Capital in which he specifically and intentionally presented to the world, and scientifically defended to his peers, the most complete and comprehensive presentation of the concept of Surplus Value during his lifetime. We think it’s his most important book.

Another book we encourage you to read and discuss with us is Friedrich Engles’ 1868 book Synopsis of Capital, which we believe accurately and effectively summarizes his comrade’s Volume 1 of Capital into shorter prose for readers who, like most laborers, are just as smart as Marx but have less time.

We also encourage you to read and discuss with us Marx’s much shorter 1847-9 book Wage Labour And Capital, as republished with an important introduction in 1891 by Engels. We believe one of the important aspects of this book, written long before Marx had developed the concept of Surplus Value, is that it provides a useful “before and after” view of Marx’s economic thought prior to developing the concept and after having done so. Focus should be paid to Engel’s distinction between labor and labor power made in the important introduction mentioned.    One other text by Marx that we do reference here, because we in large part DISAGREE with it, is from his private papers of 1861-64, now sometimes referred to as The Economic Manuscripts, but never intentionally published by either Marx or Engels during their lifetimes, and never published at all until approximately a century after being written. While we agree that, when a long dead thinker is as famous and controversial as Marx, it is good to make publicly available 100% of all surviving documents known to have been written by them, we also think it is important to distinguish between documents they made public themselves and documents found in their private belongings after they died. (Otherwise, your epic novel  or masters thesis could be equated by future generations with the sticky note scribble next to your toilet to remind yourself of a thought you later rejected after thinking it through.)

Variable Capital vs Constant Capital

We agree with Marx’s 1867 assessment in Capital Volume 1, and with Engels’ more streamlined 1868 presentation of that assessment in Synopsis of Capital, that to understand the behavior of capital in the transformative labor process, it is necessary to distinguish—on the one hand– between that portion of capital that a capitalist invests in machinery and raw materials to be worked, and—on the other hand—that portion which the capitalist invests in the sentient labor power performing the work.

Furthermore, we agree that the capital invested in the machinery and raw materials is Constant capital because its money value reappears in the finished product in exactly the same amount as it was invested (i.e. it neither grows nor shrinks during the labor process). We also agree that the capital invested in securing the labor power is Variable capital because the labor power is what adds even more value to the material being worked than the value that the capitalist pays to buy the labor power. When the capitalist later sells the product at its exchange value, that capitalist will then possess more value than before—specifically and exclusively because the labor power purchased by the Variable capital not only reimbursed the capitalist for its own cost but then also added more value to it.

We call this added value Surplus Value.

“Labor” vs “Labor Power”

We agree with the distinction between “labor” and “labor power” made by Marx consistently after (not before) 1859 and emphasized by Engels in the 1891 Introduction to his amended republication of Marx’s 1847-9 work “Wage-Labour And Capital”, which explains and justifies Engels’ decision to amend its original text to include and reflect Marx’s later-life understanding of this important distinction. We believe this distinction is still as true today as it was then. “Labor” is an abstract concept to which bourgeois political economists could not successfully ascertain a non-contradictory value, because it appears to have two variable values – one for how much it costs and another for how much it can produce. “Labor Power” is not an abstract. It’s value can be definitively ascertained because we can measure the amount of surplus value it creates.

The surplus value created is added directly to three-dimensional matter in the production of commodities by labor-power in the commodity labor process. “Labor power” is the only form of “labor” that creates this new value (surplus value), and this only occurs within the productive process. No other form of “labor” creates surplus value. This is the key distinction between “labor” and “labor power.” 

Here is that distinction exactly as therein stated (in 1891):

“The rock upon which the best economists were stranded, as long as they started out from the value of labor, vanishes as soon as we make our starting point the value of labor-power. Labor-power is, in our present-day capitalist society, a commodity like every other commodity, but yet a very peculiar commodity. It has, namely, the peculiarity of being a value-creating force, the source of value, and, moreover, when properly treated, the source of more value than it possesses itself under capitalism (aka Surplus Value)”.

