ABSTRACT
The analysis of use value, i.e. the systematic exposition of what the commercial uses of commodities consist of, seems to have remained entirely outside the sphere of traditional political economy, but I shall argue that some understanding of it represented a precondition of the formation of the concept of value in exchange and of value itself. Value in use plays no significant visible role in the works of the classical political economists. The only major exception is Marx’s application of the concept to the so-called factors of production: it is the use value of the commodity labour power to generate more value than its reproduction costs and it is the use value of capital to generate profits according to a general rate so that money capital, having that property, can be lent, and the price for borrowing it is interest. As is well known, capital in its monetary form is the object of this exchange while a price is the expression of the value of a commodity in terms of money so that interest, as a monetary price of money, is an ‘irrational form’ in Marx (Schefold 1998a). But we shall here not be concerned with these almost metaphorical applications of the concept of value in use but rather with its original meaning in the application to ordinary commodities.
