Socially Necessary Work Time, the time expended on manufacturing a commodity under socially normal conditions of production (the level of machinery, equipment, skills and labour intensity average for the given stage of development). While determining the magnitude of the commodity value, the socially necessary work time influences the proportions that evolve in production. In commodity production based on private ownership, this influence plays a regulating role and is implemented through the competitive struggle of producers. Those whose expenditures of work time on production are higher than the socially necessary, are ultimately ruined; while those who produce goods with outlays below the socially necessary become rich. The competitive struggle becomes especially acute under capitalism. Big capitalist owners, utilising the advantages of largescale production, ruin petty and medium owners. The advantages of large-scale production are utilised especially extensively under imperialism by the big monopolies which have unlimited possibilities for reducing individual work time far below what is socially necessary. Under socialism, public ownership of the means of production excludes competitive struggle. Socially necessary work time is evolved in the course of the planned development of the economy under the regulating effect of its specific economic laws, first of all of the basic economic law of socialism. Measures are adopted in a planned way to bring up lagging enterprises where individual outlays of time on manufacturing a certain product are higher than socially necessary: reequipment, upgrading machines and plant, improving the organisation of labour and production, providing high-skilled personnel, etc. Socialist society is interested in consistently reducing the socially necessary work time as a condition of growth of the country’s economic strength and of the people’s well-being. The policy of making production more efficient and the all-round improvement of the quality of work presents especially extensive opportunities for achieving this objective.