Exchange Value vs Use Value

A major difference (possibly the biggest difference) between capitalism and earlier modes of production (for example feudalism) is that capitalism is based upon the industrial marshaling of labor-power to transform materials into more finished forms specifically for the production of Surplus Value. For the industrial capitalist to redeem (aka “valorize”) the surplus value produced by labor-power, the capitalist who bought and used that labor-power must sell the finished product to a buyer in a monetary market. The amount of money the finished product can be sold for is its “Exchange Value”. When the Exchange Value is greater than the combined sum of Constant and Variable capitals that were invested into the labor process to transform those materials, then the difference between that sum and the Exchange Value is the monetary measure of the Surplus Value thus produced.

A fundamental aspect of Exchange Value is that it IS the definitive monetary value of a product. Capitalist philosophers long incorrectly insisted (and some today still willfully lie to continue insisting) that material commodities are somehow magically sold ABOVE the price of their true value, and that profit therefore is derived not by exploiting labor but simply by somehow convincing all (or at least most) of the world’s consumers to pay more for products then their true worth. We, however, agree with Marx’s discovery that products are sold AT their value, not above it.

Rather than “magically sold above value,” the concept/construction/assessment of value can and should be materially accounted for. We acknowledge that value is socially constructed and determined by the social relations formed by and reinforced within a mode of production. Under the capitalist mode of production, the labor of a doctor holds more value than that of a farmworker. But a doctor can’t heal or save lives without food and nourishment. But, because capitalism requires the domination, and often erasure, of the productive labor that actually fuels society, the farmworker’s labor is infinitely less valuable than the doctor’s. Additionally, a home that has been “staged” before sale most often will sell for a higher price because it has been determined to hold more value than a home full of the previous owners’ things.

Saying that products are sold at their value does not mean that we agree with these current social definitions of value. We are acknowledging their reality given the current mode of production and associated social relations, plus economic and political structures. Our goal is the construction of a new mode of production, with new social relations, which would in turn require new and/or different concepts and assignments of value.

A less precisely quantifiable form of value also exists, in all materials worked by humans, which is “Use Value”. “Use Value” is a “real abstract” because, even though we can’t precisely measure it, we can know it exists by observing its effects. Use is the tendency of people to find materials transformed by labor to be more useful—and therefore more valuable to possess—AFTER that transformation than they were PRIOR to it. Of Course, Use Value must exist as a prerequisite to any Exchange Value, because nobody would purchase an object with currency unless they believed the object to be use-full. But the presence of Use Value alone does not automatically give rise to Exchange Value.

When/where feudalism is the dominant mode of production, products are produced primarily for their Use Value directly. They might be used/consumed almost immediately, or they might be hoarded by an aristocratic class to be selectively distributed by that class as it sees fit—again based on their direct use value. In this scenario, labor power is still adding value to materials by transforming them, but not primarily into commodities to be sold for a monetary Exchange Value. Therefore, even where the labor-power is successfully turning raw materials into surplus goods (on top of successfully maintaining the laborer supplying it), there is no basis for calculating a specific rate of Constant Capital, Variable Capital or Surplus Value in relation to those materials and goods. The Industrial Revolution made it possible to do so by bringing commodity production for Exchange Value into the dominant position within human economy.

Therefore, it is clear that not all labor-power is used in such a way as to create Surplus Value.

EVEN some labor-power that transforms materials into finished products continues to be used for the production of direct Use Value (although production for Exchange Value is the far more prevalent form).

Service Labor vs Labor Power that Transforms Raw Materials

We think there is a very important distinction between labor provided as a service and labor power for transformation of raw materials. We think that Marx and Engels failed to fully grasp either the importance or the nature of this distinction before their respective deaths interrupted their investigations.

