Surplus labour (German: ''Mehrarbeit'') is a concept used by
Karl Marx
Karl Heinrich Marx (; 5 May 1818 – 14 March 1883) was a German philosopher, economist, historian, sociologist, political theorist, journalist, critic of political economy, and socialist revolutionary. His best-known titles are the 1848 ...
in his critique of
political economy
Political economy is the study of how Macroeconomics, economic systems (e.g. Marketplace, markets and Economy, national economies) and Politics, political systems (e.g. law, Institution, institutions, government) are linked. Widely studied ph ...
. It means labour performed in excess of the labour necessary to produce the means of livelihood of the worker ("necessary labour"). The "surplus" in this context means the ''additional'' labour a worker has to do in their job, beyond earning their keep. According to
Marxian economics
Marxian economics, or the Marxian school of economics, is a Heterodox economics, heterodox school of political economic thought. Its foundations can be traced back to Karl Marx, Karl Marx's Critique of political economy#Marx's critique of politic ...
, surplus labour is usually uncompensated (unpaid) labour.
Origin
Marx explains the origin of surplus labour in the following terms:
The historical emergence of surplus labour is, according to Marx, also closely associated with the growth of
trade
Trade involves the transfer of goods and services from one person or entity to another, often in exchange for money. Economists refer to a system or network that allows trade as a market.
An early form of trade, barter, saw the direct excha ...
(the economic exchange of goods and services) and with the emergence of a society divided into
social class
A social class is a grouping of people into a set of Dominance hierarchy, hierarchical social categories, the most common being the Upper class, upper, Middle class, middle and Working class, lower classes. Membership in a social class can for ...
es. As soon as a permanent
surplus product
Surplus product (german: Mehrprodukt, links=no) is an economic concept explicitly theorised by Karl Marx in his critique of political economy. Roughly speaking, it is the extra goods produced above the amount needed for a community of workers to ...
can be produced, the moral-political question arises as to how it should be distributed, and for whose benefit surplus-labour should be performed. The strong defeat the weak, and it becomes possible for a social elite to gain control over the surplus-labour and surplus product of the working population; they can live off the labour of others.
Labour which is sufficiently productive so that it can perform surplus labour is, in a cash economy, the material foundation for the appropriation of
surplus-value
In Marxian economics, surplus value is the difference between the amount raised through a sale of a product and the amount it cost to the owner of that product to manufacture it: i.e. the amount raised through sale of the product minus the cost ...
from that labour. How exactly this appropriation will occur, is determined by the prevailing
relations of production
Relations of production (german: Produktionsverhältnisse, links=no) is a concept frequently used by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in their theory of historical materialism and in ''Das Kapital''. It is first explicitly used in Marx's publish ...
and the balance of
power
Power most often refers to:
* Power (physics), meaning "rate of doing work"
** Engine power, the power put out by an engine
** Electric power
* Power (social and political), the ability to influence people or events
** Abusive power
Power may a ...
between social classes.
According to Marx,
capital
Capital may refer to:
Common uses
* Capital city, a municipality of primary status
** List of national capital cities
* Capital letter, an upper-case letter Economics and social sciences
* Capital (economics), the durable produced goods used f ...
had its origin in the commercial activity of ''buying in order to sell'' and ''rents'' of various types, with the aim of gaining an income (a surplus value) from this trade. But, initially, this does not involve any
capitalist mode of production; rather, the merchant traders and
rentiers are ''intermediaries'' between non-capitalist producers. During a lengthy historical process, the old ways of extracting surplus labour are gradually replaced by ''commercial'' forms of exploitation.
Historical materialism
In
Das Kapital
''Das Kapital'', also known as ''Capital: A Critique of Political Economy'' or sometimes simply ''Capital'' (german: Das Kapital. Kritik der politischen Ökonomie, link=no, ; 1867–1883), is a foundational theoretical text in Historical mater ...
Vol. 3, Marx highlights the central role played by surplus labour:
This statement is a foundation of Marx's
historical materialism
Historical materialism is the term used to describe Karl Marx's theory of history. Marx locates historical change in the rise of class societies and the way humans labor together to make their livelihoods. For Marx and his lifetime collaborat ...
insofar as it specifies what the class conflicts in civil society are ultimately about: an economy of time, which compels some to do work of which part or all of the benefits go to someone else, while others can have leisure-time which in reality depends on the work efforts of those forced to work.
In modern society, having work or leisure may often seem a
choice
A choice is the range of different things from which a being can choose. The arrival at a choice may incorporate motivators and models. For example, a traveler might choose a route for a journey based on the preference of arriving at a giv ...
