Use-Value

The property of an object that satisfies men’s needs, reflecting the material relation between man and nature. All useful objects, whether commodities or not, have a use-value.

Commodities must have a use-value. Use-value is created by concrete labor and varies in quality. Different commodities have different use-values because of different physical and chemical properties, such as food can satisfy hunger and clothing can keep out the cold. With the accumulation of men’s experience in production and the advance of scientific knowledge, the same commodity may be found to have a variety of properties and uses, for example, coal, which historically was only used as a fuel, can be used to extract various chemical products in modern society, used to make dyes, medicines, synthetic fibers and so on. In this sense, use-values, as natural properties of objects, belong to the commercial knowledge of commodities.

Use-value constitutes the content of social wealth, which is the basis for the existence and development of human society. Use-value determined by the natural attributes of commodities does not change with the change of the relations of production of society. Marx held: “Whatever its social form may be, wealth always consists of use-values, which in the first instance are not affected by this form. From the taste of wheat it is not possible to tell who produced it, a Russian serf, a French peasant or an English capitalist. Although use-values serve social needs and therefore exist within the social framework, they do not express the social relations of production.” However, the use-value of a commodity is the material carrier of the exchange-value. It is not used to satisfy the producer’s own needs, but it is used to satisfy the needs of others and of society through exchange. Political economy does not study use-values but examines the use-value as the material carrier of the exchange-value of commodities, i.e., it studies commodities from the relation of the unity of opposites of use-value and exchange-value and reveals the internal contradiction of commodities and their laws of movement.