Surplus value (n.) is new value extracted as profit like a miner extracts diamonds from a mine, which is created by workers in excess of their own labor-cost.
Surplus value (n.) by the very law of value governing commodity production rightfully belongs to the capitalist and not to the worker.
Surplus value (n.) looks to the capitalist like something his capital produced — for after production he has it, and before he did not.
Surplus value (n.) denies its own origin in its transformed form, profit; it loses its character and becomes unrecognizable.
Surplus value (n.) as surplus labour has a qualitative limit in the working day and the population, and conceived as interest its limit is merely quantitative and beggars all fantasy.
Surplus value (n.) has its ceiling in the physical maximum of the working day, as wages have their floor in the physical minimum of subsistence.
Surplus value (n.) is the capitalist birth-mark a commodity bears: not in how much it is worth but in how much more it is worth than what went into it.
Surplus value (n.) is only realized in the sale, so everyday thinking concludes it is born in the sale.
Surplus value (n.) seemed to the Physiocrats to come not from labour but from the collaboration of nature, since they saw it arise in agriculture alone.
Surplus value (n.) measured by the year makes it look as if its rate hung on mysterious influences from circulation as well as on variable capital and exploitation — an appearance that, disguised as the annual rate of profit, wrecked the Ricardian school from the 1820s on.
Surplus value (n.) is the only real secret, and it is the one thing capitalists and their economists take for granted: a sum would not be capital if it did not enrich itself.
Surplus value (n.) is value like any other, distinguished only by the fact that the worker has never received, and never will receive, an equivalent for it.
Surplus value (n.) stays unpaid congealed labour whatever happens to it — neither the capitalist's 'benevolent intention' to hunt it out nor his spending it as revenue changes what it is.