, but for most of humanity, work is an absolute necessity, and consequently most people are concerned with the real benefits they get from that work. They may accept a certain
rate of exploitation
In Marxian economics, the rate of exploitation is the ratio of the total amount of unpaid labor done (surplus-value) to the total amount of wages paid (the value of labour power). The rate of exploitation is often also called the rate of surplus ...
of their labour as an inescapable condition for their existence, if they depend on a wage or salary, but beyond that, they will increasingly resist it. Consequently, a
morality
Morality () is the differentiation of intentions, decisions and actions between those that are distinguished as proper (right) and those that are improper (wrong). Morality can be a body of standards or principles derived from a code of cond ...
or legal norm develops in civil society which imposes ''limits'' for surplus-labour, in one form or another.
Forced labour
Forced labour, or unfree labour, is any work relation, especially in modern or early modern history, in which people are employed against their will with the threat of destitution, detention, violence including death, or other forms of ex ...
,
slavery
Slavery and enslavement are both the state and the condition of being a slave—someone forbidden to quit one's service for an enslaver, and who is treated by the enslaver as property. Slavery typically involves slaves being made to perf ...
, gross mistreatment of workers etc. are no longer generally acceptable, although they continue to occur; working conditions and pay levels can usually be contested in courts of law.
Unequal exchange
Marx acknowledged that surplus labour may not just be appropriated directly in ''production'' by the owners of the enterprise, but also in ''trade''. This phenomenon is nowadays called
unequal exchange
Unequal exchange is used primarily in Marxist economics, but also in ecological economics (more specifically also as ecologically unequal exchange), to denote forms of exploitation hidden in or underwriting trade. Originating, in the wake of ...
. Thus, he commented that:
In this case, more work effectively exchanges for less work, and a greater value exchanges for a lesser value, because some possess a stronger market position, and others a weaker one. For the most part, Marx assumed equal exchange in
Das Kapital
''Das Kapital'', also known as ''Capital: A Critique of Political Economy'' or sometimes simply ''Capital'' (german: Das Kapital. Kritik der politischen Ökonomie, link=no, ; 1867–1883), is a foundational theoretical text in Historical mater ...
, i.e. that supply and demand would balance; his argument was that even if, ideally speaking, no unequal exchange occurred in trade, and market equality existed, exploitation could nevertheless occur within capitalist
relations of production
Relations of production (german: Produktionsverhältnisse, links=no) is a concept frequently used by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in their theory of historical materialism and in ''Das Kapital''. It is first explicitly used in Marx's publish ...
, since the value of the ''product'' produced by
labour power
Labour power (in german: Arbeitskraft; in french: force de travail) is a key concept used by Karl Marx in his critique of capitalist political economy. Marx distinguished between the capacity to do work, labour power, from the physical act of w ...
exceeded the value of labour power itself. Marx never completed his analysis of the world market however.
In the real world, Marxian economists like
Samir Amin
Samir Amin ( ar, سمير أمين) (3 September 1931 – 12 August 2018) was an Egyptian-French Marxian economist, political scientist and world-systems analyst. He is noted for his introduction of the term Eurocentrism in 1988 and considered ...
argue, unequal exchange occurs all the time, implying ''transfers'' of value from one place to another, through the trading process. Thus, the more trade becomes "globalised", the greater the ''intermediation'' between producers and consumers; consequently, the intermediaries appropriate a growing fraction of the final value of the products, while the direct producers obtain only a small fraction of that final value.
The most important unequal exchange in the world economy nowadays concerns the exchange between agricultural goods and industrial goods, i.e. the
terms of trade
The terms of trade (TOT) is the relative price of exports in terms of imports and is defined as the ratio of export prices to import prices. It can be interpreted as the amount of import goods an economy can purchase per unit of export goods.
An i ...
favour industrial goods against agricultural goods. Often, as
Raul Prebisch
Raul, Raúl and Raül are the Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, Galician, Asturian, Basque, Aragonese, and Catalan forms of the Anglo-Germanic given name Ralph or Rudolph. They are cognates of the French Raoul.
Raul, Raúl or Raül may re ...
already noted, this has meant that more and more agricultural output must be produced and sold, to buy a given amount of industrial goods. This issue has become the subject of heated controversy at recent
WTO
The World Trade Organization (WTO) is an intergovernmental organization that regulates and facilitates international trade. With effective cooperation
in the United Nations System, governments use the organization to establish, revise, and e ...
meetings.
The practice of unequal or unfair exchange does not presuppose the
capitalist mode of production, nor even the existence of
money
Money is any item or verifiable record that is generally accepted as payment for goods and services and repayment of debts, such as taxes, in a particular country or socio-economic context. The primary functions which distinguish money are as ...
. It only presupposes that goods and services of unequal value are traded, something which has been possible throughout the whole history of human trading practices.
