If the price of labour-power fall to this minimum, it falls below its value, since under such circumstances it can be maintained and developed only in a crippled state. But the value of every commodity is determined by the labour-time requisite to turn it out so as to be of normal quality. Labour Standard 1. Language Language is the sign-system which fulfills the communicative and cognitive role in human activity. One of the most difficult tasks confronting the philosopher is to descend from the world of thought to the actual world.
Language is the immediate actuality of thought.
Just as philosophers have given thought an independent existence, so they were bound to make philosophical language, in which thoughts in the form of words have their own content. The problem of descending from the world of thoughts to the actual world is turned into the problem of descending from language to life We have shown that thoughts and ideas acquire an independnent existence in consequence of the personal circumstances and relations of individuals acquiring independent existence. We have shown that exclusive, systematic occupation with these thoughts on the part of ideologists and philosophers, and hence the systematisation of these thoughts, is a consequence of division of labour, and that, in particular German philosophy is a consequence of German petit-bourgeois conditions. The philosophers have only to dissolve their language into the ordinary language, from which it is abstracted, in order to recognise it as the distorted language of the actual world, and to realise that neither thoughts nor language in themselves form a realm of their own, that they are only manifestations of actual life. The main citadel from which contemporary bourgeois philosophy attacks socialist thinking is literary criticism which passes itself off as social criticism, and has its roots in certain trends in the science of linguistics.