and can not, therefore, be had in sufficient quantities to reproduce the commodities as they are wanted. When this labor becomes so common that it can be had in any quantity for the purposes of production and reproduction of commodities, it ceases to be "skilled," and its product has no more value than that of any other average labor. The point to be remembered, however, is that while the measure of ordinary labor is the time during which it was expended, the measure of the time expended on any particular given commodity is the amount of product produced by its expenditure. In other words, the value of a commodity does not depend on the actual individual time spent in its production, but on the social time necessary for its reproduction, as was already stated at length before. When thus properly understood, the fact that the product of skilled labor is more valuable than the product of unskilled labor is no more an objection or an exception to our law of value than the fact that one man's unskilled labor produces more value than another man's unskilled labor because of a difference in the intensity of its application.
Another objection mentioned by Böhm-Bawerk, and the last to be considered by us here, is very characteristic of him and of most Marx-critics. They seem to be impregnably fortified in their utter ignorance of the Marxian theories which they criticise. In their blissful ignorance they very often prate like innocent children, so that one is often at a loss as to whether they ought to be pitied or envied. Says Böhm-Bawerk, very naïvely:
"The well-known and universally admitted fact that even in the case of those goods whose exchange-value coincides on the whole with the labor expended in their production, this coincidence is not always preserved, forms another exception to the labor principle. Because of the oscillations of supply and demand, the exchange-value of even such commodities is often pushed above or below the level of value which corresponds to the amount of labor incorporated in them. The latter forms only a gravitation point, not a fixed