WE BELIEVE THAT ONLY MATERIALLY TRANSFORMATIVE LABOR POWER CAN DIRECTLY PRODUCE SURPLUS VALUE. We think that service labor, even including transportation of finished products (unless they are in route to a factory to be transformed into an even more finished state)—can produce Use Value but not Surplus Value.

Of course, the Use Value produced by service-labor can indirectly drive up the Exchange Value of some adjacent material products, indirectly driving up their Surplus Value as well. For example, a clean house with alive musician playing a song to market it might sell for more than a dirty house with no promotional soundtrack arranged by the realtor to raise the demand on the part of the buyer, but that does not mean that either the musician or the janitor played a direct role in building the house.

Contrary to what capitalists would like to allege about us, neither we nor Marx ever claimed that the Exchange Value of anything bought and sold is determined by anything other than plain old supply and demand. If the demand for a commodity increases while its supply stays the same, its Exchange Value will mathematically increase, and therefore so will the Surplus Value measured by the equation in which Exchange Value is one of the key variables. We maintain, however, that the Surplus Value remains entirely the product of the labor-power which made the commodity, rather than of the advertising that influenced the demand. Surplus Value is not indirect. It is added directly to three-dimensional matter in the production of commodities by labor-power in the commodity labor process.

The value of services, similarly but separately, is ascertained by viewing the Exchange Value of said services. Whatever was paid to the janitorial company and musical company for the services rendered by its laborers is the Value of said services at the exact place and time at which they were sold. Separately, the amount paid by a buyer to purchase a house is the Value of said house at the exact place and time at which it was sold. We believe that things are not sold above or below their value.

Things are sold at their value, and that in fact is the way (the ONLY way) in which we know what their value is. Certainly, all values fluctuate. What something sold for to one person five minutes ago may be different than what it sells for to someone else in another five minutes. But that fluctuation is real, not fake. The old value really has changed to a new one, and the way we know that to be true is that a buyer just paid the new value, and a seller just accepted it by relinquishing ownership in exchange for the money. Those who disagree with us are welcome to try to prove us wrong, but this is what our experience so far leads us to think is the case.

We therefore DISAGREE, for instance, with the following musings privately made by Marx in his personal notebooks—now known as The Economic Manuscripts — sometime between 1861 and 1864, but never intentionally published by either himself or Engels until after both their deaths:

“Milton, for example, who did Paradise Lost, was an unproductive worker. In contrast to this, the writer who delivers hackwork for his publisher is a productive worker. Milton produced Paradise Lost in the way that a silkworm produces silk, as the expression of his own nature. Later on he sold the product for £5 and to that extent became a dealer in a commodity. But the Leipzig literary proletarian who produces books, e.g. compendia on political economy, at the instructions of his publisher is roughly speaking a productive worker, in so far as his production is subsumed under capital and only takes place for the purpose of the latter’s valorisation.

A singer who sings like a bird is an unproductive worker. If she sells her singing for money, she is to that extent a wage labourer or a commodity dealer. But the same singer, when engaged by an entrepreneur who has her sing in order to make money, is a productive worker, for she directly produces capital. A schoolmaster who educates others is not a productive worker. But a schoolmaster who is engaged as a wage labourer in an institution along with others, in order through his labour to valorise the money of the entrepreneur of the knowledge-mongering institution, is a productive worker.”

We think this private note written by Marx to himself is incorrect, and it seems to us to have been written down by him as an idea he was entertaining as a thought experiment rather than as a statement to which he had committed his full considered and deliberate belief. For instance, the paragraph in question appears to directly contradict another one only 11 paragraphs earlier in the same private notebook’s text, which reads:

“This phenomenon, that with the development of capitalist production all services are converted into wage labour, and all those who perform these services are converted into wage labourers hence that they have this characteristic in common with productive workers, gives even more grounds for confusing the two in that it is a phenomenon which characterises, and is created by, capitalist production itself.

