Value Product - An Additional Comment By Marx

An Additional Comment By Marx

Marx claims that, in an accounting period, the workforce in the capitalist sector normally produces a new value which is equal to its own wage-cost, plus an additional new value (called surplus value).

However, Marx warns that:

"The habit of representing surplus-value and value of labor-power as fractions of the value created — a habit that originates in the capitalist mode of production itself, and whose import will hereafter be disclosed — conceals the very transaction that characterizes capital, namely the exchange of variable capital for living labor-power, and the consequent exclusion of the laborer from the product. Instead of the real fact, we have false semblance of an association, in which laborer and capitalist divide the product in proportion to the different elements which they respectively contribute towards its formation."

— Karl Marx

For this reason, Marx criticized ratios such as the share of profits and wages (wage share) in the gross or net product as deceptive, because they disguised the real capitalist relations of production, specifically the rate of surplus value. His primary interest was in the ratio between generic profits and wages (the rate of exploitation).