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67-587: Bergen Sporvei AS was a municipal owned public transport company that operated in Bergen , Norway from 1898 to 1998. The company operated both the Bergen Tramway , Bergen trolleybus and the yellow buses in Bergen. The company was founded as Bergen Elektriske Sporvei in 1898 to operate the tramway that was built in Bergen. After the municipality nationalized the tramway it changed name to Bergen Sporvei. Eventually

134-435: A defined time-interval) into the necessary product and the surplus product . Economically speaking, the "necessary" product refers to the output of products and services necessary to maintain a population of workers and their dependents at the prevailing standard of life (effectively, their total reproduction cost). The "surplus" product is whatever is produced in excess of those necessaries. Socially speaking, this division of

201-489: A factor often omitted from theories of economic development, namely, the yearly fluctuations of agricultural yields, which even at a national level could amount to an average of over 25%. Consequently, periodical subsistence crises became inevitable, crises greater or less in degree but which at their worst could produce a decline in economic life and hence in the civilisation it supported. For this reason, as long as agricultural productivity had not progressed beyond that stage, it

268-415: A government owning all or a controlling stake of the company's shares . This form is often referred to as a state-owned enterprise . A state-owned enterprise might variously operate as a not-for-profit corporation , as it may not be required to generate a profit; as a commercial enterprise in competitive sectors; or as a natural monopoly . Governments may also use the profitable entities they own to support

335-459: A graph from, for example, the year zero, we would obtain a tangent curve, with the sharp bend occurring in the 19th century. Within the space of 100 years, a gigantic increase in productivity occurred with new forms of technology and labor-cooperation. This was, according to Marx, the "revolutionary" aspect of the capitalist mode of production , and it meant a very large increase in the surplus product created by human labour. Marx believed it could be

402-674: A long time (notably by the Physiocrats ), but in Das Kapital , Theories of Surplus Value and the Grundrisse Marx gave the concept a central place in his interpretation of economic history. Nowadays the concept is mainly used in Marxian economics , political anthropology , cultural anthropology , and economic anthropology . The frequent translation of the German " Mehr " as "surplus" makes

469-402: A net addition to the stock of wealth. A central theoretical question was then to explain the kinds of influences on the size of the surplus, or how the surplus originated, since that had important consequences for the funds available for re-investment, tax levies, the wealth of nations, and (especially) economic growth . This was theoretically a confusing issue, because sometimes it seemed that

536-399: A quarter of the world population. Many of the colonized countries originally did not have a state apparatus, only chiefdoms. The size of the surplus product, based on a certain level of productivity, has implications for how it can possibly be shared out. Quite simply, if there is not enough to go around, it cannot be shared equally. If 10 products are produced, and there are 100 people, it

603-600: A reliable surplus product makes possible an initial technical or economic division of labour in which producers exchange their products. In addition, a secure surplus product makes possible population growth , i.e. less starvation, infanticide, or abandonment of the elderly or infirm. Finally, it creates the material basis for a social hierarchy, where those at the top of the hierarchy possess prestige goods which commoners do not have access to. The first real "take off" in terms of surpluses, economic growth, and population growth probably occurred during what V. Gordon Childe called

670-502: A separate domain (the domain of commercial activity), quantifiable by means of money-prices. A socialist society, Marxian economists argue, also has a surplus product from an economic point of view, insofar as more is produced than is consumed. Nevertheless, the creation and distribution of the surplus product would begin to operate under different rules. In particular, how the new wealth is allocated would be decided much more according to popular-democratic and egalitarian principles, using

737-423: A specific state institution or branch of government, used exclusively by that branch, such as a research laboratory. The latter refers to assets and resources owned by the population of a state which are mostly available to the entire public for use, such as a public park (see public space ). In neoclassical economic theory , the desirability of state ownership has been studied using contract theory . According to

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804-495: A stable division of labour, and a significant labour productivity, regardless of how exactly that surplus product is produced, what it consists of, and how it is distributed. That depends on the social relations and relations of production specific to a society, within the framework of which surplus labour is performed. Thus, the exact forms taken by the surplus product are specific to the type of society which creates it. If we plotted economic growth or population growth rates on

871-425: A surplus arose out of clever trading in already existing assets, while at other times it seemed that the surplus arose because new value was added in production. In other words, a surplus could be formed in different ways, and one could get rich either at the expense of someone else, or by creating more wealth than there was before, or by a mixture of both. This raised the difficult problem of how, then, one could devise

938-401: A system for grossing and netting incomes & expenditures to estimate only the value of the new additional wealth created by a country. For centuries, there was little agreement about that, because rival economists each had their own theory about the real sources of wealth-creation —even if they might agree that the value of production must equal the sum of the new revenue which it generates for

