Aggregate Social Product
Autor: Sebastião Matias de Carvalho Neto | Publicado: 2012-10-12T12:43:00-03:00

Aggregate Social Product, =

gross material
product produced by society in a definite
period of time (usually a year). As a value,
the aggregate product comprises the value
of the means of production transferred
to the product and the newly created value,
which is the national income. In its physical
form, and depending on the usable function
of various use values in the process of
social reproduction, the aggregate product
combines the means of production and
consumer goods. The aggregate social
product is created by the labour force employed
in material production and partly by the
labour power of factory and office workers
employed in the non-productive sphere,
where the material production process is
continued through operations in the sphere
of circulation (post-manufacture handling,
packaging, delivery to distribution facilities
as well as the storage of socially feasible
amounts of goods to ensure the continuity
of the production and consumption
processes). Production of the aggregate social
product may be increased mostly by raising
the labour productivity of the work force
in material production through utilising
the achievements of scientific and technical
progress and the better organisation of
labour and production process, as well as
by increasing the work force employed in
the sphere. The rate of growth of the
aggregate product and the way it is used
are all determined by the prevailing mode
of production. Under capitalism, the lion's
share of the aggregate social product is
produced by hired labour, and only a
negligible part by the labour of petty
individual producers. Private capitalist
ownership of the means of production,
with its inevitable anarchy and fierce
competition, and the relative and absolute
deterioration of the working people's living
standards ensures the spontaneous
character of the production of the social
product, while its distribution and utilisation
are antagonistic in nature. Aggregate
product marketing problems tend to
intensify the fight for both domestic and foreign
markets, and to aggravate every
contradiction inherent in bourgeois society. Under
socialism, the aggregate social product is
created by labour freed from exploitation
at public and cooperative enterprises, and
in far less significant quantities at individual
private households owned by members of
agricultural cooperatives (by collective
farmers). The aggregate social product
in socialist society is produced and
distributed on a planned and organised basis, its
realisation proceeds in an unbroken fashion,
with due consideration of growing demands
and in accordance with available material
and labour resources. The balancing of
the aggregate social product is extremely
important in planning social and economic
development in the USSR (see Balance
[Inter-Branch] of the Production and
Distribution of the Social Product). The
transferred value of the means of
production is accumulated in the fund which
is used to reimburse the consumed means
of production, and forms the material basis
for socialist property relations. The newly
created value consists of the value of the
necessary product and the value of the
surplus product. The value of the necessary
product assumes the form of the 
consumption fund for the work force of the
material sphere of production; the value
of the surplus product functions as the
consumption fund for the work force in
the non-productive sphere, for the disabled
part of the population, for the material
support of the institutions operating in
this sphere; it also forms the accumulation
fund. The value and the physical forms of
the aggregate social product are interrelated
and interdependent. For example, scientific
and technical progress and an increase
of equipment available per worker promote
the growing share of the Department I in
the aggregate social product, which results
in a shift towards increasing the
compensation fund rather than the national income.
At the same time, the saturation of the
labour process with more equipment means
higher labour productivity. And that, in
its turn, results in a greater physical volume
of the national income (in comparable
prices) and a greater surplus product,
which is the source of accumulation and
higher rates of expanded socialist
reproduction (see Reproduction, Socialist).