Surplus Product

Surplus product (German: Mehrprodukt) is an economic concept explicitly theorised by Karl Marx in his critique of political economy. Marx first began to work out his idea of surplus product in his 1844 notes on James Mill's Elements of political economy. Notions of "surplus produce" have been used in economic thought and commerce for a long time (notably by the Physiocrats), but in Das Kapital, Theories of Surplus Value and the Grundrisse Marx gave the concept a central place in his interpretation of economic history.

Nowadays the concept is mainly used in Marxian economics, surplus economics, political anthropology, cultural anthropology, economic anthropology and archaeology as well as sociology and other social sciences. For most of human history, the meaning of the surplus product was fairly clear. It was simply that part of what workers produced (a product or service) which they had to hand over to the chief, the landowner, the lord, or the state, in the form of a tax, rent or tribute. However, the meaning of surplus product becomes less clear in capitalist society (see below).

The translation of the German "Mehr" as "surplus" is in a sense unfortunate, because it might be taken to suggest "unused", "not needed" or "redundant", while literally it means "more" or "added" - thus, "Mehrprodukt" refers really to the additional or "excess" product produced. In German, the term "Mehrwert" simply and literally means value-added, a measure of net output, (though, in Marx's specialist usage, it means the surplus-value obtained from the use of capital, i.e. it refers to the net addition to the value of capital owned).