1005-406: A whole. As such, state ownership is only one possible expression of public ownership, which itself is one variation of the broader concept of social ownership. In the context of socialism, public ownership implies that the surplus product generated by publicly owned assets accrues to all of society in the form of a social dividend , as opposed to a distinct class of private capital owners. There

1072-550: Is a natural monopoly or because the government is promoting economic development and industrialization . State-owned enterprises may or may not be expected to operate in a broadly commercial manner and may or may not have monopolies in their areas of activity. The transformation of public entities and government agencies into government-owned corporations is sometimes a precursor to privatization . State capitalist economies are capitalist market economies that have high degrees of government-owned businesses. Public ownership of

1139-433: Is a concept theorised by Karl Marx in his critique of political economy . Roughly speaking, it is the extra goods produced above the amount needed for a community of workers to survive at its current standard of living. Marx first began to work out his idea of surplus product in his 1844 notes on James Mill 's Elements of political economy . Notions of "surplus produce" have been used in economic thought and commerce for

1206-416: Is a process of transferring private or municipal assets to a central government or state entity. Municipalization is the process of transferring private or state assets to a municipal government. A state-owned enterprise is a commercial enterprise owned by a government entity in a capitalist market or mixed economy . Reasons for state ownership of commercial enterprises are that the enterprise in question

1273-416: Is a wide variety of organizational forms for state-run industry, ranging from specialized technocratic management to direct workers' self-management . In traditional conceptions of non-market socialism, public ownership is a tool to consolidate the means of production as a precursor to the establishment of economic planning for the allocation of resources between organizations, as required by government or by

1340-563: Is desirable. In their model, the government and a private firm can invest to improve the quality of a public good and to reduce its production costs. It turns out that private ownership results in strong incentives to reduce costs, but it may also lead to poor quality. Hence, depending on the available investment technologies, there are situations in which state ownership is better. The Hart-Shleifer-Vishny theory has been extended in many directions. For instance, some authors have also considered mixed forms of private ownership and state ownership. In

1407-464: Is fairly obvious they cannot all consume or use them; most likely, some will get the products, and others must do without. This is according to Marx and Engels the ultimate reason for socio economic inequality , and why, for thousands of years, all attempts at an egalitarian society failed. Thus they wrote: "All conquests of freedom hitherto ... have been based on restricted productive forces . The production which these productive forces could provide

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1474-409: Is likely that the 90 people would be willing to work for the 10 people who own more grain than they can consume, in order to get some extra grain. If the surplus product is simply held in reserve, wasted or consumed, no economic growth (or enlarged economic reproduction ) occurs. Only when the surplus is traded and/or reinvested does it become possible to increase the scale of production. For most of

1541-681: Is that human needs and wants expand. Thus, as the surplus product increases, the necessary product per person also increases, which usually means an increase in the standard of living. In this context, Marx distinguishes between the physical minimum requirements for the maintenance of human life, and a moral-historical component of earnings from work. This distinction is however somewhat deceptive, for several reasons. 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. The main reasons were: The formation of

1608-473: The Neolithic Revolution , i.e. the beginning of the widespread use of agriculture , from about 12,000 to 10,000 years ago onward, at which time the world population is estimated to have been somewhere between 1 and 10 million. Archaeologist Geoffrey Dimbleby comments: "It has been calculated that if man had never progressed beyond the hunting and food-gathering stage, the maximum population which

1675-423: The means of production is a subset of social ownership , which is the defining characteristic of a socialist economy. However, state ownership and nationalization by themselves are not socialist, as they can exist under a wide variety of different political and economic systems for a variety of different reasons. State ownership by itself does not imply social ownership where income rights belong to society as

1742-440: The surplus-value obtained from the use of capital, i.e. it refers to the net addition to the value of capital owned). In Theories of Surplus Value , Marx says in classical economics the "surplus" referred to an excess of gross income over cost , which implied that the value of goods sold was greater than the value of the costs involved in producing or supplying them. That was how you could "make money". The surplus represented

1809-489: The Hart-Shleifer-Vishny model it is assumed that all parties have the same information, while Schmitz (2023) has studied an extension of their analysis allowing for asymmetric information . Moreover, the Hart-Shleifer-Vishny model assumes that the private party derives no utility from provision of the public good. Besley and Ghatak (2001) have shown that if the private party (a non-governmental organization) cares about

