>Am I completely misunderstanding your (and Marx's) position here? Yes, or at least, to the best of my knowledge of Marx. The aeroplane has thousands of hours

>Am I completely misunderstanding your (and Marx's) position here? Yes, or at least, to the best of my knowledge of Marx. The aeroplane has thousands of hours of basic socially necessary labour which have been put into it. All the labour hours to construct the aeroplane, and all its parts, etc. Further, the plane requires constant maintenance and fuel, which are also products of labour. The pilot adds his own labour too. The actual flight is a commodity separate to the plane, yet it is produced using the commodity of the plane itself. Both the labour put into the plane by the workers who made it, and the labour applied by the pilot, contribute to the final value of this commodity of a single passenger flight. As you noted, it is not the same commodity if there is no pilot, or no plane; in the same way, a hole-punching machine does not produce the same commodity without someone to operate it. This combination of values is no different from the combination of wood and paint to make a toy.