Its annual monetary value is approximately equal to the netted sum of six flows of income generated by production: The last five money-incomes are components of realized surplus value.
In his view, this total is equal to the value of wage payments + surplus value, the latter which would include, apart from net profit, interest and rent, the net tax levy and royalty-type fees paid in respect of incomes generated by production of output, plus the surplus-value component of unsold inventories of new output.
Marx claims that, in an accounting period, the workforce in the capitalist sector normally produces a new value which is equal to its own wage-cost, plus an additional new value (called surplus value).
However, Marx warns that: "The habit of representing surplus-value and value of labor-power as fractions of the value created — a habit that originates in the capitalist mode of production itself, and whose import will hereafter be disclosed — conceals the very transaction that characterizes capital, namely the exchange of variable capital for living labor-power, and the consequent exclusion of the laborer from the product.
Instead of the real fact, we have false semblance of an association, in which laborer and capitalist divide the product in proportion to the different elements which they respectively contribute towards its formation."
In Marxian economics, however, these flows would be regarded either as a faux frais of production, a circulating constant capital outlay, or an element of gross surplus value.
Business rents, excluded as intermediate expenditures from GDP, therefore are included in the Marxian value product as a component of surplus value.
From a Marxian point of view, official value added also includes some dubious components such as the rental value of owner-occupied housing.
3, titled "The Trinity Formula" where he discusses the view that land, labour and capital (which he sarcastically calls the "holy trinity" of political economy) all create a new value equal to factor income (Marx regarded human labour and land as the mainsprings of material wealth, but he considered value as a purely social attribution referring to labor-content).
In Marxian social accounting, one theoretical controversy concerns the treatment of the wages of so-called productive and unproductive labour.
Another Marxian accounting controversy, less discussed, concerns which net tax receipts of government constitute part of the new value product.
The conceptual problem here is essentially that it may be difficult to specify unambiguously what the nature and function of the "product" sold is, when services are rendered.
That was manifestly not Marx's view; already in his Grundrisse manuscript he had referred to a balance sheet cited by Malthus; in Das Kapital he attempted to calculate the rate of surplus value according to data provided by Frederick Engels; and towards the end of his life, as Leontief noted, he wrote that he wanted to study the "ups and downs" of economic activity mathematically (but Samuel Moore convinced him that the data to do it did not exist yet).
Subsequent Marxian scholars have argued the critique of political economy should continue, with regard to the new economic concepts and theories, rather than stop at the point where the ink dried on the last sheet of paper that Marx wrote on.