Value, social labour materialised in commodities. Any commodity produced by human beings embodies their labour; however, it is only in certain historical conditions that labour assumes a socialised form of value. What is required is that labour must produce things that meet a certain human requirement—not that of the producer, but of others, who obtain these goods as users through exchange, When passing along the goods to each other in the process of exchange, buyer and seller treat them as equivalent values. In doing this they abstract themselves from the utilitarian properties of the exchanged goods, these properties being incomparable, and reveal what different commodities have in common: their socialised property—the labour embodied in them. Abstraction from the utility properties of goods means abstraction from the professional peculiarities of the labour which has created them, and the reduction of various kinds of concrete labour to labour independent of its concrete forms— abstract labour. Abstract labour is expended in the process of production, where it functions as concealed social labour, while revealing its socialised nature in exchange relations through commodity values. Thus, value, on the one hand, represents the productive consumption of labour in the physiological sense, i. e., the brain, muscles, nerves, etc, while on the other, it reflects the producers’ relations of production which stand behind the relations of the goods they are exchanging. What value a commodity has is determined by the amount of labour that is socially necessary for its production, and is measured in terms of the socially necessary work time required for producing the commodity in the current normal conditions of production and with the current average level of skill and intensity of labour attained by society. In practice, socially necessary working time is measured against the time consumed for the production of the given type of commodity by those producers who account for most of its production. Substantively, value is formed by the simple labour consumed, that is, the labour power expended by the average man without special training. Therefore, how great that value is depends on the relative complexity of labour. Complex labour functions as multiplied simple labour. Consequently, the more complex the labour is, the greater value it creates per unit of time. "The exceptionally productive labour,” Marx wrote, "operates as intensified labour; it creates in equal periods of time greater values than average social labour of the same kind" (Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I, p. 302). The socially necessary time materialised in commodities cannot be related to just so many hours or minutes. It can be expressed only indirectly, through exchange, in terms of another commodity. The exchange ratio signifies that both its parts represent equivalent values, and incorporate an equal amount of socially necessary working time. The normal social conditions of production are not immutable. They find their most concrete form of expression in the changing productivity of social labour. As a consequence, how great the value is varies in inverse proportion to labour productivity. The concept of value is the most generalised expression of the economic conditions of commodity production based on private ownership. Thus, value incorporates in embryonic form all the most advanced forms of money- commodity relations. Under capitalism, value exists as a result of the operation of capital, and is a measure of relations based on the exploitation of hired labour. The expenditure of past labour contained in the means of production consumed in manufacturing a product takes the shape of the value of the constant capital consumed, while the expended live labour is embodied in the value of the variable capital and surplus value. In a socialist economy, value is an expression of production relations among collective producers, who work for themselves and their 383 society. Based on public ownership of the means of production, their labour no longer bears the nature of private labour. It is planned on a national scale, and is genuine socialised labour. In this situation, value is the expression of the social labour embodied in the social product. And though various aspects of social labour under socialism still retain certain differences, these differences are not antagonistic. The socialist state plans the action of economic factors, and these influence the creation and movement of value in the desired direction. It uses value as one of the planning levers to control social production in the interests of its development, streamlining, higher economic effectiveness, and steadily rising living standards for the working population.