Surplus

Surplus (pronounced sur-pluhs)

(1) Something that remains above what is used or needed.

(2) In agricultural economics, produce or a quantity of food grown by a nation or area in excess of its needs, especially such a quantity of food purchased and stored by a governmental program of guaranteeing farmers a specific price for certain crops.

(3) In accounting, the excess of assets over liabilities accumulated throughout the existence of a business, excepting assets against which stock certificates have been issued; excess of net worth over capital-stock value.

(4) In public finance, an excess of government revenues over expenditures during a certain financial year.

(5) In international trade, an excess of receipts over payments on the balance of payments.

(6) In economic theory, an unsold quantity of a good resulting from a lack of equilibrium in a market.  For example, if a price is artificially high, sellers will bring more goods to the market than buyers will be willing to buy.  In classical economics, the opposite of shortage.

(7) In Chancery law (and its successor courts), the remainder of a fund appropriated for a particular purpose.

1325–1375: From the Middle English surplus, from the Old French sorplus (remainder, extra), from the Medieval Latin superplūs (excess, surplus), the construct being super (over) + plūs (more).  Surplus in Italian is a borrowing from modern French where surplus has existed since the twelfth century.  In English, surplus has been used as an adjective since the fourteenth century.  Enjoying the same pronunciation, surplice and surplus are often confused.  A surplice is a liturgical vestment of the Christian Church, usually styled as a tunic of white linen or cotton material, with wide sleeves and often some lace embellishment or embroidered edges.  Lengths vary; in medieval times it reached almost to the ground but tends now to be shorter; some still retain the longer garments for the ceremonial.  As surplis, it was a thirteenth century Middle-English borrowing from the Anglo-French surpliz, a syncopated variant of Old French surpeliz, derived from the Medieval Latin superpellīcium (vestīmentum) over-pelt (garment), neuter of superpellīcius.  Construct was super (over) + pellīt(us) (clothed with skins or fur) + -ius (the adjectival suffix).  A clerical surplice is thus a kind of frock; a clerical surplus means too many priests.

Surplus Repression

German-American Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979) was a sociologist and philosopher, highly influential in the mid-late twentieth century.  Even today, Marcuse enjoys a cult following.

A critique of capitalism’s culture and economic arrangements, Marcuse's book Eros and Civilization (1655) drew, inter alia, from Karl Marx (1818-1883) and Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) and described an alternative structure for society.  He didn’t reject Freud’s idea that repression of mans’ instinctive desires was necessary for civilization to endure but Marcuse distinguished between basic (or necessary) repression and surplus repression, detailing the differences between the biological vicissitudes of the instincts and the socially imposed.  His construct was that basic repression is that which man suppresses to permit peaceful societies to form; a repression or modification of the instincts being necessary “…for the perpetuation of the human race in civilization.”  Surplus repression meant those “…restrictions necessitated by [the] social domination” of the particular ruling-class or hegemony.  The purpose of surplus repression was to shape the instincts of individuals to conform to the requirements of modern capitalism, a surrender to what Marcuse called the “performance principle”, a construct building on Marx’s theories of alienation and surplus value.

Lindsay Lohan and her lawyer in court, Los Angeles, 2011.

Marcuse's writing did have the attraction of being more accessible than that of Marx or Freud (and certainly that of many neo-Marxists or Freudians) but that also meant it was easier for critics to cherry pick the points they found most objectionable.  For an explanation of why society need to be organized the way it was, conservatives seemed to prefer the rationalization of the "harsh but deliciously clever" English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) best known for his book Leviathan (1651) in which appeared the memorable passage describing the life of man in a world where there existed no restraining authorities forcing people to repress their worst instincts:

In such condition, there is no place for industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving, and removing, such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

Such a culture Hobbes called the "state of nature" by which he meant not an environmentally sustainable hippie commune but a place in which there was bellum omnium contra omnes (war of all against all) and murder went unpunished except by another murder.  Although the distinction is now an unfashionable one to draw, conservatives liked the way Hobbes seemed to know not all cultures were civilizations and that a little surplus repression was a small price to pay for for its benefits.  Hobbes lived through troubled times and his views on the importance of stable, strong governance should be understood as the writings of one who had seen what the alternative looks like but as a list of exculpatory bullet-points, it's something which can be ticked off by by the Ayatollahs in Tehran or the Chinese Communist Party.  Marcuse is not so transportable.

Sometimes, it really was read for the articles.  Michael G Horowitz's profile of Marcuse was published in the September 1970 edition of Playboy.

Marcuse’s work was acknowledged as a landmark in the synthetization of Marxist and psychoanalytic theories but was criticized for being just another of the utopian visions written of since antiquity, work cut adrift from the moorings of the political reality which seemed in the 1960s more urgently to demand attention.  Marcuse acknowledged the distance of his work from reality and conceded his theories could reach actualization only by revolution or gradual infiltration of the structures of the power-elite and, after the disappointments of the moments in 1968 when revolution fleeting was in the air, he preferred the latter.  German student activist Rudi Dutschke (1940–1979) had advocated a "…march through the institutions of power", radically to change society from within government and cultural institutions by becoming part of the machinery and structures under which capitalism operated.  This too owed a debt to the theories of hegemony and Marcuse wrote to Dutschke in 1971 saying he “regarded your notion of the "march through the institutions" as the only effective way.”  It all failed.  It was the highly unusual coincidence of circumstances in the post war (1948-1973) Western world which briefly in 1968 made the system seem internally vulnerable and the hegemony learned the lesson: they would control who manned the institutions that matter and the troublemakers could march through things like theatre trusts, literary festivals and art gallery committees.