This is the fundamental role played by The Law of Value in all societies, of driving forwards productivity, by seeking to maximise the quantity of use values produced by any given amount of social labour. It necessarily results in a fall in the unit value of products/commodities. But, it is only in conditions of generalised commodity production that The Law of Value pushes forward this rise in productivity at an accelerated rate, because of the competition between commodity producers. As Lenin also describes, this competition between commodity producers, in conditions of generalised commodity production, is also, then, what leads to the process of differentiation of them into bourgeois and proletarians, as the winners become the bourgeois owners of capital, and the losers, now, do not become slaves, serfs or paupers, but become proletarian sellers of labour-power, which is bought by capital.
“It is important to emphasize the point that what determines value is not the time taken to produce a thing, but the minimum time it could possibly be produced in, and the minimum is ascertained by competition.” (p 63)
Each commodity producer is forced, by competition, to produce at the lowest value, first to ensure they maximise their market share, but also to maximise their profit, when selling at the market value, and so maximising their ability to accumulate capital and produce on an even larger scale. This is important when considering Proudhon's schema, which envisages continued commodity production, but without this role of competition, because each producer would receive a labour note, based on the actual labour provided.
“Suppose for a moment that there is no more competition and consequently no longer any means to ascertain the minimum of labour necessary for the production of a commodity; what will happen? It will suffice to spend six hours' work on the production of an object, in order to have the right, according to M. Proudhon, to demand in exchange six times as much as the one who has taken only one hour to produce the same object.” (p 63)
Nor does it result in the proportional relation and variety of products that Proudhon claimed. Cotton textiles could be produced much cheaper than linen, and so pushed out linen production. A similar thing was seen, in the 1980's, in relation to video recorders. Two formats were available - VHS and Betamax. It was generally accepted that Betamax was a superior format, but VHS producers had a larger share of the market, with more content supplied in that format meaning that consumers could only get the range of content if they had a VHS machine. The decisive factor was that the producers of porn used VHS. So VHS players dominated, pushing the better quality Betamax out of production.
The desire for such harmonious and proportional relations is just a pious wish, which, Marx says, good natured bourgeois economists have always expressed. Marx quotes Boisguillebert and Atkinson as illustrations of this pious wish.
“This correct proportion between supply and demand, which is beginning once more to be the object of so many wishes, ceased long ago to exist. It has passed into the stage of senility. It was possible only at a time when the means of production were limited, when the movement of exchange took place within very restricted bounds. With the birth of large-scale industry this true proportion had to come to an end, and production is inevitably compelled to pass in continuous succession through vicissitudes of prosperity, depression, crisis, stagnation, renewed prosperity, and so on.” ( p 65)
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