If it helps, it seems that Marx equates a ‘use-value’ with “something useful”, and the “physical body” of a commodity (“It is therefore the physical body of the commodity itself, for instance iron, corn, a diamond, which is the use-value or useful thing”). So he doesn’t seem to be referrring to a quantity of usefulness so much as a useful thing. I guess that, insofar as a commodity is treated as an ‘exchange-value’ by a person, it is not itself treated as a use-value for them, but rather it is turned into a different use-value. That basically just seems to be saying that exchange-value is nothing inherent physically to the commodity, though, which I suppose that we could agree on, although it’s somewhat trivial as well.
I think I recall hearing somewhere that, in austrian economics, two commodities are exchanged when the owner subjectively value them at the same value right?
Well, no, if the owner subjectively valued them equally, he wouldn’t need the other commodity. I guess that you could say that he ‘values them equally’ in that he values his own commodity because of its ability to give him the other’s use-value, and hence values it in terms of another commodity’s use-value, but ultimately exchange wouldn’t make sense if the owner didn’t value the other commodity more than their own in a more important sense.
Not quite, the relationship is still characterised only by the amount of commodity that changes hand.
So do you just mean that when a commodity is valuable for oneself because of its ability to exchange, this is determined not so much by its physical properties as that it is present in sufficient quantities to be exchanged for something else’s physical properties? The physical properties would still come into it, though, because the person buying the commodities would have to value them for their usefulness as a physical thing. I suppose that, from the perspective of the seller’s self-interest, the commodity still wouldn’t appear as a useful physical thing for them, because they don’t use it. They could have 20 yards of linen or 1 coat, but if these have the same price, they could be exchanged for the same amount or for each other, while 40 yards of linen would from this perspective be different from 1 coat only because it would have twice the purchasing power and could buy two coats, in other words quantitatively more than qualitatively.
Perhaps it would be better to say, then, that in exchange-value the commodity’s ‘qualitative’ character doesn’t count, but rather the qualitative character of the commodity exchanged for (as a ‘use-value’), although its quantitative character counts because it determines how much one can exchange for?
His reasoning is based on the fact that items exchange for equal amounts of labor time.
It seems that both Marx and Engels said the opposite multiple times, however. I think that even in the first volume he says that Adam Smith, Ricardo and such would be wrong to identify ‘average price’, the price which commodities prices oscillate around, with value. I’m still not sure of what exactly his theory of value consists, but he doesn’t seem to be saying that price = value, or that people value things because of the labour in them. He could be being contradictory, but given the close proximity of the statements and the fact that he apparently states that the ‘price of production’ theory is not incompatible with the theory of value, I doubt that he sees the theory of value as saying that price = value.
If anything, according to the ‘commodity fetishism’ thread Engels seems to have said that labouring to produce things which exchange for other things is a way of valuing the other things on the market. Their point seems to be that subjective valuation has to be manifested in action in order to count on the market, and that labour is a way of expressing demand as effective demand. This isn’t the whole picture, but it does seem to make a decent point about the nature of production for the market, which is a way of practically valuing things.
Use-value is subjective yes.
If a use-value is a useful thing, wouldn’t it also be objective? Something’s usefulness depends upon its objective properties as well as subjective aspects.