Surplus value = the value generated - cost of labor power
Slaves do create much more surplus value than workers. Remember that earlier supporters of classical liberalism were slave owners or supported the slave trade
this post was submitted on 12 Oct 2023
13 points (100.0% liked)
GenZedong
4186 readers
25 users here now
This is a Dengist community in favor of Bashar al-Assad with no information that can lead to the arrest of Hillary Clinton, our fellow liberal and queen. This community is not ironic. We are Marxists-Leninists.
This community is for posts about Marxism and geopolitics (including shitposts to some extent). Serious posts can be posted here or in /c/GenZhou. Reactionary or ultra-leftist cringe posts belong in /c/shitreactionariessay or /c/shitultrassay respectively.
We have a Matrix homeserver and a Matrix space. See this thread for more information. If you believe the server may be down, check the status on status.elara.ws.
Rules:
- No bigotry, anti-communism, pro-imperialism or ultra-leftism (anti-AES)
- We support indigenous liberation as the primary contradiction in settler colonies like the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Israel
- If you post an archived link (excluding archive.org), include the URL of the original article as well
- Unless it's an obvious shitpost, include relevant sources
- For articles behind paywalls, try to include the text in the post
- Mark all posts containing NSFW images as NSFW (including things like Nazi imagery)
founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
This person is talking out of their ass.
I guess you could make a really stretched semantic argument that surplus isn't the correct term, as it implies that the labourer also receives some of the value of their labour. Even so, the labourer produces something of value, which an owner then reaps the rewards of. That's surplus value.
I guess you could also make a historical argument in that the concept of surplus value only came about contemporaneously to wage labour, but that's also quite weak. Value and labour existed before wage labour, so surplus value also existed, regardless of when it was first formally conceptualized.
Agree with your take here.
It could probably be argued that it's not surplus value in a strictly academic sense, but it is in a very practical sense.
In this case, it's a distinction without a difference, and I can't imagine the benefit of making that distinction.
Note that "slaves would give you as much if not more surplus value than workers you have to pay" is one of the central problems here. They surely would give more surplus value in %, but in absolute values they would only do so in very primitive level of development, and even then not necessarily since even in antiquity slave labour was often considered inefficient.
Marx write more of this in Capital iirc.