Criticism of Marx's concept of surplus labour
According to economist Fred Moseley, "neoclassical economic theory was developed, in part, to attack the very notion of surplus labour or surplus value and to argue that workers receive all of the value embodied in their creative efforts."
Some basic modern criticisms of Marx's theory can be found in the works by Pearson, Dalton, Boss, Hodgson and Harris (see references).
The
analytical Marxist
Analytical Marxism is an approach to Marxist theory that was prominent amongst English-speaking philosophers and social scientists during the 1980s.
Described by G. A. Cohen as "non-bullshit Marxism", members of this school seek to apply the ...
John Roemer
John E. Roemer (; born February 1, 1945 in Washington, D.C., to Ruth Roemer and Milton Roemer, namesake of Roemer's law) is an American economist and political scientist. He is the Elizabeth S. and A. Varick Stout Professor of Political Scienc ...
challenges what he calls the "fundamental Marxian theorem" (after
Michio Morishima
was a Japanese heterodox economist and public intellectual who was the Sir John Hicks Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics from 1970–88. He was also professor at Osaka University and member of the British Academy. In 1976 he ...
) that the existence of surplus labour is the
necessary and
sufficient condition
In logic and mathematics, necessity and sufficiency are terms used to describe a conditional or implicational relationship between two statements. For example, in the conditional statement: "If then ", is necessary for , because the truth of ...
for
profits. He proves that this theorem is logically false. However, Marx himself never argued that surplus labour was a ''sufficient'' condition for profits, only an ultimate ''necessary'' condition (Morishima aimed to prove that, starting from the existence of profit expressed in price terms, we can deduce the existence of surplus value as a logical consequence). Five reasons were that:
*profit in a capitalist operation was "ultimately" just a financial claim to products and labour services made by those who did not themselves produce those products and services, in virtue of their ownership of
private property
Private property is a legal designation for the ownership of property by non-governmental legal entities. Private property is distinguishable from public property and personal property, which is owned by a state entity, and from collective or ...
(capital assets).
*profits could be made purely in trading processes, which themselves could be far removed in space and time from the co-operative labour which those profits ultimately presupposed.
*surplus labour could be performed, without this leading to any profits at all, because e.g. the products of that labour failed to be sold.
*profits could be made without ''any'' labour being involved, such as when a piece of unimproved land is sold for a profit.
*profits could be made by a self-employed operator who did not perform surplus labour for somebody else, nor necessarily appropriated surplus labour from anywhere else.
All that Marx really argued was that surplus labour was a ''necessary feature'' of the
capitalist mode of production as a general social condition. If that surplus labour did not exist, other people could not ''appropriate'' that surplus labour or its products simply through their ownership of
property
Property is a system of rights that gives people legal control of valuable things, and also refers to the valuable things themselves. Depending on the nature of the property, an owner of property may have the right to consume, alter, share, r ...
.
Also, the amount of unpaid, voluntary and housework labour performed outside the world of business and industry, as revealed by
time use survey
A time-use survey is a statistical survey which aims to report data on how, on average, people spend their time.
Objectives
The objective of the Time-Use survey is to identify, classify and quantify the main types of activity that people engag ...
s, suggests to some feminists (e.g.
Marilyn Waring
Dame Marilyn Joy Waring (born 7 October 1952) is a New Zealand public policy scholar, international development consultant, former politician, environmentalist, feminist and a principal founder of feminist economics.
In 1975, aged 23, she beca ...
and
Maria Mies
Maria Mies (born 1931, Steffeln, Rhine Province, Prussia, Germany) is a German professor of sociology and author of several feminist books, including ''Indian Women and Patriarchy'' (1980), ''Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale'' (1986 ...
) that Marxists may have overrated the importance of industrial surplus labour performed by salaried employees, because the very ability to perform that surplus-labour, i.e. the continual reproduction of
labour power
Labour power (in german: Arbeitskraft; in french: force de travail) is a key concept used by Karl Marx in his critique of capitalist political economy. Marx distinguished between the capacity to do work, labour power, from the physical act of w ...
depends on all kinds of supports involving unremunerated work (for a theoretical discussion, see the reader by Bonnie Fox). In other words, work performed in households—often by those who do not sell their labour power to capitalist enterprises at all—contributes to the sustenance of capitalist workers who may perform little household labour.
Possibly the controversy about the concept is distorted by the enormous differences with regard to the world of work:
*in Europe, the United States, Japan and Australasia,
*the newly industrialising countries, and
*the poor countries.
