Surplus Labour in Capitalist Society
In feudal society, it was often quite clear how many days a serf or peasant worked for himself or herself (necessary labour), and how many days s/he worked for his or her lord (surplus labour). On this important distinction between a corvée and a capitalist economy, Lenin writes:
Necessary labour and surplus-labour (i. e., the labour that pays for the maintenance of the worker and the labour that yields unpaid surplus-value to the capitalist) are combined in the single process of labour in the factory, in a single working day at the factory, etc. The situation is different in the corvée economy. Here, too, there is necessary labour and surplus-labour, just as there is in the system of slavery. But these two kinds of labour are separated in time and space. The serf peasant works three days for his lord and three days for himself. He works for his lord on the latter’s land or on the production of grain for him. For himself he works on allotted land, producing for himself and for his family the grain that is necessary for maintaining labour-power for the landlord.
Under capitalism, the distinction between necessary labour and surplus labour however becomes obscured by the nature of the market transactions involved. Most people are legally free agents who can buy and sell labour on the basis of more or less equal access to markets, and an equal opportunity to better their lot in competition with others. Yet, owners of substantial property assets enter the market with an advantage over propertyless people who simply have to sell their labour to survive. It gives property owners the power to command the surplus labour of others. When the wage contract is signed, it appears that the employee is paid for the hours that he works, but at the same time, Marx argues, the worker adds an amount of value on the job in excess of the value of his wage/salary: he performs surplus labour.
In hiring an employee, the employer thus not only incurs a cost (the wage-bill, based on hours worked) but also reaps a benefit, namely the extra value the employee creates (the surplus product of labour) beyond the value of what it costs to hire him or her. This benefit, Marx argues, shows up in the form of gross profit income after deduction of costs, but the only real evidence that surplus labour is the cause of it, is that the value of output produced is higher than the value of inputs used to produce it. The economic relation of necessary and surplus labour has therefore become hidden, and the division of enterprise revenues between wages, profits and taxes seems to become a purely distributional issue; just how exactly that new value originated, could be theorised about in all sorts of ways (see factors of production and surplus value).
Read more about this topic: Surplus Labour
Famous quotes containing the words capitalist society, surplus, labour, capitalist and/or society:
“It has to be acknowledged that in capitalist society, with its herds of hippies, originality has become a sort of fringe benefit, a mere convention, accepted obsolescence, the Beatnik model being turned in for the Hippie model, as though strangely obedient to capitalist laws of marketing.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)
“The Indian is one of Nature’s gentlemen—he never says or does a rude or vulgar thing. The vicious, uneducated barbarians, who form the surplus of overpopulous European countries, are far behind the wild man in delicacy of feeling or natural courtesy.”
—Susanna Moodie (1803–1885)
“When he painted a road, the roadmakers were there in his imagination. When he painted the turned earth of a ploughed field, the gesture of the blade turning the earth was included in his own act. Wherever he looked he saw the labour of existence; and this labour, recognized as such, was what constituted reality for him.”
—John Berger (b. 1926)
“It has to be acknowledged that in capitalist society, with its herds of hippies, originality has become a sort of fringe benefit, a mere convention, accepted obsolescence, the Beatnik model being turned in for the Hippie model, as though strangely obedient to capitalist laws of marketing.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)
“Probably I should not consciously and deliberately forsake my particular calling to do the good which society demands of me, to save the universe from annihilation; and I believe that a like but infinitely greater steadfastness elsewhere is all that now preserves it.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)