Use Value - The Role of Use Value in Political Economy

The Role of Use Value in Political Economy

In his textbook The Theory of Capitalist Development (1942), American Marxian Paul Sweezy claimed that:

"Use-value is an expression of a certain relation between the consumer and the object consumed. Political economy, on the other hand, is a social science of the relations between people. It follows that 'use-value as such' lies outside the sphere of investigation of political economy."

Curiously, Sweezy disregarded that in consuming (both intermediate and final consumption), producers and consumers might also be socially related.

Likewise, in his influential Principles of Political Economy, the Japanese Marxian Kozo Uno sums up the theory of a "purely capitalist society" in the three doctrines of circulation, production and distribution. Apparently it did not occur to him that even in the purest capitalist society, (final) consumption would have to occur as a necessary aspect of economic reproduction, and that capitalist relations extended to, and included, the way in which consumption was organised in capitalist society - increasingly substituting private consumption for collective consumption.

Marx himself explicitly rejected Sweezy's and Uno's interpretation (see the quotation from 1859 cited previously, in which use-value is distinguished from the general concept of utility). In a draft included in the Grundrisse manuscripts, which inspired the starting point of A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy and Das Kapital, Marx explicitly states that:

"The commodity itself appears as unity of two aspects. It is use value, i.e. object of the satisfaction of any system whatever of human needs. This is its material side, which the most disparate epochs of production may have in common, and whose examination therefore lies beyond political economy. Use value falls within the realm of political economy as soon as it becomes modified by the modern relations of production, or as it, in turn, intervenes to modify them. What it is customary to say about it in general terms, for the sake of good form, is confined to commonplaces which had a historic value in the first beginnings of the science, when the social forms of bourgeois production had still laboriously to be peeled out of the material, and, at great effort, to be established as independent objects of study. In fact, however, the use value of the commodity is a given presupposition -- the material basis in which a specific economic relation presents itself. It is only this specific relation which stamps the use value as a commodity. - Karl Marx, Fragment on Value, in: Grundrisse, Notebook 7 (1858), emphasis added.

In an important essay Roman Rosdolsky shows the important role of use value in Marx's economics. The fact is that Marx himself, in the introduction to his Grundrisse manuscript, had defined the economic sphere as the totality of production, circulation, distribution and consumption. He did not however live to finish Das Kapital, and did not theorise how commercial relations would reshape the sphere of personal consumption in accordance with the requirements of capital accumulation.

It was only later that scholars such as Walter Benjamin, Fernand Braudel, Ben Fine, Manuel Castells and Michel Aglietta tried to fill this gap in Marx's unfinished work.