On the other hand, it gives the apologists [of capitalism] an opportunity to convert the productive worker, because he is a wage labourer, into a worker who merely exchanges his services (i.e. his labour as a use value) for money. This makes it easy to pass over in silence the differentia specifica of this “productive worker”, and of capitalist production — as the production of surplus value, as the process of the self-valorisation of capital, which incorporates living labour as merely its AGENCY. A soldier is a wage labourer, a mercenary, but he is not for that reason a productive worker.”

We agree with the second of those paragraphs but not the first, and we would have to question the sanity of anyone who sincerely and simultaneously believed both.

While we in no way reject or deny the tendency of capitalism to subsume all laborers within its sphere of domination by converting them—both informally and formally—into either wage-laborers or piece-laborers, WE DO NOT AT ALL BELIEVE this means every laborer who makes a capitalist richer is therefore a producer of Surplus Value. We do not agree that the “writer who delivers hackwork for his publisher”, the “singer, when engaged by an entrepreneur” and the “schoolmaster who is engaged as a wage labourer … of the knowledge-mongering institution” in this thought-experiment are producers of Surplus Value, even if the use value embodied in their services is being bought by a capitalist with money and sold by that capitalist for a profit.

Of course, we agree that their labor produces Use Value. And we agree that this use value has an upward effect on the Exchange Value of the books which contain the writer’s words, the albums which contain the singer’s music and the classrooms or computers which contain the teacher’s seminars. But we think the Surplus Value in these respective items is being produced by the labor-power of the workers in the book printery/bindery, the record/tape/CD factory, the computer factory, and the brick-and-mortar construction site which builds the scholastic campus.

In other words, we DO NOT believe that Surplus Value is synonymous with “profit”.

Surplus Value vs Profit

We acknowledge the fact that Marx (1818-1883) and Engels (1820-1895) often tended, throughout their life works, to treat the terms “profit” and “surplus value” as if they were synonymous. We don’t. That was then, and that was them. This is now, and we are us.

We’ve seen no evidence that either Marx or Engels ever directly challenged the Dictionaries of their time over the definition of the word “profit”, which the dictionaries defined then—and still define now—as simply “a financial gain”. So, we see no reason to give that word any other or more obscure meaning.

While it’s true that all Surplus Value is a form of profit, we say that there are many forms of profit which are not Surplus Value, even if they are means of accumulating real existing value that once was Surplus Value at the moment of its actual creation.

For example, we have no quarrel with Marx’s characterization of landlord-accumulated rent and money-lender-accumulated interest under capitalism as portions of surplus value that happen to get accumulated by landlords and finance capitalists instead of by industrial capitalists. However, we believe we must explicitly denote that nothing about collecting either rent or interest inherently procures, arranges, or administers labor-power in any particular way, let alone specifically in such a way as to transform raw materials into mass-produced finished commodities to be sold for an Exchange Value thereby creating Surplus Value. Rent and interest both existed as influential commercial practices long before capitalism became the dominant mode of production.

Then, as we have discussed and denoted, there are also some capitalists who accrue profit by hiring laborers to perform services (rather than transform raw materials into commodities) which services these capitalists sell to consumers of the service, charging the consumers more than they pay the laborers who actually provide the service. These instances are frequent, not rare. And the laborers employed by such capitalists are many, not few.


In these service scenarios, we believe that what is being produced and sold is a monetized Use Value, not a Surplus Value. We do not believe that the monetization of this value alone—without using the labor-power specifically to transform materials into mass produced commercial commodities—can be accurately/scientifically described as the production of Surplus Value.