1876-705: The aggregated surplus of millions of agricultural workers was easily enough to support a large number of towns and to foster the development of industry, commerce and banking. Much as they admired agriculture and depended on it, the Romans literally identified " civilization " with cities ( civitates )." Specific to the surplus product within capitalist society, as Marx discusses in Das Kapital , are these main aspects (among others): Marx believed that, by splitting purely economic-commercial considerations off from legal-moral, political or religious considerations, capitalist society for

1943-472: The agricultural regime followed, between 70 and 90 percent of the labour input in early civilizations was, of necessity, devoted to food production. This means that all early civilizations had to remain predominantly agricultural. It also means that the surplus resources available to the upper classes were never large in relation to total production and had to be used carefully. Because of this, strategies for increasing revenue had to be mainly political: increasing

2010-484: The capitalist surplus product exclusively in terms of the relationship between the value of necessary labour and surplus labour ; at any one time, this surplus product is lodged simultaneously in money, commodities (goods), and claims to labour-services, and therefore is not simply a "physical" surplus product (a stockpile of additional goods). In Marx's view, as he expresses it in the Grundrisse all economising reduces to

2077-437: The company also started operating buses. Both the trams and buses where yellow. In 1965 the tramway was closed and replaced with trolleybuses, also operated by Bergen Sporvei. As a consequence of the municipal merger in Bergen in 1972, Laksevåg Kommunale Rutebilselskap was merged into Bergen Sporvei. After the municipal merger there were a number of bus companies in Bergen, and Bergen Sporvei only retained route permissions within

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2144-797: The complexities are revealed when they try to measure the surplus product of a given economic community. In producing, people must continually maintain their assets, replace assets, and consume things but they also can create more beyond those requirements, assuming sufficient productivity of labour. This social surplus product can be: Thus, for a simple example, surplus seeds could be left to rot, stored, eaten, traded for other products, or sown on new fields. But if, for example, 90 people own 5 sacks of grain, and 10 people own 100 sacks of grain, it would be physically impossible for those 10 people to use all that grain themselves—most likely they would either trade that grain, or employ other people to farm it. Since 5 sacks of grain are insufficient for 90 people, it

2211-485: The cost of using a piece of land they do not own. The increasing economic division of labour is closely associated with the growth of trade and goes together with an increasing a social division of labour . As Ashley Montagu puts it, "barter, trade, and commerce largely depend on a society's exchangeable surpluses." One group in society utilizes its position in society (e.g. the management of reserves, military leadership, religious authority, etc.) to gain control over

2278-419: The development of human society, there have always been different possibilities for a more equitable distribution of wealth. Which of those possibilities have been realised is not just a question of technique or productivity, but also of the assertion of power, ideology, and morals within the prevailing system of social relations governing legitimate cooperation and competition. The wealth of some may depend on

2345-566: The earliest known state organizations emerged in Mesopotamia (3700 BC), Egypt (3300 BC), the Indus Valley (2500 BC) and China (1400 BC). In various parts of the world, e.g. Africa and Australasia , tribal societies and chiefdoms persisted for much longer before state formation occurred. Many modern states originated out of colonialism . For example, the British empire at its largest contained

2412-468: The economy of human labour-time. The greater human productivity is, the more time there is—potentially—to produce more than is necessary to simply reproduce the population. Alternatively, that extra time can be devoted to leisure, but who gets the leisure and who gets to do the extra work is usually strongly influenced by the prevailing power and moral relations, not just economics. The corollary of increasing wealth in society, with rising productivity,

2479-444: The first permanent surpluses are associated with tribal groups who are more or less settled in one territory, and stored foodstuffs. Once some reserves and surpluses exist, tribes can diversify their production, and members can specialise in producing tools, weapons, containers, and ornaments. Modern archaeological findings show that this development actually began in the more complex hunter-gatherer (foraging) societies. The formation of

2546-459: The first time in history made it possible to express the economic functions applying to all types of society in their purest forms. In pre-capitalist society, "the economy" did not exist as a separate abstraction or reality , any more than long-term mass unemployment existed (other than in exceptional cases, such as wars or natural disasters). It is only when the "cash nexus" mediates most resource allocation, that "the economy" becomes viewed as

2613-476: The framework of a contradiction —in antiquity the contradiction between free men and slaves, in the Middle Ages that between nobility and serfs, in modern times that between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat." But it would be erroneous to simply infer the pattern of socioeconomic inequality from the size of the surplus product. That would be like saying, "People are poor because they are poor". At each stage of

2680-416: The future. In that case, there is no real physical scarcity with regard to the goods satisfying basic human needs anymore. It's more a question of political will and social organisation to improve the lot of the poor, or, alternatively, for the poor to organise themselves to improve their lot. The category of surplus product is a transhistorical economic category, meaning it applies to any society with

