The Idea Of Surplus

This book provides an analytical understanding of some of Tagore’s most contested and celebrated works and ideas. It reflects on his critique of nationalism, aesthetic worldview, and the idea of ‘surplus in man’ underlying his life and works. It discusses the creative notion of surplus that stands not for ‘profit’ or ‘value’, but for celebrating human beings’ continuous quest for reaching out beyond one’s limits. It highlights, among other themes, how the idea of being ‘Indian’ involves stages of evolution through a complex matrix of ideals, values and actions—cultural, historical, literary and ideological. Examining the notion of the ‘universal’, contemporary scholars come together in this volume to show how ‘surplus in man’ is generated over the life of concrete particulars through creativity. The work brings forth a social scientific account of Tagore’s thoughts and critically reconstructs many of his epochal ideas. Lucid in analysis and bolstered with historical reflection, this book will be a major intervention in understanding Tagore’s works and its relevance for the contemporary human and social sciences. It will interest scholars and researchers of philosophy, literature and cultural studies.

Theories of Surplus Value is a book that, unlike Marx, actually needs an introduction. Theories was intended to be collected and published as the fourth volume to Marx's Capital, but after Engels had successfully collected and published volumes two and three after Marx's death, Engels died before he could publish it. Theories has had a long history of being in-and-out of publication, and particularly in-and-out of being an actually accessible publication. In 1905, the infamously-hated-by-Lenin Karl Kautsky, published the first edition of the manuscript in three volumes separated and rearranged by Adam Smith in volume one, to David Ricardo in the other two volumes, with the breakup of the Ricardian school as the third volume. Kautsy's version circulated in print and was translated to many languages over the decades, remaining the sole version of Theories until The Institute of Marxism-Leninism published a new German version. This arrangement, while still relatively close to Kautsy's narrative arrangement of tracing surplus value from Smith to the Ricardian split into "vulgar economics," annotated the manuscript with different topic headings. This version was then translated into English by Progress Publishers and this is the version of the book which circulates today and is considered to be the most accurate version to Marx's notebooks. This Radical Reprint by Pattern Books is made to be accessible and as close to only manufacturing cost as possible. This first volume of Theories of Surplus Value covers the origins of surplus value, to clarifying confusion between value and material substance, to Adam Smith's definitions of value and the contradictions of Smith's idea on value and profit, to another extrapolation on circulation within and by capitalist production and the process of reproduction. These three volumes, in totality, are to show how the classical theories of value led to a theory stuck within the market paradigm and caught in the loop of capitalist circularity. For Marx, the current ontology of political economy only ruled within the scope of pragmatism within the market system, and these programs no longer offered any integrated theory of capitalism.

Theories of Surplus Value is a book that, unlike Marx, actually needs an introduction. Theories was intended to be collected and published as the fourth volume to Marx's Capital, but after Engels had successfully collected and published volumes two and three after Marx's death, Engels died before he could publish it. Theories has had a long history of being in-and-out of publication, and particularly in-and-out of being an actually accessible publication. In 1905, the infamously-hated-by-Lenin Karl Kautsky, published the first edition of the manuscript in three volumes separated and rearranged by Adam Smith in volume one, to David Ricardo in the other two volumes, with the breakup of the Ricardian school as the third volume. Kautsy's version circulated in print and was translated to many languages over the decades, remaining the sole version of Theories until The Institute of Marxism-Leninism published a new German version. This arrangement, while still relatively close to Kautsy's narrative arrangement of tracing surplus value from Smith to the Ricardian split into "vulgar economics," annotated the manuscript with different topic headings. This version was then translated into English by Progress Publishers and this is the version of the book which circulates today and is considered to be the most accurate version to Marx's notebooks. This Radical Reprint by Pattern Books is made to be accessible and as close to only manufacturing cost as possible. This second volume of Theories of Surplus Value covers Smith, Ricardo, and Rodbertus' theories of rent, to the theory of cost-price, to growth and productivity in agricultural labor, to extensive diagrams on rent and the influence of machines. These three volumes, in totality, are to show how the classical theories of value led to a theory stuck within the market paradigm and caught in the loop of capitalist circularity. For Marx, the current ontology of political economy only ruled within the scope of pragmatism within the market system, and these programs no longer offered any integrated theory of capitalism.

First published in 1990, this is an analysis of the history of western economics from Petty to Supply-Side, through the prism of the controversies over productive labour and its product. It treats the early economists’ "productive-unproductive" dichotomies as shorthands for many other sets of distinctions relevant for boundaries, value and welfare. Central to the debates is the question of whether the economy is said to generate a ‘surplus’. Economists and politicians with views on these matters include the Physiocrats, Smith and Ricardo, Marx and his Soviet and western admirers, the marginalists, Keynes, Polanyi, Becker, and Reagan. The book maps the shifting emphases that economists and social thinkers have placed on markets and ‘mode’ of production generally. This reissue will be useful to students of economic thought, welfare theory and policy, growth economics and economic systems.

Focusing on the period between the 1970s and the present, Life as Surplus is a pointed and important study of the relationship between politics, economics, science, and cultural values in the United States today. Melinda Cooper demonstrates that the history of biotechnology cannot be understood without taking into account the simultaneous rise of neoliberalism as a political force and an economic policy. From the development of recombinant DNA technology in the 1970s to the second Bush administration's policies on stem cell research, Cooper connects the utopian polemic of free-market capitalism with growing internal contradictions of the commercialized life sciences. The biotech revolution relocated economic production at the genetic, microbial, and cellular level. Taking as her point of departure the assumption that life has been drawn into the circuits of value creation, Cooper underscores the relations between scientific, economic, political, and social practices. In penetrating analyses of Reagan-era science policy, the militarization of the life sciences, HIV politics, pharmaceutical imperialism, tissue engineering, stem cell science, and the pro-life movement, the author examines the speculative impulses that have animated the growth of the bioeconomy. At the very core of the new post-industrial economy is the transformation of biological life into surplus value. Life as Surplus offers a clear assessment of both the transformative, therapeutic dimensions of the contemporary life sciences and the violence, obligation, and debt servitude crystallizing around the emerging bioeconomy.