Thus, because the accumulation of capital normally stimulates the growth of the productive forces, this has the effect that the size of the surplus product which can be traded will normally grow also.
42.
As soon as a permanent surplus product can be produced, the moral-political question arises as to how it should be distributed, and for whose benefit surplus-labour should be performed.
43.
For most of human prehistory, Marxian writers like Ernest Mandel and V . Gordon Childe argued, there existed no economic surplus product of any kind at all, except very small or incidental surpluses.
44.
"The classical economists are therefore quite right to maintain that the consumption of surplus product by productive, instead of unproductive, workers is a characteristic feature of the process of accumulation . "-736
45.
However it is never possible to obtain mathematically exact or fully objective distinctions between necessary and surplus product, because social needs and investment requirements are always subject to moral debate and political contests between social classes.
46.
Although it is nowadays possible to measure the number of hours worked in a country with reasonable accuracy, there have been few attempts by social statisticians to estimate the surplus product in terms of labour hours.
47.
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 ).
48.
An alternative view of socialism prefiguring the neoclassical models of market socialism consisted of conceptions of market socialism based on crises caused by over-accumulation of capital and lack of conscious control over the surplus product.
49.
The strong defeat the weak, and it becomes possible for a social elite to gain control over the surplus-labour and surplus product of the working population; they can live off the labour of others.
50.
From that point on, the surplus product is formed within a " class " relationship, in which the exploitation of surplus labour combines with active or passive " resistance " to that exploitation.
