I find David Laibman's justification of the LoV the best I have seen. His basic argument is that Capitalist power derives from control over the labor process and since the social relation of capital appears in fragmented form, it must be individually validated through the sale of commidities. Thus, the social relation that commodities are an outward expression of is the capitalist controlled labor process.
My question is, if we accept that the social relation expressed by commodities is the quantitative aspect of the labor process (labor time), where does the "socially necessary" labor time come in to play here? Does the commodity express the labor process that actually was used to produce it? If so it wouldn't express socially necessary labor time. If the commodity expresses socially necessary labor time, why is this (in Laibman's framework)? Perhaps the commodity expresses the entire spectrum of techniques that could be used to reproduce it, and society merely perceives that which would occur under "the conditions of production normal for a given society and with the average degree of skill and intensity of labor prevalent in that society?" Or is it that the social relation expressed is the average of the specific labor processses that the various producers of the commodity would use? Because each commmodity can only express one quantitative social relation and thus it must be an average in order to express the multiplicty of different labor processes used to produce it? Why must that be so? How owuld it work with similar but differentiated commodities? Is the social relation expressed by a commodity a result of the perception of those who come into contact with the commodity. And for historical materialists, wouldn't that perception be conditioned by "the conditions of production normal for a given society and with the average degree of skill and intensity of labor prevalent in that society?"
