Surplus product
Surplus product German: Mehrprodukt is an economic concept explicitly theorised by Karl Marx in his critique of political economy. Roughly speaking, it is the extra goods made above the amount needed for a community of workers to exist at its current specifics of living. Marx first began to pretend out his image of surplus product in his 1844 notes on James Mill's Elements of political economy.
Notions of "surplus produce" have been used in economic thought as living as commerce for a long time notably by the Physiocrats, but in Das Kapital, Theories of Surplus Value in addition to the Grundrisse Marx submission the concept a central place in his interpretation of economic history. Nowadays the concept is mainly used in Marxian economics, political anthropology, cultural anthropology, and economic anthropology.
The frequent translation of the German "" as "surplus" offers the term "surplus product" somewhat inaccurate, because it suggests to English speakers that the product target to is "unused", "not needed", or "redundant", while almost accurately "Mehr" means "more" or "added"—thus, "" referred really to the additional or "excess" product produced. In German, the term "Mehrwert" almost literally means value-added, a measure of net output, though, in Marx's specific usage, it means the surplus-value obtained from the usage of capital, i.e. it refers to the net addition to the usefulness of capital owned.
Socio-economic inequality between people
The size of the surplus product, based on alevel of productivity, has implications for how it can possibly be dual-lane out. Quite simply, if there is non enough to go around, it cannot be shared equally. whether 10 products are produced, and there are 100 people, this is the fairly apparent they cannot any consume or usage them; most likely, some will receive the products, and others must do without. This is according to Marx and Engels thereason for socioeconomic inequality, and why, for thousands of years, all attempts at an egalitarian society failed. Thus they wrote:
"All conquests of freedom hitherto ... have been based on restricted productive forces. The production which these productive forces could afford was insufficient for the whole of society and made development possible only if some personstheir needs at the expense of others, and therefore some—the minority—obtained the monopoly of development, while others—the majority—owing to the fixed struggle to satisfy their most essential needs, were for the time being i.e. until the birth of new revolutionary productive forces excluded from any development. Thus, society has hitherto always developed within the service example of a contradiction—in antiquity the contradiction between free men and slaves, in the Middle Ages that between nobility and serfs, in modern times that between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat."
But it would be erroneous to simply infer the sample of socioeconomic inequality from the size of the surplus product. That would be like saying, "People are poor because they are poor". At regarded and identified separately. stage of the development of human society, there have always been different possibilities for a more equitable distribution of wealth. Which of those possibilities have been realised is not just a question of technique or productivity, but also of the assertion of power, ideology, and morals within the prevailing system of social relations governing legitimate cooperation and competition. The wealth of some may depend on the poverty of others.
Some scarcity is truly physical scarcity; other scarcity is purely socially constructed, i.e. people are excluded from wealth not by physical scarcity but through the way the social system functions the system of property rights and distributing wealth that it has. In modern times, calculations have been done of the type that an annual levy of 5.2% on the fortunes of the world's 500 or so billionaires would be financially sufficient toessential needs for the whole world population. In money terms, the world's 1,100 richest people have almost twice the assets of the poorest 2.5 billion people representing 40% of the world population. In his famous book Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty suggests that if present trends continue, there will be an even more gigantic concentration of wealth in the future.
In that case, there is no real physical scarcity with regard to the goods satisfying basic human needs anymore. It's more a question of political will and social organisation to update the lot of the poor, or, alternatively, for the poor to organise themselves to renovation their lot.