In other words, we believe that in the service sectors of capitalist industry (unlike the materially transformative sectors), the profit accumulated by the capitalist is entirely a service value profit, no part of which is accurate to describe as Surplus Value. This service value profit does have some parallel qualities to Surplus Value. Constant Capital is present in the form of tools/machinery paid for by the capitalist to equip the laborers to perform the service. Variable Capital is also present in the form of whatever the capitalist pays the laborers for their labor. The real Exchange Value the customer pays the capitalist for the service is usually greater than the sum of both the Constant and the Variable Capital. And, that difference is retained and/or reinvested by the capitalist as profit, just as it is in commodity production.

But, the key and very important difference, which convinces us that none of this service profit value constitutes Surplus Value, is that the entire value of the service is consumed by its recipient at the exact simultaneous time it is being rendered. None of it is preserved in the form of a three-dimensional mass production commodity that will outlast the rendering of the service, or which the purchaser can later retail to a different consumer at an even higher exchange value.

Some will say that this distinction by us is an exercise in trivial hair splitting. We don’t think so. We believe it is an essential distinction without which revolutionaries will be unable to demarcate from many forms of populism which constantly emerge. However necessary the tasks of the service laborers may be to human civilization (and many are), the most basic fact about capitalism is that it’s a MODE OF PRODUCTION, not a “mode of service”. A worldwide “revolution” led by and for service laborers might achieve many progressive reforms. But capitalism would, unfortunately, survive such an uprising, because only the workers at points of actual PRODUCTION have the real power to overthrow and replace the MODE thereof.

Absolute vs Relative Surplus Value

We agree that, wherever Surplus Value is being produced there are two established ways of measuring its rate. We credit and appreciate Marx and Engels for establishing these two ways of measuring it.

These two established forms of measurement are called Absolute Surplus Value and Relative Surplus Value.

We agree with the mathematical equation that measures Absolute Surplus Value by expressing the labor process by which variable capital is turned into labor-power, which was presented by both Marx in Volume 1 of Capital, 1867, and by Engels the next year in Synopsis Of Capital.

This equation is:

CONSTANT CAPITAL (c) + VARIABLE CAPITAL (v) + SURPLUS VALUE (s) = EXCHANGE VALUE OF NEW CAPITAL (C).

This, of course, can also be written as:

s = C – (c + v).

And that is how Absolute Surplus Value is determined (always measured in currency).

The other measurement, Relative Surplus Value, is simply an expression of what percentage of the worker´s (aka productive laborer’s) working day is spent in the production of Surplus Value, after having already reproduced the value of the Variable Capital invested by the capitalist to procure the worker’s labor-power for that day. The time spent by the workers reproducing the Variable Capital invested into the procurement of their labor is defined as “Necessary Labor Time”. The rest of the shift thereafter, during which the workers produce Surplus Value, is defined as “Surplus Labor Time”.

So, for example, if a worker was paid four (4) Star Trek Energy Credits to work a ten (10) hour day in which that worker transformed raw materials into an amount of finished product that sold for an Exchange Value of ten (10) Star Trek Energy Credits, then the worker’s labor-power would be creating an Energy Credit of value each hour, and would have already reimbursed the capitalist for the four (4) Energy Credits after just four (4) hours of work. Therefore, the worker would be spending the remaining six (6) out of ten (10) hours of the shift performing Surplus Labor. This would mean that the worker was producing Relative Surplus Value at a rate of sixty percent (60%) of the working day. (Of course, this particular example would never actually occur, because Capitalism is far too primitive a mode of production to ever build even an inter-planetary civilization, let alone an interstellar one.)

This concept, Relative Surplus Value, can also be used–and sometimes is used–to measure the percentage of the worker’s working day that is spent producing more monetary value than what it costs the worker, monetarily, to “reproduce themself”, meaning what it costs the worker to feed themself, wash and clothe themself, shelter themself in a place where they can sleep so as to be able to show up ready and able to work at the start of the next working day, and also rear a member of the next generation of their class who can, on average, replace them in industry when they either die or become too old to work.

