----- Original Message ----- From: "Gil Skillman" <gskillman@mail.wesleyan.edu> Sent: Monday, April 29, 2002 5:37 PM Subject: Comment on the definition of surplus value Greetings from a former listmember and current archive-peruser. I wanted to write in support on Ian's comment in the following passage: >I think you are correct in saying that the capital of slave owners is part of the fixed capital of the slave owners, as a herd of cattle would be part of the fixed capital of a farmer (as indeed US slave-owners mostly were). However, I think it is a bit rigid to say that the only form of 'surplus-value' in a broad sense that can exist is a surplus of exchange value on variable capital. This is certainly the most dynamic form of surplus value, the only kind that is part of a ssytem of self-valorising value. Merchant capital and slave-owner's capital don't have the same dynamic role: they depend on differentials in costs of production which globalising capital tends to reduce. As long as we are clear about the respective forms of 'surplus-value' it may be less confusing to accept then alongside the capitalist variety.< In Capital V. I, Marx defines surplus value as the increment (M' minus M) arising from a circuit of capital M--C--M', subject to 2 conditions: 1) the increment must represent the "valorization" of value, that is, the creation of new value financed by the initial advance of capital, not simply a redistribution of existing value; and 2) this increment of newly created value must be transferred from producers to non-producers (i.e., capitalists) so that, for example, a capitalist can't, by this stipulation, create surplus value by purchasing leather, adding his/her own labor to create a pair of boots, selling the result, and pocketing the difference. The idea that surplus value comes from the advance of *variable* capital is thus not part of Marx's *definition* of capital, but rather a theoretical *result* of applying this definition to the particular case of the capitalist mode of production, in which workers are assumed to be "free in the double sense," and particularly in the sense of being "free" to sell their own labor power. Thus, the valorized surplus labor of slaves would count as "surplus value" by Marx's definition, just as Marx understood surplus value to arise from the circuit of usury capital given that the latter was advanced to value producers, even though this circuit did not involve the purchase of labor power. FWIW, Gil
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