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 10 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).