Although this cost to labor of labor’s own reproduction can be closely related to variable capital (as wages for example), there is no guarantee that will be identical in sum to variable capital. That’s because there is no guarantee that labor can afford to reproduce itself on what it is being paid, and that workers aren’t in the process of being exploited to death and not sustainably replaced. Nor is there any guarantee that labor couldn’t necessarily succeed in reproducing itself on even less than what is being paid, and that workers aren’t succeeding in saving a small amount of value out of their paychecks (and, if they’re smart, hoping their boss doesn’t notice this too much).

The cost to labor of labor’s own reproduction, therefore and incidentally, is a third value which that “very peculiar commodity” known as labor possesses—in addition to the two that Engels denoted the existence of in the Introduction to the 1891 republication of Wage Labor & Capital (v and v+s respectively). This, we are completely comfortable to say, is our statement, not Marx’s or his comrade’s. The exact sum of this third value possessed by labor is much more mathematically difficult to pinpoint than the comparatively simple sums of variable capital and absolute surplus value. But every consumer price index in the world constitutes an attempt to approximately measure it, and the concept of Relative Surplus Value can be used to gauge an approximation of the relationship between this “cost of living” and labor’s working day.”

Fundamental Laborers and Workers

We have already explained the major distinction we believe exists between laborers who physically transform matter into a more finished form that then gets sold as a commodity for a monetary Exchange Value, and laborers who do anything other than specifically that. As we stated, we believe laborers who do specifically that are the only laborers who produce Surplus Value.

Our tendency defines those particular laborers as workers, and we believe that workers are the particular laborers who can, by organizing and leading a revolution in their own primary collective self-interest, transform civilization’s mode of production from capitalism to a mode more advanced and more just toward all (aka socialism and/or communism, which has yet to authentically exist anywhere, but which we hope will someday authentically exist everywhere there are people).

We believe the workers will and must organize both themselves and all the other laborers, under the workers’ political leadership, to pull off this transition to the higher and better mode of production, in which exploitation, imperialism and oppression in general will finally be eliminated from the human condition.

We hypothesize that, among the ranks of the laborers who aren´t specifically workers, there are some who are materially closer to the workers than others due to the nature of the labor they perform. In addition to the question of physical proximity (or lack thereof) to the point of production, there is also the matter of how similar (or dissimilar) the laborer’s daily lived reality is to the typical daily reality of a worker. Those whose reality is most similar, we refer to as “fundamental laborers”, meaning that we consider them to be the fundamental material allies of the workers at the points of production.

Capital is Social – Surplus Value is the Basis of all Other Class Reproduction

For as long as capitalism remains the dominant mode of production, surplus value is the only type of value that can be produced at a large enough scale to potentially expand the total quantitative size of that civilization and/or significantly enhance each succeeding generation’s access to new levels of science and technology. Production of products for direct use value only survives in minor unimportant niches of the overall capitalist economy. Provision of non-product services is, on the one hand, a major and inherently necessary marshaling of laborers to produce use values, without which human society (including the members thereof who produce the actual surplus value) could not continue to function. However, the capitalist service industry does not and cannot directly expand the size or scale of the overall human economy.

The overwhelming majority of all wealth (value) that is possessed by any human or group of humans today was, at one point or another, produced as surplus value by a worker. Therefore, the vast majority of other laborers, and ultimately even the vast majority of people period, experience their lives as a sequence of events organized by capitalists in pursuit of either the continuing production of surplus value, or the continuing accumulation of circulating value that originally came into existence as surplus value.

This core metabolism of capitalism, therefore, has subsumed the lifelong activity of nearly every human alive, recuperating that metabolic survival energy and reproducing it, generation after generation, in the form of all the social classes—from the bourgeoisie to the petite bourgeoisie to the laboring classes, to the lumpen—which constitute the miserable human condition as structured by this backward mode of production.

Thanks for taking the time to read this summation of our thoughts on Surplus Value.

To discuss further – in agreement or disagreement – Email us at koleksyoninip@gmail.com.