Editing Use value (section)

== Utility ==
Marx's concept of use-value seems akin to, but in reality differs from the [[neoclassical economics|neoclassical]] concept of utility:
* Marx usually assumes in his analysis that products sold in the [[Market (economics)|market]] have a use-value to the buyer, without attempting to quantify that use-value other than in product units of price, and commodity value. (this caused some of his readers to think wrongly that use-value played no role in his theory).  "The utility makes it a use value,"<ref>Karl Marx, Das Kapital, vol.1, p.27</ref> The [[neoclassicism|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]].  For "Price is the money-name of the labour realised in a commodity".<ref>Karl Marx, ''Das Kapital'', Vol.1, p.70</ref>
* 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. According to his supporters Marx would have allegedly rejected the concept of marginal utility precisely because it accentuated profit on capital returns over the usefulness or utility of labour.  Thus the wider application of general utility lay in variable rates of productivity, since higher labour inputs could raise or lower the price of commodity.  This was the true concept of Use as a Value system: the higher the rate of 'productiveness' the more labour 'crystallised' in the article.<ref>Marx, Capital, vol.1, pp.29-30.</ref>
* 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 encyclopaedic knowledge of commodities".{{fact|date=January 2024}}

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.{{fact|date=January 2024}}