Surplus Value - Complicating Factors in Assessing Surplus-value

Complicating Factors in Assessing Surplus-value

Complicating factors in assessing surplus-value are:

• state intermediation, where profit and wage income is taxed on the one side, and supplemented on the other with subsidies and grants of various kinds;
• Backwardation of certain physical goods in which time and presence are drivers of price.
• employee and employer contributions to social security and health schemes (wage costs and total labour costs may not be equal);
• price inflation applying to wage goods, profit and capital goods;
• creative accounting and tax avoidance or evasion techniques which misrepresent how much value has really been created.
• income obtained from what Marx called "fictitious capital" or what now are often called "bubble" phenomena.
• unsold inventories of net outputs which contain surplus-value.

These phenomena often make it difficult to calculate what the real net wage income is, and what the real net profit income is; there may be a very significant difference between gross income and disposable income.

In modern society, the complexity of transactions can often seem almost impenetrable or opaque. People may become less concerned with issues of exploitation, rather their concern may just simply be with defending their entitlement to a secure real net income ("take home pay") from the work they do, or from any other source.

How the exchange between capital and labour happens to be viewed, depends greatly on the balance of power between employers and employees, and on the ability for all parties to the exchange to make gains from the trade in human labor. People would not usually trade unless they made a positive gain by it, but obviously the gains could be very unequally distributed among different parties to the trade. The more real net income capitalists and workers lose, the more concerned they become about fair exchange and exploitation.