Surplus Product and The Social Valuation of Labour
Although it is nowadays possible to measure the number of hours worked in a country with reasonable accuracy, there have been few attempts by social statisticians to estimate the surplus product in terms of labour hours.
Very interesting information has become available from time use surveys however on how people in society on average spend their time. From this data, it is evident just how much modern market economies in reality depend on the performance of unpaid (i.e. volunteered) labour. That is, the forms of labour that are the subject of commercial exploitation are quantitatively only a sub-set of the total labour which is done in a society, and depend on non-market labour being performed.
This in turn creates a specific and characteristic way in which different labour activities are valued and prioritised. Some forms of labour can command a high price, others have no price at all, or are priceless. Nevertheless all labor in capitalist society is influenced by value relations, irrespective of whether a price happens to be imputed to it or not. The commercial valuation of labor may not necessarily say anything though about the social or human valuation of labor.
Read more about this topic: Surplus Product
Famous quotes containing the words surplus, product, social and/or labour:
“Just as the French of the nineteenth century invested their surplus capital in a railway-system in the belief that they would make money by it in this life, in the thirteenth they trusted their money to the Queen of Heaven because of their belief in her power to repay it with interest in the life to come.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)
“...In the past, as now, [Hollywood] was a stamping ground for tastelessness, violence, and hyperbole, but once upon a time it turned out a product which sweetened the flavor of life all over the world.”
—Anita Loos (1888–1981)
“I have more in common with a Mexican man than with a white woman.... This opinion ... chagrins women who sincerely believe our female physiology unequivocally binds all women throughout the world, despite the compounded social prejudices that daily affect us all in different ways. Although women everywhere experience life differently from men everywhere, white women are members of a race that has proclaimed itself globally superior for hundreds of years.”
—Ana Castillo (b. 1953)
““To be born woman is to know—
Although they do not talk of it at school—
That we must labour to be beautiful.””
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)