Surplus

Surplus value is a concept created by Karl Marx in his critique of political economy, where its ultimate source is claimed to be unpaid surplus labor performed by the worker for the capitalist, serving as a basis for capital accumulation. more...

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The German equivalent word "Mehrwert" means simply value-added (an output measure), but in Marx's value theory, the extra or surplus-value has a specific meaning, namely the amount of the increase in the value of capital upon investment, i.e. the yield regardless of whether it takes the form of profit, interest or rent.

Marx himself regarded the reduction of profit, interest and rent income to surplus-value, and surplus value to surplus labour as one of his greatest theoretical achievements.

For Marx, the gigantic increase in wealth and population from the 19th century onwards was mainly due to the competitive striving to obtain maximum surplus-value from the employment of labor, resulting in an equally gigantic increase of productivity and capital resources. To the extent that increasingly the economic surplus is convertible into money and expressed in money, the amassment of wealth is possible on a larger and larger scale (see capital accumulation and surplus product).

In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels wrote:

The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature's forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground -- what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labor?

Theory of surplus value

The problem of explaining the source of surplus value is expressed by Friedrich Engels as follows:

"Whence comes this surplus-value? It cannot come either from the buyer buying the commodities under their value, or from the seller selling them above their value. For in both cases the gains and the losses of each individual cancel each other, as each individual is in turn buyer and seller. Nor can it come from cheating, for though cheating can enrich one person at the expense of another, it cannot increase the total sum possessed by both, and therefore cannot augment the sum of the values in circulation. (...) This problem must be solved, and it must be solved in a purely economic way, excluding all cheating and the intervention of any force — the problem being: how is it possible constantly to sell dearer than one has bought, even on the hypothesis that equal values are always exchanged for equal values?"

Read more at Wikipedia.org