Use of The Surplus Product
In producing, people must continually maintain their assets, replace assets, and consume things (productive consumption and final consumption) but they also can create more beyond those requirements, assuming sufficient productivity of labour.
This social surplus product can be:
- destroyed, or wasted
- held in reserve, or hoarded
- consumed
- traded
- reinvested (accumulated)
Thus, for a simple example, surplus seeds could be left to rot, stored, eaten, traded for other products, or sown on new fields. But if, for example, 90 people own 5 sacks of grain, and 10 people own 100 sacks of grain, it would be physically impossible for those 10 people to use all that grain themselves — most likely they would either trade that grain, or employ other people to farm it.
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Famous quotes containing the words surplus and/or product:
“Next week Reagan will probably announce that American scientists have discovered that the entire U.S. agricultural surplus can be compacted into a giant tomato one thousand miles across, which will be suspended above the Kremlin from a cluster of U.S. satellites flying in geosynchronous orbit. At the first sign of trouble the satellites will drop the tomato on the Kremlin, drowning the fractious Muscovites in ketchup.”
—Alexander Cockburn (b. 1941)
“Culture is a sham if it is only a sort of Gothic front put on an iron building—like Tower Bridge—or a classical front put on a steel frame—like the Daily Telegraph building in Fleet Street. Culture, if it is to be a real thing and a holy thing, must be the product of what we actually do for a living—not something added, like sugar on a pill.”
—Eric Gill (1882–1940)