This article first appeared in the Winter 2025 issue of the German edition of Jacobin.
Each time I relocate to Germany, I buy a mug. This usually entails a trip to the nearest TK Maxx, where I purchase a €4, extra-large vessel for my herbal tea. The dainty European mugs found in my prefurnished lodgings just can’t hold the quantities I need. My criteria are simple: it must be large and sturdy. I don’t care what it looks like or who manufactured it. In Marxist terms, I’m concerned only with its use value.
If, however, I wished to seem fancy or fashionable, I could purchase a Hermès “H Déco Rouge No. 1” mug for €125. Drinking my ginger brew out of this lovely piece of porcelain might increase my social worth in the eyes of discerning tableware connoisseurs, but its use value remains the same: it holds my tea. Remaining in the vernacular of Marxism, the additional €121 that I could theoretically pay for the Hermès mug represents the difference in their exchange values as commodities.
When Karl Marx discusses the difference between use and exchange values, he refers to material objects that satisfy human wants and needs, only transformed into commodities when traded on a market. In 1857, he used the example of wheat, which
possesses the same use value, whether cultivated by slaves, serfs or free labourers. It would not lose its use value if it fell from the sky like snow. Now, how does use value become transformed into a commodity? [When it becomes a] vehicle of exchange value.
Intrinsic to capitalism as an economic system, then, is the conversion of things that have use values (which, often enough, are abundant and free) into things that have exchange values, i.e., scarce commodities that people must pay for.
Although not a material object, love also has a use value that exists outside of the social relations of exchange that govern capitalist societies. Most, if not all of us, have given and received love, often beginning as children in our…
Auteur: Kristen R. Ghodsee
