Surplus Labour - Surplus Labour and Exploitation

Surplus Labour and Exploitation

Exploitation occurs when those appropriating surplus labour — whether in the form of surplus-value, surplus product or direct surplus labour — are different than those performing surplus labour. Just as there are attempts to force more work out of the workers, there are also attempts at resistance to exploitation, e.g. strike action, union campaigns, living wage campaigns, go-slows, refusal to perform tasks not contracted for, threatening to leave employment for another job if that is a real possibility, etc. Critical variables in determining the total surplus labour performed are:

  • the length of the working day (and week): in other words, the total amount of time worked over a regular period
  • the intensity of work
  • the productiveness of the work (which also depends on the technologies used)
  • the subsistence level for workers
  • the position of strength or weakness of employers and employees
  • the level of unemployment and job vacancies.

In Capital, Volume I, Marx portrays the battle over work-time as the fulcrum of class conflict in capitalism, which can involve complex trade-offs between time and money. However, contrary to many Marxists, Marx never believed that exploitation at the point of production was the only kind of exploitation that exists.

Read more about this topic:  Surplus Labour

Famous quotes containing the words surplus, labour and/or exploitation:

    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)

    Measure not the work
    Until the day’s out and the labour done,
    Then bring your gauges.
    Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861)

    The only phenomenon with which writing has always been concomitant is the creation of cities and empires, that is the integration of large numbers of individuals into a political system, and their grading into castes or classes.... It seems to have favored the exploitation of human beings rather than their enlightenment.
    Claude Lévi-Strauss (b. 1908)