Use Value - Use Value and Utility

Use Value and Utility

Marx's concept of use-value seems akin to, but in reality differs from the neoclassical concept of utility.

• Marx usually assumes in his analysis that products sold in the market have a use-value to the buyer, without attempting to quantify that use-value other than in product units (this caused some of his readers to think wrongly that use-value played no role in his theory). The neoclassicals, on the other hand, typically see prices as the quantitative expression of the general utility of products for buyers and sellers, instead of expressing their exchange-value.

• In neoclassical economics this utility is ultimately subjectively determined by the buyer of a good, and not objectively by the intrinsic characteristics of the good. Thus, neoclassical economists often talk about the marginal utility of a product, i.e., how its utility fluctuates according to consumption patterns. This kind of utility is a "general utility" which exists independently from particular uses that can be made of a product, the assumption being that if somebody wants, demands, desires or needs a good, then it has this general utility.

• Marx rejects any economic doctrine of consumer sovereignty, stating among other things in his first chapter to Das Kapital that "In bourgeois societies the economic fictio juris prevails, that every one, as a buyer, possesses an encyclopedic knowledge of commodities".

In summary, different concepts of use value lead to different interpretations and explanations of trade, commerce and capitalism. Marx's main argument is that if we focus only on the general utility of a commodity, we abstract from and ignore precisely the specific social relations of production which created it.