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tion of the workforce is assured and its maintenance costs covered. It
is therefore nothing else than the monetary form of the social surplus
product, which is the propertied classes' share in the distribution of
the social product in all class-structured societies: slave-owners'
income in a slave society; feudal ground rent in a feudal society;
tribute in the tributary mode of production, etc. The wage-earner, the
proletarian, does not sell 'labour' but his or her labour power, his or
her production capacity. It is this labour power that bourgeois society
transforms into a marketable commodity. It has its own value, which
is an objective fact like that of any commodity: its own production
costs, its reproduction overheads. Like any commodity, it has its use
(use value) for the buyer, which is a precondition for its sale but
which by no means determines the price it is sold at. Yet the use, or
use value, of labour power for its buyer, the capitalist, is precisely
that of producing value, since, by definition, all labour in a market
economy adds value to the value of the machines and the raw
materials it is applied to. Thus every wage-earner produces 'value
added'. However, since the capitalist pays the worker a wage - which
represents the cost of reproduction of labour power - he will only buy
this labour power if the value 'added' by the worker exceeds the value
of the labour power itself. This fraction of value newly produced by
the wage-earner Marx calls 'surplus value'. The discovery of surplus
value as a fundamental category of bourgeois society and its mode of
production, along with the explanation of its nature (a result of the
surplus labour, of the unpaid, unrewarded work supplied by the
wage-earner) and of its origins (the economic necessity for the
proletarian to sell his or her labour power to the capitalist as a
commodity), represents Marx's main contribution to economics and
the social sciences in general. This is, in itself, the application of the
perfected labour theory of value to the specific context of a specific
commodity, labour power (Mandel, 1986).
TRIAD
The expressions 'Triad' and 'Triadic' come from K. Ohmae (1985).
They were first used in business schools and economic journalism,
before entering into more common usage. The three axes of the Triad
are the US, the European Union and Japan, but round each of these
axes larger groups have formed. According to Ohmae, the only hope
for a developing country - to which must now be added the former