>OK...here's something that's got me stumped: the
>distinction between "surplus" and "surplus value,"
>especially after the capitalist mode of production.
>I've read from more than one person now that according
>to Marx (or at least a particular reading of him),
>after the capitalist mode of production is abolished,
>it's possible for production to generate a "surplus"
>that can be accumulated, but that "surplus value"
>would no longer exist. My questions are:
>
>(1) Suppose that "surplus" refers to the actual
>use-values produced over and above what's consumed.
>Why can't I use the term "surplus value" to refer to
>the *magnitude* of that surplus relative to some
>metric (not necessarily money, just to make things
>looser)?
>
>(2) Say the answer to question (1) is no, for whatever
>reason. OK, fine. So then we've got a surplus of
>use-values which is not quantified as "surplus value."
>Then I have to ask: well, without this
>quantification, how am I or whatever organization
>through which production is rationally planned able to
>figure out if we're actually producing a surplus or
>deficit?
Don't get stuck with the word "surplus"; pay attention to the word "value" and the specific sense in which Marx uses this word. Surplus labor existed in pre-capitalist societies (and will exist in post-capitalist societies, unless people will choose to live as if there would be no tomorrow), but surplus *value* did not exist (and won't exist under communism). For Marx, surplus *value* refers to the *specific mode* of appropriating surplus labor, *neither* to the fact of appropriating surplus labor as such *nor* to quantification as such. The point of Marxist analysis is to clarify the specificity of capitalism: *what makes capitalism what it is*. Marx writes in _Grundrisse_, for instance: "It is not, then, simply the exchange of _objectified labour_ for _living_ labour...which constitutes capital and hence wage labour, but rather, the exchange of objectified labour as _value_, as self-sufficient value, for living labour as _its_ use value, as use value not for a specific, particular use or consumption, but as use value for _value_....[T]he fact that surplus labour is posited as surplus value of capital means that the worker does not appropriate the product of his own labour; that it appears to him as _alien property_; inversely, that _alien labour_ appears as the property of capital." The *alien* character which products of labor assume, in the guise of *value*, originates only in the ensembles of social relations that are capitalism, *no other*. Value mystifies: "Value, therefore, does not stalk about with a label describing what it is. It is value, rather, that converts every product into a social hieroglyphic....The recent scientific discovery, that the products of labour, so far as they are values, are but material expressions of the human labour spent in their production, marks, indeed, an epoch in the history of the development of the human race, but, by no means, dissipates the mist through which the social character of labour appears to us to be an objective character of the products themselves" (Marx, _Capital_, Vol. 1). Marx did not invent the labour theory of value; political economists whom Marx criticized did. What Marx says is that "discovering" a so-called "secret" -- "the determination of the magnitude of value by labour-time...hidden under the apparent fluctuations in the relative values of commodities" -- in itself does *not* allow us to understand, much less dissipate, the real secret of commodity fetishism: the historical specificity of capitalism -- the fact that *only* under the social relations of capitalism (and no other historical forms prior to it), "the labour-time socially necessary for their production forcibly asserts itself like an over-riding law of Nature" (_Capital_, Vol. 1). The term "surplus value" refers to our subjection to products of our own labor (whereas under feudalism, serfs were subject to lords, not to their products), the discipline of the market which "asserts itself like an over-riding law of Nature." Under communism, products of our labor will lose this alien & inexorable power over us, for we shall be able to consciously & collectively, which is to say politically, decide what, how, & how much (or little) we'll produce & consume; the ends of labor will become *our* ends, with the end of the separation of politics & economy. Hence surplus labor, but no surplus *value*.
Yoshie