Page 237 - DPOL201_WESTERN_POLITICAL_THOUGHT_ENGLISH

Unit 12: Karl Marx: Class Struggle and Social Change and Theory of Surplus Value

Marx, in spite of his erudite scholarship, was a child of his times. He viewed the non-European Notes
world through the European perspective. His observations, however profound, reflected a great
deal of prevailing Hegelian prejudices and Eurocentricism. Many of the Indian Marxists did not
accept Marx’s formulations on the Asiatic Mode, or his observations on British imperialism in
India.

12.11 Theory of Surplus Value
Marx himself considered his theory of surplus-value his most important contribution to the progress
of economic analysis. It is through this theory that the wide scope of his sociological and historical
thought enables him simultaneously to place the capitalist mode of production in his historical
context, and to find the root of its inner economic contradictions and its laws of motion in the
specific relations of production on which it is based.
As said before, Marx’s theory of classes is based on the recognition that in each class society, part
of society (the ruling class) appropriates the social surplus product. But that surplus product can
take three essentially different forms (or a combination of them). It can take the form of straight
forward unpaid surplus labour, as in the slave mode of production, early feudalism or some
sectors of the Asiatic mode of production (unpaid corvee labour for the Empire). It can take the
form of goods appropriated by the ruling class in the form of use-values pure and simple (the
products of surplus labour), as under feudalism when feudal rent is paid in a certain amount of
produce (produce rent) or in its more modern remnants, such as sharecropping. And it can take a
money form, like money-rent in the final phases of feudalism, and capitalist produts. Surplus-
value is essentially just that: the money form of the social surplus product or, what amounts to the
same, the money product of surplus labour. It has therefore a common root with all other forms of
surplus product: unpaid labour.
This means that Marx’s theory of surplus-value is basically a deduction (or residual) theory of the
ruling classes’ income. The whole social product (the net national income) is produced in the
course of the process of production, exactly as the whole crop is harvested by the peasants. What
happens on the market (or through appropriation of the produce) is a distribution (or redistribution)
or what already has been created. The surplus product, and therefore also its money form, surplus-
value, is the residual of that new (net) social product (income) which remains after the producing
classes have received their compensation (under capitalism: their wages). This ‘deduction’ theory
of the ruling classes’ income is thus ipso factor an exploitaton theory. Not in the ethical sense of
the world-although Marx and Engels obviously manifested a lotof understandable moral indignation
at the fate of all the exploited throughout history, and especially at the fate of the modernproletariat-
but in the economic one. The income of the ruling classes can always be reduced in the final
analysis to the product of unpaid labour: that is the heart of Marx’s theory of exploitation.
Marx likewise laid bare the economic mechanism through which surplus-value originates. At the
basis of that economic mechanism is a huge social upheaval which started in Western Europe in
the 15th century and slowly spread over the rest of the continent and all other continents (in many
so-called underdeveloped countries, it is still going on to this day).
Self-Assessment
Choose the correct options
1. Who said, “The history of all hitherto existing society in the history of class struggles”.
(i) Marx (ii) Engels (iii) Marx-Engels (iv) None of these
2. The label “Utopian Socialists” was first used by ............... in the History of political economy.
(i) Heinrich Marx (ii) Jerome Blanqui (iii) Hegel (iv) None of these

LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY 231