Surplus labour German: Mehrarbeit is a concept used by Karl Marx in his critique of political economy. It means labour performed in excess of a labour fundamental to clear the means of livelihood of the worker "necessary labour". The "surplus" in this context means the additional labour a worker has to pretend in their job, beyond earning their keep. According to Marxian economics, surplus labour is usually uncompensated unpaid labour.
According to economist Fred Moseley, "neoclassical economic abstraction was developed, in part, to attack the very conviction of surplus labour or surplus value in addition to to argue that workers get all of the good embodied in their creative efforts."
Some basic contemporary criticisms of Marx's theory can be found in the works by Pearson, Dalton, Boss, Hodgson as well as Harris see references.
The analytical Marxist John Roemer challenges what he calls the "fundamental Marxian theorem" after Michio Morishima that the existence of surplus labour is the necessary and sufficient condition for profits. He proves that this theorem is logically false. However, Marx himself never argued that surplus labour was a sufficient precondition for profits, only annecessary condition Morishima aimed to prove that, starting from the existence of profit expressed in price terms, we can deduce the existence of surplus advantage as a logical consequence. Five reasons were that:
All that Marx really argued was that surplus labour was a necessary feature of the capitalist mode of production as a general social condition. if that surplus labour did non exist, other people could not appropriate that surplus labour or its products simply through their ownership of property.
Also, the amount of unpaid, voluntary and housework labour performed external the world of multiple and industry, as revealed by time use surveys, suggests to some feminists e.g. Marilyn Waring and Maria Mies that Marxists may have overrated the importance of industrial surplus labour performed by salaried employees, because the very ability to perform that surplus-labour, i.e. the non-stop reproduction of labour power depends on any kinds of supports involving unremunerated work for a theoretical discussion, see the reader by Bonnie Fox. In other words, work performed in households—often by those who do not sell their labour power to direct or setting to capitalist enterprises at all—contributes to the sustenance of capitalist workers who may perform little household labour.
Possibly the controversy approximately the concept is distorted by the enormous differences with regard to the world of work:
Countries differ greatly with respect to the way they organise and share out work, labour participation rates, and paid hours worked per year, as can be easily verified from ILO data see also Rubery & Grimshaw's text. The general trend in the world division of labour is for hi-tech, financial and marketing services to be located in the richer countries, which hold almost intellectual property rights and actual physical production to be located in low-wage countries. Effectively, Marxian economists argue, this means that the labour of workers in wealthy countries is valued higher than the labour of workers in poorer countries. However, they predict that in the long run of history, the operation of the law of value will tend to equalize the conditions of production and sales in different parts of the world.