Countries differ greatly with respect to the way they organise and share out work, labour participation rates, and paid hours worked per year, as can be easily verified from
ILO
The International Labour Organization (ILO) is a United Nations agency whose mandate is to advance social and economic justice by setting international labour standards. Founded in October 1919 under the League of Nations, it is the first and ol ...
data (see also Rubery & Grimshaw's text). The general trend in the world
division of labour
The division of labour is the separation of the tasks in any economic system or organisation so that participants may specialise (specialisation). Individuals, organizations, and nations are endowed with, or acquire specialised capabilities, and ...
is for hi-tech, financial and marketing services to be located in the richer countries, which hold most
intellectual property rights
Intellectual property (IP) is a category of property that includes intangible creations of the human intellect. There are many types of intellectual property, and some countries recognize more than others. The best-known types are patents, cop ...
and actual physical production to be located in low-wage countries. Effectively, Marxian economists argue, this means that the labour of workers in wealthy countries is valued higher than the labour of workers in poorer countries. However, they predict that in the long run of history, the operation of the
law of value
The law of the value of commodities (German: ''Wertgesetz der Waren''), known simply as the law of value, is a central concept in Karl Marx's critique of political economy first expounded in his polemic ''The Poverty of Philosophy'' (1847) against ...
will tend to equalize the conditions of production and sales in different parts of the world.
See also
*
Abstract labour and concrete labour
*
Capital accumulation
Capital accumulation is the dynamic that motivates the pursuit of profit, involving the investment of money or any financial asset with the goal of increasing the initial monetary value of said asset as a financial return whether in the form o ...
*
Capitalist mode of production
*
Economic surplus
In mainstream economics, economic surplus, also known as total welfare or total social welfare or Marshallian surplus (after Alfred Marshall), is either of two related quantities:
* Consumer surplus, or consumers' surplus, is the monetary gain ...
*
Labour power
Labour power (in german: Arbeitskraft; in french: force de travail) is a key concept used by Karl Marx in his critique of capitalist political economy. Marx distinguished between the capacity to do work, labour power, from the physical act of w ...
*
Labour theory of value
The labor theory of value (LTV) is a theory of value that argues that the economic value of a good or service is determined by the total amount of " socially necessary labor" required to produce it.
The LTV is usually associated with Marxian e ...
*
Productive and unproductive labour
Productive and unproductive labour are concepts that were used in classical political economy mainly in the 18th and 19th centuries, which survive today to some extent in modern management discussions, economic sociology and Marxist or Marxian ec ...
*
Reserve army of labour
Reserve army of labour is a concept in Karl Marx's critique of political economy. It refers to the unemployed and underemployed in capitalist society. It is synonymous with "industrial reserve army" or "relative surplus population", except that t ...
*
Spatial mismatch
Spatial mismatch is the mismatch between where low-income households reside and suitable job opportunities. In its original formulation (see below) and in subsequent research, it has mostly been understood as a phenomenon affecting African-American ...
*
Surplus product
Surplus product (german: Mehrprodukt, links=no) is an economic concept explicitly theorised by Karl Marx in his critique of political economy. Roughly speaking, it is the extra goods produced above the amount needed for a community of workers to ...
*
Surplus value
In Marxian economics, surplus value is the difference between the amount raised through a sale of a product and the amount it cost to the owner of that product to manufacture it: i.e. the amount raised through sale of the product minus the cost ...
Notes
References
''Capital'', Volume I*
ttp://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/ch47.htm ''Capital'', Volume III*Karl Marx, "The character of surplus labour
*George Dalton (February 1961). "Economic theory and primitive society". ''American Anthropologist'', LXIII, no. 1, 1–25.
*
*
*
*Marvin Harris, Cultural Materialism: The Struggle for a Science of Culture. Random House 1979.
*Geoffrey Hodgson, Capitalism, Value and Exploitation (Martin Robertson, Oxford, 1982).
*Ernest Mandel, Marxist Economic Theory, Vol. 1. London: Merlin Press, 1968.
*Karl Marx,
Das Kapital
''Das Kapital'', also known as ''Capital: A Critique of Political Economy'' or sometimes simply ''Capital'' (german: Das Kapital. Kritik der politischen Ökonomie, link=no, ; 1867–1883), is a foundational theoretical text in Historical mater ...
.
*Bonnie Fox (ed.), Hidden in the Household: Women's Domestic Labour Under Capitalism, Women's Press, 1980.
*Stephen A. Resnick and Richard D. Wolff, Knowledge and Class: A Marxian Critique of Political Economy (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1987).
*Jill Rubery and Damian Grimshaw, The Organization of Employment; An International Perspective. Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.
*Fred Moseley paper
*Harry W. Pearson, "The economy has no surplus" in "Trade and market in the early empires. Economies in history and theory", edited by Karl Polanyi, Conrad M. Arensberg and Harry W. Pearson (New York/London: The Free Press: Collier-Macmillan, 1957).
*John Roemer, ''Analytical foundations of Marxian Economic Theory''. Cambridge University Press, 1981.
{{Marxist & Communist phraseology
Labour economics
Marxian economics