but by producing commodities that society no longer wants. You go on making shoe-buckles after they have gone out of fashion, and you can get nothing for them. They have no value. And why? Because, while they indeed represent labour, they do not represent socially necessary labour. So again with over-production: you may produce a greater amount of a commodity than society requires at the time. The value of the commodity falls. Why? Because while it has cost as much actual labour as before, it has not cost so much socially necessary labour. In fact, the labour it has taken has been socially unnecessary, for there was no demand for the product. On the other hand--and we are entitled to make this expansion of Lassalle's argument--take the case of under-production, of deficient supply. Prices rise. What is usually known as a scarcity value is conferred on commodities. But this scarcity value Lassalle converts into a labour value; the commodity is produced by the same individual labour, but the labour is more socially necessary. In plain English, there is more demand for the product. Lassalle's distinction is thus an ingenious invention for expressing rarity value in terms of labour value. It has no theoretical importance, but is of some practical service in the socialistic argument. That argument is not that value is constituted by labour pure and simple, but by labour modified by certain general conditions of society; only it holds that these conditions--conditions of productivity, of rarity, of demand--have been created by nobody in particular, that, therefore, nobody in particular should profit by them, and that so far as the problem of the distribution of value goes, the one factor in the constitution of value which needs to be taken into account in settling that problem, is labour. All value comes from labour, represents so much time of labour, is, in fact, so much "labour-jelly," so much preserved labour.