Surplus Value

Surplus value is an instructive concept for the study of consumer culture insofar as it provides a way of thinking about the social and economic relations underpinning the production of the commodities consumed. In Karl Marx's analysis of capitalism and class conflict, the creation and retention of surplus value was positioned as the main source of profit and the key mechanism through which the proletariat are exploited by the bourgeoisie. Marx argued that before the emergence of capitalism, exchange took place as a means to an end insofar as a certain level of exchange was necessary to ensure basic levels of human subsistence. By contrast, capitalist production seeks to expand or add value and exchange the commodities produced for a higher value than the inputs to the production process. It seeks to increase the rate at which the commodities produced can be exchanged for other commodities, or put another way, it seeks to maximize the price—exchange value in Marx's terms—of the commodities that it produces. It is through this process of expanding value that profits become possible.

Crucial to an understanding of surplus value is an appreciation of Marx's labor theory of value. For Marx, the exchange value (price) of a commodity should be a reflection of the number of labor hours going into its production and the level of skill associated with the work undertaken. So when Adam Smith (1776, 1:ix) noted how, in industrialized or “capitalist” economies, “the whole produce of labour does not always belong to the labourer. He must in most cases share it with the owner of the stock which employs him,” Marx found the basis of his critique.

In his analysis of the capitalist mode of production, Marx suggested that there are direct producers who engage in productive labor and nonproducers who do not and so live off the production of others. Marx refers to the direct producers as the proletariat and the nonproducers as the bourgeoisie and identifies an antagonistic relationship between these two classes that arises as a result of the social mechanisms through which the bourgeoisie appropriate surplus labor from the proletariat. Under capitalism, argued Marx, the means of production—the tools, machinery, and factories necessary to produce the commodities to be exchanged—are owned by the bourgeoisie, and yet the bourgeoisie are not direct producers themselves. The bourgeoisie must therefore employ the proletariat to make use of the means of production and produce commodities for the purposes of exchange and the pursuit of profit. The other side of the equation is that the proletariat do not themselves have access to the means of production and so must sell their labor and capacity to produce commodities. Similarly, the proletariat do not have access to the products of their labor, and so they are dependent on their wages to gain access to the commodities required to meet their basic conditions of survival. In this situation, the capitalist bourgeoisie [Page 1411]have access to the products of the proletariat's labor and although they have not contributed to the production of these commodities, they are the ones in a position to exchange these products in the pursuit of profit.

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