How much is surplus value?

[Lenina Rosenweg]

Surplus value is the amount of the product of our labor power which goes to the capitalist-our boss. I understand the LTV and I understand (more or less) how the percentage of surplus value capitalists can extract varies depending on many things including the organic composition of capital, and the relative strength of the working class.

My question is can we know what percentage of the product of our labor power goes to surplus value?

If someone works in a cubicle for 5 days a week and makes $400 a week, can we know how many days out of a week or a year a worker works for himself and how many days he or she is forced to work for the Man?

How large, relative to the amount we work, is surplus value?

I read an article on libcom a while ago about workers in the 60s/70s who made Rolls Royces. These workers made cars by hand and were highly skilled. There was an estimate to the effect that they worked for themselves only a week out of the year-that is for a year they lived off of what they produced in a week. This sounded extreme but would this be accurate? I imagine the surplus value produced is much more for highly skilled work. I'm still a bit shaky on some of this.

Also would surplus value exist in a socialist society? If there is, how would it be disposed of?

[ckaihatsu]

This is an excellent question and topic, one that I think isn't asked and addressed nearly enough -- especially for people who are relatively new to Marxist economics and may still be trying to wrap their heads around all of the elements within the totally different paradigm.

My understanding -- anyone should feel free to correct me -- is that 'socially necessary labor' is that which is required to sustain and reproduce (biologically, socially) the labor force, going forward into the future.

So right there we're not necessarily talking about hard numbers as finance and economics types may be used to doing -- it's a more *qualitative* bucket of what does it take to keep humanity and civilization more or less moving forward, in terms of labor power.

And, by the same regard, I think this might be the biggest "gray area" for us in our own, "internal" politics and possible societal planned production -- exactly what *should* the "baseline" standard of living be for the 'perpetuation of labor'? Obviously capitalism is incapable of even the basics, like full employment, so that part is a no-brainer, of course, but beyond capitalism, then what?

In the present day, in the context of capitalism, we might use rent payments, mortgage payments, or property values, along with family size, as a way of indexing people's varying strata of standards of living (just a thought), and go from there to calculate other basic personal expenses, thus arriving at some kind of 'socially necessary labor' calculation under capitalism. Any revenue that the employer takes in, based on labor time beyond that which covers the 'socially necessary labor' number, minus the wages paid out for that labor, would be the surplus labor value.

I made a simple 2-step chart based on a line from Jack London's _Iron Heel_ to illustrate this extraction of surplus labor value:


Labor & Capital, Wages & Dividends

http://i47.tinypic.com/dzbdzq.jpg


Here's a another diagram on the same topic:


A Business Perspective on the Declining Rate of Profit

http://i47.tinypic.com/28u781c.jpg


I've always found it curious that among Marxists / socialists / communists / whatever there is still the holdover thinking (for a communist-type economy) of a market-like surveying of demand, for the subsequent production of commodity-like products and services which may then possibly be consumed or may not be.

My point being that in a socialist society the "surplus" would have to be *intentionally planned for in advance*, and so, by definition, wouldn't really be a surplus since waste would be negligible.