This question <589|408> overall <73|77> Will: <1276|169>.  
  Question 97: The value of a commodity does not increase if it is made by a slow or inept laborer. Explain carefully why not. Whose decision is it to keep the value of the output of a slow worker below the time actually used for its production? How is it enforced?   
  [76] Will: The value of a commodity does not increase with a slow or inept worker due to the fact that the ‘value’ with which we are addressing is a socially necessary labor-time which requires a worker to produce at the average level. To clarify Civic [1995WI:124] breaks down ‘socially necessary,’ “Marx talks about all the labor power of a society combined together and then an average unit is described as a unit which is socially necessary.” The commodity may take more time to produce, but the actual value with which the commodity is endowed will not increase. From the perspective of the consumer, the consumer as a generality does not know the amount of labor put into a certain commodity and the commodity which was created by a slow worker which may have taken a week, is the same value as the same commodity produced by an exceptional worker which completed the labor within a day. The ‘value’ is determined by the give and take agreement/decision among the producers and their market competition for which they have settled upon within each given commodity. Enforcement of value is merely the works of the market and between producers and consumers, as ADHH [2005fa:1917] stated it “occurs when the buyer pays the same price for a desk that took 12 hours to be assembled by a slow laborer as he does for a similar desk that took only 7 hours to be assembled by a more efficient laborer.”   
  Hans: Very good content-wise, but you used some weird formulations, like “the value with which we are addressing,” or “the ... value with which the commodity is given” (you probably mean “endowed” and I changed this now in the text). You are not doing justice to the depth of your thinking if you use such idiosyncratic language.   
 
 
 
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