May Day and Surplus Value

Most Americans don't know what Surplus Value is, and how capitalists exploit and screw them every day of the week.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

Surplus value is a concept used famously by Karl Marx in his critique of political economy, although he did not himself invent the term but he developed its concept. It refers roughly to the new value created by the unpaid labour of the worker upon the value of his labour power, which is freely appropriated by the capitalist and is the base of the profit, thus being the primary basis for capital accumulation.

"Surplus-value and the rate of surplus-value are... the invisible essence to be investigated, whereas the rate of profit and hence the form of surplus-value as profit are visible surface phenomena" - Karl Marx, Capital Vol. 3, Pelican edition, p. 134

For Marx, the gigantic increase in wealth and population from the 19th century onwards was mainly due to the competitive striving to obtain maximum surplus-value from the employment of labor, resulting in an equally gigantic increase of productivity and capital resources. To the extent that increasingly the economic surplus is convertible into money and expressed in money, the amassment of wealth is possible on a larger and larger scale (see capital accumulation and surplus product).

In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels wrote:

The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature's forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground -- what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labor?

Don's stop, read more about how capitalist millionaires and billionaires get that way. It is because they steal and confiscate the surplus value that only the working class produces. Capitalists are parasites, something that the average uneducated person has yet to learn.