Excuse my forgetfullness/stupidity

[Rafiq]

What exactly is surplus value? Is this the money that the Capitalist would make off the a worker's labour minus the wage he pays the worker?


Also, what exactly is capital?

[$lim_$weezy]

Without getting too deep into it, I believe you are correct about surplus-value. Labor has the peculiar power of producing more value than the employer pays the worker. If the capitalist payed the worker exactly the cost of his creation of value, and paid exactly the value for the materials used in production, he would make no money.

Capital is value that is created by the process of circulation in the market. For example, I buy a banana for a dollar and then sell it to someone for two dollars. Basically, "money which begets money", buying in order to sell (be it merchants' capital or industrial capital).

I don't pretend to fully understand Marx's "Capital", and I hope I haven't misspoken too gravely...

[taka því rólega]

Indeed, surplus value is the way in which profit can be extracted from wage labour - essentially paying a worker less than his hours are worth to the employer (i.e. how much revenue they generate).

Broadly, capital is a factor of production - it can be used in producing goods and is not used up (initially). In more specific Marxian economics I believe capital can represent "value capital" - the investment in labour-power from which surplus value can be extracted (the workers are in essence a means of producing value), and "constant capital" - investment in eg. machinery, from which no surplus value is extracted.

It can also be referred to as finance capital (seen more particularly in Lenin, I believe) which is quite simply money used to buy/provide services etc.

Hope that made sense, correct me if I'm incorrect.

[Zanthorus]

What exactly is surplus value?

Surplus-value is quite simply the amount of money recieved by the capitalist at the end of a given turnover period minus the original capital advanced. "The character and tendency of the process M-C-M, is therefore not due to any qualitative difference between its extremes, both being money, but solely to their quantitative difference. More money is withdrawn from circulation at the finish than was thrown into it at the start... This increment or excess over the original value I call “surplus-value.”" (Capital) Marx was not the first to write about it, in fact he was going to dedicate an entire book (The manuscript of which has been published as 'Theories of Surplus-Value') to covering the history of the theory. Marx's original contribution to the subject was to hypothesise that the only possible source of surplus-value was the unpaid labour of the working-class.

You're original statement is not quite clear but you could be confusing the rate of surplus-value with surplus-value as such. The rate of surplus-value is determined by the ratio of surplus-value to the wages payed out by the capitalist (What Marx calls the 'variable capital) s/v. This is in contradistinction to the rate of profit which is determined by the ratio of surplus-value to the entire capital advanced s/(c + v).

The reason the capitalist is able to obtain surplus-value is because of the fact that it is not the workers' labour which the capitalist buys but in fact his labour-power, the workers' capacity to labour, which the capitalist buys for a definite time period. The value of the workers' capacity to labour is determined by the value of the means of subsistence and education needed to keep the worker in a position adequate to the maintanence of their capacity to labour, whereas what the capitalist recieves is the value created by the exertion of the workers capacity to labour. Thus, the source of surplus-value is unpaid labour even on the assumption that the worker is paid the full value of her labour-power in wages.