2747-467: The general budget. The creation of a state-owned enterprise from other forms of public property is called corporatization . In Soviet-type economies , state property was the dominant form of industry as property. The state held a monopoly on land and natural resources, and enterprises operated under the legal framework of a nominally planned economy , and thus according to different criteria than enterprises in market and mixed economies. Nationalization

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2814-500: The good of all, or whether they are essentially exploitative, with governing elites gaining wealth and power at the expense of the majority. For most documented examples, the latter seems closer to reality. In terms of scale, however, it is only with the benefit of centralized state control that large populations can be integrated and supported; the collapse of states... is inevitably followed by population decline." Archaeologist Bruce G. Trigger comments: "It appears that, regardless of

2881-493: The history of urban civilisation, excess foodstuffs were the main basis of the surplus product, whether appropriated through trade, tribute, taxation, or some other method. In Marxism, the existence of a "surplus product" normally assumes the ability to perform surplus labour , i.e. extra labour beyond that which is necessary to maintain the direct producers and their family dependents at the existing standard of life. In Capital , Vol. 1, chapter 9, section 4, Marx actually defines

2948-494: The material basis for a transition to communism in the future, a form of human society in which all could live to their potential, because there was enough to satisfy all human needs for everybody. Economic historian Paul Bairoch comments: "...in traditional societies the average agricultural worker produced an amount of foodstuff only about 20 to 30% in excess of his family's consumption. ... These percentages—this 20 to 30% surplus—acquire special meaning if we take into account

3015-525: The means of production may be labelled state socialism . State ownership was recognized by Friedrich Engels in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific as, by itself, not doing away with capitalism, including the process of capital accumulation and structure of wage labor. Engels argued that state ownership of commercial industry would represent the final stage of capitalism, consisting of ownership and management of large-scale production and manufacture by

3082-426: The number of farmers controlled, creating situations in which ruling groups shared available resources more disproportionately according to rank, or persuading farmers to surrender marginally greater amounts of surplus production without increasing the cost of the mechanisms needed to ensure social control." Given the rather low labour-productivity of agrarian societies, a proportionally large amount of (surplus-)labour

3149-436: The old municipal borders was well as Laksevåg . In 1998, Pan Trafikk , operating the red suburban buses was merged with Bergen Sporvei, creating the new company Gaia Trafikk . This Norwegian tram- or light rail-related article is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Public ownership In market-based economies, state-owned assets are often managed and operated as joint-stock corporations with

3216-400: The poverty of others. Some scarcity is truly physical scarcity; other scarcity is purely socially constructed , i.e. people are excluded from wealth not by physical scarcity but through the way the social system functions (the system of property rights and distributing wealth that it has). In modern times, calculations have been done of the type that an annual levy of 5.2% on the fortunes of

3283-522: The producers. Political economy was originally considered to be a "moral science", which arose out of the moral and juridical ambiguities of trading processes themselves. It was analytically difficult to take the step from the incomes of individuals, the immediate source of which was rather obvious, to a consideration of the incomes of groups, social classes and nations. Somehow, a "system of transactors" showing aggregate sales and purchases, costs and incomes had to be devised, but just exactly how that system

3350-399: The property rights approach based on incomplete contracting (developed by Oliver Hart and his co-authors), ownership matters because it determines what happens in contingencies that were not considered in prevailing contracts. The work by Hart, Shleifer and Vishny (1997) is the leading application of the property rights approach to the question whether state ownership or private ownership

3417-524: The public good, then the party with the larger valuation of the public good should always be the owner, regardless of the parties' investment technologies. More recently, some authors have shown that the investment technology also matters in the Besley-Ghatak framework if an investing party is indispensable or if there are bargaining frictions between the government and the private party. Surplus product Surplus product (German: Mehrprodukt )

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3484-501: The ruling elite controls the production and distribution of the surplus product, it thereby also controls the state. In turn, this gives rise to a moral or religious ideology which justifies superior and inferior positions in the division of labour , and explains why some people are naturally entitled to appropriate more resources than others. Archaeologist Chris Scarre comments: "There has been some debate as to whether states should be considered beneficent institutions, operating for

3551-429: The same thing. The system of surplus-extraction might also be a mix of staple finance and wealth finance. The use of the term "finance" for the appropriation of a surplus is just as troublesome as the term "surplus product". Commoners required to pay a levy, tax or tribute to the landowners, on pain of imprisonment or death, obviously are not making an "investment" for which they get a return, but instead are forced to pay

