857: 6P

Econ 305

Essay III- Value and Surplus Value Theory

Attempt either ONE question from Part A, OR TWO questions from Part B, OR THREE questions from Part C

PART A

1. Explain carefully in a six page essay how each of the following, taken only by itself, shapes relative surplus value:

a. a lengthening of the work day

b. a rise in labor productivity in the wage goods industry

c. a rise in the intensity of labor

d. a permanently lowered real wage for and accepted by productive laborers.

2. Prepare a six page essay in which you explain carefully (a) What are super profits (b) How might a firm within a competitive industry gain more super profits for itself (c) As a result of your answer to (b), what might be the impact on other competitive firms’ behavior in that same industry (d) Explain the connection of your answers to (b) and (c) to Marx’s “composition of capital” (e) Explain the connection of your above answers to the value rate of profit in that industry.

3. Prepare a six page essay to explain (a) How an economic expansion (say a rising rate of capital accumulation) affects market prices in the labor power and means of production markets (b) How those affected markets can cause an economic decline (c) Analyze the two affected markets showing how newly changed conditions in each might offset completely the economic decline argued in your answer to (b) and instead produce continued expansion.

4. Prepare a six page essay in which you explain the following quote: “The notion of relative surplus value (RSV) helps to explain why the value profit rate is pushed up, even as competitive forces also serve to push it down.”

5. Prepare a six page essay that uses the concepts of fundamental, subsumed, and non-class processes to explain the presence and consequences of monopoly power wielded by industrial capitalist in the wage good (V) industry and next in the means of production(C) industry.

PART B

6. How do the three circuits of capital differ from one another? Prepare a three page essay to answer this question.

7. Use what you have learned in the course to prepare a three page essay that explains the connection starting around the 1870s between competition among industrial capitalists located in different European nations and colonialism and imperialism around the world.

PART C

8. How does Marx explain why one TV set equals 800 candy bars? Prepare a two page essay to answer this question.

9. Why is S/V an exact measure of class exploitation? Prepare a two page essay to answer this question.

10. Prepare a two page essay that explains how Marx uses the difference between the use value of labor power and its exchange value to explain the origin of surplus value.

11. If the commodity gold is chosen as money, explain why the societal demand for gold as money equals the sum of prices for all commodities, where each commodity price (in that sum) equals the value of that particular commodity relative to (divided by) the value of gold? First, write down the equation in the above question and then explain it and its terms in two pages.

12. Suppose a person prepares a tax form. Prepare a two page essay in which you explain under what conditions that person’s labor is productive or unproductive in capitalism.