law of value (jim o'connor)

[Barbara Laurence]

Charles, true enough.  If you add to Marx's statement about "every child
knows you need a certain amount of labor to produce a certain number of
products" is his letter to I forgot who - if you add the market
(circulation), a truism becomes a theory of sorts.  The claim is now
something that every child doesn't know.  The quantity of labor deployed in
this and that industry or sector is determined by something else.  Namely,
the market, which determines socially necessary labor, i.e., the labor that
produces products that sell at their costs plus the average profit rate.
If something is produced and not sold, the labor of course can't be and
isn't socially necessary.
This is why I never really understood the point of the so-called
transformation problem.  Socially necessary labor produces value, but
exactly how much no one can know until the market has cleared (or not).
Know what I mean?
Are there comments on the law of value?  As - the greater is worker
productivity (the richer the worker makes the capitalist), the smaller is
the value of labor power (hence cet. par. the poorer the worker becomes).
The worker becomes literally poorer if money wages fall when the cost of
consumer items fall such that real wages remain constant.  If money wages
remain the same, then clearly real wages rise when the cost of the
consumption basket falls).