Exploitation and its unintended outcomes. An axiomatic obituary for Marx’s surplus value.

The present paper scrutinizes the logical foundation of Marx’s dialectic analysis of the evolving money economy. The minimalistic frame of reference is thereby given with the set of structural axioms. It turns out, first, that the commonplace notion of exploitation has to be replaced by crossover exploitation among capitalists and workers; second, that the concept of surplus value cannot explain the existence and magnitude of overall profits; finally, that the real shares of output are determined in the spheres of income and expenditure and not, as classical, Marxian and neoclassical economists unanimously maintain, in the sphere of production.