From: Dogan Goecmen (Dogangoecmen@AOL.COM)
Date: Wed Nov 29 2006 - 12:59:55 EST
Jurriaan, thank you very much for this illuminating input. I think the idea can even be traced back to Aristotle. However in modern times we should not forget Locke as well. In Two Treatises on Government the chapter on property is very important on this. Your reference to Ibn Khaldun is in particular interesting because it challenges our traditional Western-Euro-centred approaches. Thank you again. Cheers Dogan In einer eMail vom 29.11.2006 18:37:44 Westeuropäische Normalzeit schreibt adsl675281@TISCALI.NL: The German word for "surplus value" (Mehrwert, literally more-value) means simply value-added. As Marx discusses in his manuscript "Theories of Surplus Value", the political economists struggled theoretically with the problem of what the ultimate origin of the new additional value was, proposing various solutions based on concepts of productive versus unproductive labour, earnt versus unearnt income, and wealth-consuming versus wealth-creating activities. The only thing that Marx did that was new, was to reduce all surplus-value to surplus-labour, i.e. the substance of surplus-value was surplus labour. In his Phd Thesis, the New Zealand Marxist Ronald L. Meek traced the theoretical origin of the concept of an economic surplus back to Thomas Mun ((1571-1641), but I think Ibn Khaldun, (1332-1406) already referred to it. In neoclassical economics, the issue is resolved with the concept of the "factors of production", each adding to the new value, to which Marx sarcastically referred as the "holy trinity of political economy". Friedrich Engels formulated the problem like this: "Whence comes this surplus-value? It cannot come either from the buyer buying the commodities under their value, or from the seller selling them above their value. For in both cases the gains and the losses of each individual cancel each other, as each individual is in turn buyer and seller. Nor can it come from cheating, for though cheating can enrich one person at the expense of another, it cannot increase the total sum possessed by both, and therefore cannot augment the sum of the values in circulation. (...) This problem must be solved, and it must be solved in a purely economic way, excluding all cheating and the intervention of any force - the problem being: how is it possible constantly to sell dearer than one has bought, even on the hypothesis that equal values are always exchanged for equal values?" http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/anti-duhring/ch19.htm Gil Skillman has made an argument, that this way of framing the problem does not really make sense, but I do not know his reasons yet exactly. These days, of course, very large gains in monetary value can be created simply through manipulating trading relations, which is one reason why Marx went out of fashion among many. The modern sense of "value-added" is simply the value of gross output from production less intermediate goods and services used up, defined either "gross" (including value of economic depreciation and various costs associated with the maintenance of fixed assets) or net (excluding those items). This concept is formally based on the theory of "factors of production", with the exception of land - only the value of land improvements is regarded as adding to new value. Pure land rents are normally excluded from the concept of value-added. "Production" in this case is generally defined as the activity of residential institutional units in transforming inputs into outputs, such that monetary income is generated thereby. Jurriaan
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