3618-417: The social product reflects the respective claims which the labouring class and the ruling class make on the new wealth created. Strictly speaking, however, such an abstract, general distinction is a simplification, for at least three reasons. The concept of a social surplus product seems very simple and straightforward at first sight, but for social scientists it is actually a quite complex concept. Many of

3685-522: The social surplus product; as the people in this elite group assert their social power, everyone else is forced to leave the control over the surplus product to them. Although there is considerable controversy and speculation among archaeologists about how exactly these early rulers came to power (often because of a lack of written records), there is good evidence to suggest that the process does occur, particularly in tribal communities or clans which grow in size beyond 1,500 or so people. From that point on,

3752-555: The space of 40 to 60 years to the transition from an average surplus of the order of 25% to something more like 50% and over, thus surpassing—for the first time in the history of mankind—what might be called the risk-of-famine limit; in other words, a really bad harvest no longer meant, as in the past, serious shortage or actual famine. The agricultural revolution... prepared the way for the industrial revolution." Economic historian Roberto Sabatino Lopez adds that: "Though most farmers and peasants individually produced very little surplus,

3819-484: The state's management policies, though these rights are not property rights as they are not transmissible. For example, if a family is allocated an apartment that is state owned, it will have been granted a tenancy of the apartment, which may be lifelong or inheritable, but the management and control rights are held by various government departments . There is a distinction to be made between state ownership and public property. The former may refer to assets operated by

3886-564: The state. Within the United Kingdom, public ownership is mostly associated with the Labour Party (a centre-left democratic socialist party), specifically due to the creation of Clause IV of the "Labour Party Manifesto" in 1918. "Clause IV" was written by Fabian Society member Sidney Webb . When ownership of a resource is vested in the state, or any branch of the state such as a local authority , individual use "rights" are based on

3953-527: The state. State ownership is advocated as a form of social ownership for practical concerns, with the state being seen as the obvious candidate for owning and operating the means of production. Proponents assume that the state, as the representative of the public interest , would manage resources and production for the benefit of the public. As a form of social ownership, state ownership may be contrasted with cooperatives and common ownership. Socialist theories and political ideologies that favor state ownership of

4020-481: 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. To maintain social order and enforce a basic morality among a growing population, a centralized state apparatus emerges with soldiers and officials, as a distinct group in society which is subsidized from the surplus product, via taxes, tributes, rents and confiscations (including war booty). Because

4087-486: The term "surplus product" somewhat inaccurate, because it suggests to English speakers that the product referred to is "unused", "not needed", or "redundant", while most accurately "Mehr" means "more" or "added"—thus, " Mehrprodukt " refers really to the additional or "excess" product produced. In German, the term "Mehrwert" most literally means value-added , a measure of net output, (though, in Marx's particular usage, it means

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4154-532: The world's 500 or so billionaires would be financially sufficient to guarantee essential needs for the whole world population . In money terms, the world's 1,100 richest people have almost twice the assets of the poorest 2.5 billion people representing 40% of the world population. In his famous book Capital in the Twenty-First Century , Thomas Piketty suggests that if present trends continue, there will be an even more gigantic concentration of wealth in

4221-450: The world's surface could support at any one time would be 20–30 million people." As regards extraction of a surplus from the working population (whether as a tax, a tribute, a rent or some other method), modern anthropologists and archaeologists distinguish between "staple finance" and "wealth finance". They do not like the term "surplus product" anymore, because of its Marxist connotations and definitional controversies, but it boils down to

4288-476: Was insufficient for the whole of society and made development possible only if some persons satisfied their needs at the expense of others , and therefore some—the minority—obtained the monopoly of development, while others—the majority—owing to the constant struggle to satisfy their most essential needs, were for the time being (i.e. until the birth of new revolutionary productive forces) excluded from any development. Thus, society has hitherto always developed within

4355-435: Was needed in the ancient world to produce a relatively small amount of physical surplus. Archaeologist Brian M. Fagan comments: "The combination of economic productivity, control over sources and distribution of food and wealth, the development and maintenance of the stratified social system and its ideology, and the ability to maintain control by force was the vital ingredient of early states". According to Gil Stein ,

4422-409: Was practically impossible to conceive of a continuous progress in the development of civilisations, let alone of the accelerated scientific and technical progress that is an essential characteristic of modern times. The profound changes in the system of agricultural production that preceded the industrial revolution brought that particular deadlock to an end. The consequent increase in productivity led in

4489-438: Was put together, could differ a great deal, depending on "from whose point of view" the transactions were considered. The Physiocratic school, for example, believed that all wealth originated from the land, and their social accounting system was designed to show this clearly. In Das Kapital and other writings, Marx divides the new "social product" of the working population (the flow of society's total output of new products in

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