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On Mon, 22 May 2000, Rakesh Bhandari wrote:
> An unsold commodity is not "somehow 'not necessary'"; it is
> simply not a value at all. Something only becomes a value,
> some magnitude of socially necessary labor time, upon being
> sold for money....
Ah, you're thinking of the influence of market demand upon the
social necessity of labour time as a binary matter: 0 or 1,
rather than a sliding quantitative scale. Well, I think that
has problems, but it's less damaging to the labour theory of
value than the notion that demand affects the /degree/ to which
labour should be considered socially necessary. (The binary
version strikes me as problematic because almost all would-be
commodities can be sold at /some/ price or other (>0), so it
seems that whether or not a product "becomes a value" may depend
on the seller's reservation price, which could be quite
contingent, and unrelated to the conditions of production, or
the general conditions of market demand.)
Allin.
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