I was reading last year’s comments from Capital and I found one by @Vampire@hexbear.net that I wanted to comment on, if it’s okay. Their comment was

Has anyone discussed how the (Marxist) concept of ‘surplus value’ corresponds to the (non-Marxist economic) concept of ‘value added’?

John Smith in his Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century: Globalization, Super-Exploitation, and Capitalism’s Final Crisis makes the same point, and it is especially of interest to him in national accounts within and especially between nations.

Value-added shouldn’t be seen as value that capitalists somehow add to the product, either because they ‘organized’ the process, took the risk, perfomed advertising, etc., which is how orthodox economists describe it.

The “value added” should be, according to Smith and I agree, thought of as “value captured” … or just surplus value.

When workers produce a product, typically in the Global South, their productive labor is what creats (actually adds) value to the product. Their labor transfers the value of the means of production and also adds value via their direct labor on the objects of labor which produces a new use-value.

The capitalists, typically in the Global North or perhaps some Global South affiliate to a northern firm, pay the workers their wage. With this wage the workers can buy their means of subsistence to reproduce their labor-power. The value of this means of subsistence is the value of labor-power as Marx mentions in chapter 6

But, as we know from chapter 8, “the activity of labor-power, therefore, not only reproduces it’s own value, but produces value over and above this,” - surplus value. But where does this surplus value come into play?

When the capitalists take the product and sell it, typically at northern prices in the context of imperialism, the money they make from the sales (after deducing the costs of the wages and means of production and other costs - taxes, perhaps future investments etc.) are called “value added”, but this isn’t value they’ve added! What is it? Well the capitalists take the money from the “value added” and use it to purchase, and consume, other products of labor - products of labor that have value - products of labor that the working class, as an aggregate, can’t afford after spending their wages on their means of subsistence. This “value added”, when in money-form, is used by capitalists to consume surplus value that workers have produced elsewhere in the economy.

“Value added” is value added indeed, it’s surplus value that the workers have added to the economy that capitalists are able to capture from us. Hence value added is actually value extracted.

But, this exploitation is masked in orthodox economics and viewed as value that the capitalists somehow rightfully deserve. They claim it is the capitalists’ value added, not our surplus value exploited.

From Smith

Also, and this is my own take here so take it with a critical eye, the above description of value added is how I understand Wright’s concept of the capitalist consumption matrix and the super-integrated labour value. This super-integrated labor value is an accounting of labor value which counts the surplus value produced in the economy which appears as value added, and hence allows natural prices to correspond with value without a transformation proble… but this is getting in the weeds and is one of many interpretations of the weeds. As already mentioned here, others disagree with Wright’s framework and there are other models of these weeds such as the standard interpretation (which can be found in Howard & King’s The Political Economy of Marx), TSSI (tempral single system interpetation), the Sraffian/neo-Ricardian school which ends up rejecting value as in anyway tied to price, whatever school Duncan Foley is in… like I said this is getting into the weeds I’m a novice explorer. So this last paragraph isn’t gospel.