"Whatever is produced tends to serve some purpose, even if this be frivolous, destructive, or fantastic. Thus a kind of value adheres to all made objects according to the needs these meet, or, to choose another word, their utility. For produced things, use-value represents the conjugation of labor and nature, and occupies the boundary between human nature and nature at large. And because human nature entails participation of the imagination, there is no use-value that does not include some subjective and imagined dimension -- whether this be the coziness of a good blanket, the taste of wine, the anticipation of the potential life lying embedded in a seed, and so forth.
Use-value is essentially concrete; it is a qualitative function, composed of sensuous and intellectual distinctions with other aspects of the world, including other use-values. Being qualitative, it retains the essential feature of differentiation, that distinct elements can recognize one another and form links and associations. Use-values can be deformed when they come to express alienated ways of being -- what else can be said, after all, about use-values such as are expressed by a TV game show, or any of the commodities that reflect false needs -- sports utility vehicles, lite beer, fashion magazines, hand guns, and so on. But because they are also concrete, they can be restored, as a 'used' article can be mended and made to shine. Indeed, the mending of the ecological crisis requires precisely such a restoration.
Not all use-values are attached to commodities. However, all commodities have a use-value, since no one would purchase anything or exchange it for something else unless it has some utility. But they also have another kind of value, arising from the fact of exchangeability that attaches to all commodities: exchange-value. Here, in sharp contrast to use-values, the sensuous and concrete are eliminated by definition and a priori. All that is retained as the mark of exchangeability is quantity: this item, x, is exchangeable for so many of y, which in turn is exchangeable for so many of z, and so forth, with no intrinsic end. Any concrete quality will break the chain; only number suffices, and money becomes the embodiment of that number. Hence money is fundamentally quantity, which becomes its use-value.
[Georg Simmel writes]: 'The quantity of money is its quality. Since money is nothing but the indifferent means for concrete and infinitely varied purposes, its quantity is the only important determination so far as we are concerned. With reference to money, we do not ask what and how, but how much.'
There is nothing else in the universe like it. Use-values require the participation of nature, but exchange-values are made by quantifying nature. The ascension of quantity over quality gives these relations the capacity for evil once the value function is advanced to the center of the social stage, as in capitalism. In this loss of the sensuous and concrete, the abstracting function is abandoned to the delusions of power. Precisely because nature has been detached, with its limits and inter-relations, in short, its ecosystems, there is no longer any internal limit to the value function. It can expand effortlessly. Pure quantity can swell infinitely without any reference to the external world, even though the quantity-using creature remains very much in that world. And if there is some will-to-power in the creature who makes for himself this value function, carried forward from traditional modes of domination, then that, too, can go to infinity."
Joel Kovel
