Surplus Value Quotes & Sayings

[The ruling elites] know who their enemies are, and their enemies are the people, the people at home and the people abroad. Their enemies are anybody who wants more social justice, anybody who wants to use the surplus value of society for social needs rather than for individual class greed, that's their enemy. — Michael Parenti

Since, however, the reduced surplus value is to be distributed among them in like manner, the modification of their respective parts in the production of surplus value must find expression in a modification of the prices. — Rudolf Hiferding

Our ideal society finds it essential to put a rent on land as a way of maximizing the total consumption available to the society ... Pure land rent is in the nature of a 'surplus' which can be taxed heavily without distorting production incentives or efficiency. A land value tax can be called 'the useful tax on measured land surplus'. — Paul Samuelson

Most of these first nine chapters prepare the ground for, and then introduce, the notion of surplus value. — Anonymous

The parallel between these animals sick from surplus value and humans sick from industrial concentration is illuminating. ( ... ) Against the industrial organization of death, animals have no other recourse, no other possible defiance, except suicide. — Jean Baudrillard

Surplus-value and the rate of surplus-value are ... the invisible essence to be investigated, whereas the rate of profit and hence the form of surplus-value as profit are visible surface phenomena — Karl Marx

The Theory of Surplus Value means that anytime you hire someone, you are exploiting him. If you pay someone to fix your automobile, he has the right, by virtue of being your mechanic, to steal your car. — P. J. O'Rourke

You must be aware that the reward for labour, and quantity of labour, are quite disparate things. — Karl Marx

He wanted to show why the enormous increase in productivity brought about by the industrial revolution had made the great majority of human beings worse off than before. He wanted to reveal how the old relationships of master and slave, lord and serf, survived under the cloak of freedom of contract. His answer to these questions was the doctrine of surplus-value. — Anonymous

The preachers have got it completely backward. If life is eternal, then life is cheap. Value does not come from surplus; it comes from rarity. Prices rise as supply drops. The reality that our lives are brief is what makes them precious. The fact that they will end makes them more meaningful. "Ultimate purpose" is no purpose at all: it is the surrender of purpose. It is the pretense that faith equals meaning. — Dan Barker

The hippie is the scion of surplus value. The dropout can only claim sanctity in a society which offers something to be dropped out of
career, ambition, conspicuous consumption. The effects of hippie sanctimony can only be felt in the context of others who plunder his lifestyle for what they find good or profitable, a process known as rip-off by the hippie, who will not see how savagely he has pillaged intricate and demanding civilizations for his own parodic lifestyle. — Germaine Greer

The general fact of surplus value, namely that the workmen does not get the full value of his labours, and that he is taken advantage of by the capitalist, is obvious. — Edward Carpenter

Fashion is the most intense expression of the phenomenon of neomania, which has grown ever since the birth of capitalism. Neomania assumes that purchasing the new is the same as acquiring value ... If the purchase of a new garment coincides with the wearing out of an old one, then obviously there is no fashion. If a garment is worn beyond the moment of its natural replacement, there is pauperization. Fashion flourishes on surplus, when someone buys more than he or she needs. — Stephen Bayley

But now, in the circulation M-C-M, value suddenly presents itself as a self-moving substance which passes through a process of its own, and for which commodities and money are both mere forms. But there is more to come: instead of simply representing the relations of commodities, it now enters into a private relationship with itself, as it were. It differentiates itself as original value from itself as surplus-value, just as God the Father differentiates himself from himself as God the Son ... Value therefore now becomes value in process, money in process, and, as such, capital. (256) — David Harvey

In reality, the laborer belongs to capital before he has sold himself to capital. His economic bondage is both brought about and concealed by the periodic sale of himself, by his change of masters, and by the oscillation in the market price of labor power. Capitalist production, therefore, under its aspect of a continuous connected process, of a process of reproduction, produces not only commodities, not only surplus value, but it also produces and reproduces the capitalist relation; on the one side the capitalist, on the other the wage-laborer. — Karl Marx

Managers receiving hundreds of thousands a year - and setting their compensation for themselves - are not being paid wages, they are appropriating surplus value in the guise of wages. — Michael Harrington

The distinction between "paid labor" and "housework" implied in working-class men's yearning for the domestic ideal persisted in later-nineteenth-century analyses of women's unpaid labor and was eventually replicated in Capital. Because wives' work was laregely unpaid, and because husbands came to the marketplace as the "possessors" of their wives' labor, Marx did not address the role of housework in the labor exchange that led to surplus value. Neither did he attend to the dynamics that permitted the husband to lay claim, in the price of his own labor, to the value of his wife's work. — Jeanne Boydston

As Peret asserts, the value of such stories resides in the fact that they respond to direct social necessity but in a way that is not obvious in a society dominated by what is utilitarian and functional. Rather they represent a natural surplus of imaginative abundance that may confound or reinforce the way we perceive the world, but which never does so in a simple way. Even though they may have no direct social use, they nonetheless embody the actual state of real relations between people. — Michael Richardson

It is therefore only at the money moment - the moment of capitalist universality - that we can tell where we are in relation to value and surplus-value. — David Harvey

I love the Army-Navy surplus store Surplus Value Center. They have really good long underwear and multicolored bandanas, cool camo jackets, and really, really scary-looking knives. If you're into that sort of thing. — Jill Soloway

Hannah Arendt in her study of totalitarianism borrowed from Immanuel Kant the concept of radical evil, of evil that's so evil that in the end it destroys itself, it's so committed to evil and it's so committed to hatred and cruelty that it becomes suicidal. My definition of it is the surplus value that's generated by totalitarianism. It means you do more violence, more cruelty than you absolutely have to to stay in power. — Christopher Hitchens

The directing motive, the end and aim of capitalist production, is to extract the greatest possible amount of surplus value, and consequently to exploit labor-power to the greatest possible extent. — Karl Marx