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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