Caesercel
mentally crippled by lonely teen years
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The idea here is to analyse how we "value" things, especially commodities, and how we assign them a "worth".
Use Value means the value that is projected on a commodity by the virtue that it is useful and fulfills a purpose. A PS5 maybe useful to you because you can use it for gaming so it's valuable to you in that regard. An apple might be useful to me because I can eat it and also like it's taste, so I value apples in my life. One can immediately see that this is kind of subjective and contingent on someone's needs as one man's trash is another man's gold. A PS5 might be useful to someone who games but still useless to someone else who doesn't have time for that or doesn't like gaming.
BUT, if you gift the second type of person a PS5 or if he wins it in a giveaway, he might actually keep it despite not being a gamer. Why? He may not game but he can, say, gift it to his cousin who may find use for it. Or sell it on the market. The bottom line is that it is useful to atleast someone and by that virtue it has value, even to an owner who may never use it. This value is born entirely out of the social nature of the commodity, the mere fact that you can gift or exchange it. Owing to this social nature, this value drapes on a cloak of objectivity. (Kind of like how looks are fundamentally subjective but socially acceptable beauty standards can make it seem objective.) Even non gamers have an estimation that a PS5 is a considerably valuable thing. (relatively)
A market is one such social setting. Therefore Exchange Value is the value of a commodity that exists at the point of exchange in the market when that commodity changes hands. It's a fundamentally social phenomena. It's the concept on whose foundation we can make statements like, "I can exchange a PS5 for X number of ceramic coffee cups"
But where does this value come from? What exactly is being evaluated here? By what virtue or metric (beyond subjective usefulness) can we decide that a PS5 is more valuable than a ceramic coffee cup?
Use Value means the value that is projected on a commodity by the virtue that it is useful and fulfills a purpose. A PS5 maybe useful to you because you can use it for gaming so it's valuable to you in that regard. An apple might be useful to me because I can eat it and also like it's taste, so I value apples in my life. One can immediately see that this is kind of subjective and contingent on someone's needs as one man's trash is another man's gold. A PS5 might be useful to someone who games but still useless to someone else who doesn't have time for that or doesn't like gaming.
BUT, if you gift the second type of person a PS5 or if he wins it in a giveaway, he might actually keep it despite not being a gamer. Why? He may not game but he can, say, gift it to his cousin who may find use for it. Or sell it on the market. The bottom line is that it is useful to atleast someone and by that virtue it has value, even to an owner who may never use it. This value is born entirely out of the social nature of the commodity, the mere fact that you can gift or exchange it. Owing to this social nature, this value drapes on a cloak of objectivity. (Kind of like how looks are fundamentally subjective but socially acceptable beauty standards can make it seem objective.) Even non gamers have an estimation that a PS5 is a considerably valuable thing. (relatively)
A market is one such social setting. Therefore Exchange Value is the value of a commodity that exists at the point of exchange in the market when that commodity changes hands. It's a fundamentally social phenomena. It's the concept on whose foundation we can make statements like, "I can exchange a PS5 for X number of ceramic coffee cups"
But where does this value come from? What exactly is being evaluated here? By what virtue or metric (beyond subjective usefulness) can we decide that a PS5 is more valuable than a ceramic coffee cup?
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