The aspiration of the bourgeoisie to receive extra fee is the cornerstone of a capitalist way of production. Owners of the enterprises found a way to benefit by work of workers whose efforts directly create material benefits in a pursuit of a profit. It is about the surplus value. This concept is central in the economic theory of Marx.
Essence of the surplus value
The capitalist system is characterized by presence of two main economically active groups: capitalists and hired workers. Capitalists own means of production that allows them to organize industrial and trade enterprises, employing those who have only ability to work. The workers who are directly creating material benefits receive the salary for the work. Its size is established at that level which has to provide to the worker tolerable living conditions.
Working for the capitalist, the hired worker actually creates the cost which exceeds the expenses necessary for maintenance of his working capacity and reproduction of labor. This additional cost created by unpaid work of the worker is also called the surplus value in Karl Marx's theory. It is expression of that form of operation which is characteristic of capitalist relations of production.
Marx called production of the surplus value a being of the basic economic law of a capitalist way of production. This law concerns not only the relations between owners and hired workers, but also those relations that arise between various groups of the bourgeoisie: bankers, land owners, industrialists, dealers. Under capitalism the pursuit of the profit taking a form of the surplus value plays a major role in production development.
Surplus value as expression of capitalist operation
In the center of the doctrine about the surplus value the explanation of those mechanisms by means of which capitalist operation in bourgeois society is carried out lies. Process of production of cost possesses internal contradictions as at the same time there is a nonequivalent exchange between the hired worker and the owner of the enterprise. The worker spends a part of the working hours on free of charge to create material benefits which represent the surplus value for the capitalist. As a prerequisite of emergence of the surplus value of classics of Marxism called the fact of transformation of labor into goods. Only under capitalism the owner of money and the free worker can find each other in the market. Nobody can force the worker to work on the capitalist, in this regard he differs from the slave or the serf. Need to provide the existence forces to sell labor him. The theory of the surplus value was developed by Marx long enough. For the first time its provisions in rather worked form were issued in the late fifties of the XIX century in the manuscript of "The critic of political economy" which formed the basis of the fundamental work which received the name "Capital". Some thoughts of the nature of the surplus value meet in works of the 40th years: "Wage labor and capital" and also "Poverty of philosophy".