Value: Exchange and Use Value

For Karl Marx, the value of a commodity consists of two contradictory aspects: use value and exchange value. Use value refers to a product's utility in satisfying needs and wants as afforded by its material properties. Exchange value is the “quantitative relation, as the proportion in which values in use of one sort are exchanged for those of another sort” (Marx 1996, 46); that is, it is based on a product's use value for others, social use value. Both derive from the expenditure of labor power—use value from the qualitative aspect of work as transforming useless matter into useful objects; exchange value from the purely quantitative, commensurable side of work: “abstract labor.” Exchanged products as use values are qualitatively different, but as exchange values they must be equal. Marx concluded that there must be something identical in them that allows for quantitative comparison. He identified socially necessary simple labor time as that common substance.

Use value can exist without exchange value as material property of the product, but exchange value can only be expressed by an opposition of use values. Although exchange presupposes homogeneous labor substance, it is only possible as exchange of heterogeneous use values. In turn, exchange value realized in the market affirms the social character of use value—the recognition function of consumption can be located in this link between social utility and exchange.

In the development of a capitalist economy, pure exchange value (money and capital) comes to subordinate use value. Whereas both in simple and in money-mediated commodity exchange (C-C, C-M-C), use value is the beginning and end of the process (producing use value for others in order to obtain use values to satisfy one's own needs), in commercial and capitalist transactions (M-C-M), exchange value is the driving force. At the heart of this transformation is the commodification of labor power. Labor power has the unique capacity to produce more value than it contains, and the capitalist can retain and reinvest the surplus value created by the exploitation of labor power bought from the worker. Again, use value is subjected to exchange value: the main use value of labor power now is its ability to produce surplus exchange value—the production of concrete use values becomes a mere means to this end. The dominance of abstract exchange value and the subsequent loss of the concrete and un-identical are central in the Frankfurt school critique of consumer culture as driven by the culture industry. This loss of qualitative distinction has been seen as one of the defining characteristics of consumerism. Igor Kopytoff, for example, pits “commodification” as a force that homogenizes value against nonconsumerist “culture,” which he sees as “discrimination.”

Such dominance of exchange value plays a central role in Georg Simmel's analysis of modernity, although his account of value does not directly build on Marx. For Simmel, the act of exchange objectifies value as a quantitative relation between objects. Money as pure exchange value acquires the use value [Page 1502]of the ultimate tool—the thing with which to achieve everything. By making everything exchangeable for everything, the universal use of money deprives concrete objects of their unique character; they lose the personal significance they used to have in pre-monetary times. An exchange value–dominated culture will offer more individual freedom and opportunities to develop a personal style of life—but it will also be more blasé and superficial.

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