Remanent Surplus Value

We propose the category of remanent surplus value: the value transferredto each copy of a commodity by accumulated scientific knowledge --- socialized in itsorigin, unwearable in its nature, unpaid in the present. We define remanent laboras the past labor crystallized in a support that does not wear out, and which continuesto act without being consumed by its exercise. We show that this category is asecond mode of labor-power in Marx's sense: an aptitude to produce, but an aptitudeimpermeable to use, whose cost of reproduction in the present is zero. We deduce adouble accounting: value (an extensive magnitude) divides with the copies andtends toward zero; remanence (an intensive magnitude) remains whole in each copy andproduces remanent surplus value. We define two production regimes by the structureof their production cycle (one-cycle vs.\ two-cycle regimes), propose two measurabletracers (the labor--EBIT correlation and the operating margin), and evaluate theframework on a panel of listed firms, 2015--2024, estimated by hierarchical maximumlikelihood. We discuss the implications for the ``techno-feudalism'' debate: thesuper-profits of tech and pharma are proposed to be read not as rents on vassal subjects,but as the realization, copy after copy, of remanent surplus value.