Concept in Definition ABC
Miscellanea / / July 04, 2021
By Florencia Ucha, on Feb. 2013
The capital gain is a word that is used in our language to indicate the increase that a thing has experienced in its value and due to causes external to it.
Increase that a good or object experiences due to external causes
“My parents' house has suffered a capital gain since the Palermo neighborhood became a very profitable gastronomic and commercial pole and then this raised the valuation of the properties of area.”
It is a term that has been developed by economic theory and etymologically refers to more value.
Then, the succession of facts, events unrelated to one thing, or else they cause them to suffer an increase in their value and therefore in the intention of people to want to possess them.
The example just given of the property is one that best illustrates the concept that is usually also called as surplus value.
At the behest of the process of production the value will be created by the labor involved.
If not half this hand of the workers on the raw material, to modify it and thus generate a product, it will have no value.
Communism: money that is accumulated by capitalism at the expense of workers' efforts
On the other hand, for the communismThe surplus value consists of the money accumulated by the capitalist class at the expense of the efforts made by the workers.
Concept developed by the economist David Ricardo and taken up by Marx that seeks its suppression because it privileges capitalism to the detriment of the workers
It should be noted that the origin of this word dates back two centuries, in the nineteenth century, and more precisely has been the German philosopher, creator of Marxism, Karl Marx, who has spread it.
According to the ideology held by Marx, surplus value consisted in the accumulation of money perpetrated by the capitalist class thanks to the effort made by the worker in due time.
Because the worker receives a certain salary as payment for the activity that he develops, but of course, there is an additional value, above, that The employee works that is not paid and the one who ends up receiving it is the owner of the means of production, the capitalist, in terms of the ideology Marxist.
Marx considered that each product corresponds to a value that will be closely associated with a time of labor necessary to be produced.
Meanwhile, the work force It is understood by Marx as a product whose price will be linked to what the worker needs to live with dignity.
Now, if an employee only working five hours a day manages to satisfy his own needs and those of his environment but his employer makes him work ten hours, then, there will be five hours that constitute the capital gain of the employer, who precisely owns them, uses them for his own benefit and thus continues to increase his capital.
To put it more clearly, surplus value is simply exploitation in the eyes of Marxism.
We cannot ignore that David Ricardo, an English economist, has been a benchmark of the economy classic and pioneer of macroeconomy, who first theorized about this concept and who ended up influencing Marx.
Ricardo enjoys the milestone of being an economist who has been invoked and read by economists of diverse and antagonistic roots, for example, it is that someone like Marx, ideologically situated at the antipodes, has studied his theory and even his synthesis on surplus value ended influencing him certainly and is what allowed him to conclude that it substantially harms workers and benefits directly to capitalism.
Marx considered surplus value a tremendous social injustice since although the products generate large profits the employee will not receive more money, more salary for it, far from it, but the surplus money will end up in the hands of the capitalists.
Entrepreneurs, according to Marx, were greatly enriched by the effort made by others, and so he considered this system tremendously unfair.
As a consequence, Marxism advocated the disappearance of surplus value and, in return, proposed that it were the workers, at the request of a cooperative, who became owners of the forces of production.
The two synonyms that we use the most instead of this concept that is worth mentioning that is not so frequently used in the language are those of increase and valuation.
Issues in Capital Gains