Marx’s Doctrine of Use Value Compared with Mill’s Theoretic Utilitarianism

Two classic accounts of utility vie for attention in the philosophical forum, some two hundred years after their respective foundings: J.S. Mill’s doctrine of utility, otherwise known as utilitarianism; and Karl Marx’s theory of the primacy of use value over exchange value. Although these thinkers do not share a similarity in the structure and aim of their arguments, they express wide gulfs between their understandings of utility, both in the realm of abstract disputation and in the real world. First, a brief rendition of these respective concepts is necessary if they are to be understood by the contemporary reader; afterwards, real-world examples of their conceptual presences will be given; and finally, an idiosyncratic value judgement will be laid upon the winner and loser of the theoretic duel.

Marx’s use value notion of utility is overtly materialistic, limited by the material dimensions of the value-containing object in question and its logical and practical extension towards the subjectivities of human beings as conditioned by their specific historical and superstructural dispositions. It is present in materiality, primarily: Marx is not for nothing renowned and vilified as the material ontologist par excellence. Its grounds for being are the trading markets of things and objects, prices and commodifications of spiritual necessities into material being, fetishized abstractions and concretions of superstructural unreality. Marx favours use value over exchange value because use value is pre-ideological, free from the processes of alienation that take place in a market economy. Something Marx might say is: containing calories has use value, even if it cannot be priced, because it can directly and physically contribute to the well-being of subjects and their bodies, maintain their lives and serve in their reproduction. However, something that can only be considered to be contingently valuable, that is, dependent on the whims of the market devoid of ‘iron laws’ and ‘hands of God’, as in Smith and Ricardo ¹ , possesses only exchange value and as such, is useless in itself as itself. In the Marxian doctrine, the beefsteak, which can sustain the life of man, is inherently more valuable than the mascara, the blue jeans or the bumper stickers sold under capitalist economies for no other object than the capitalist’s profit.

Mill’s notion of utility is idealistic, focused on the perceptions of the subject rather than the object and its valuable countenance. It is a more abstract, if more flexible, notion of utility; it bears a keen likeness to Marx’s idea of exchange value since it conceives of utility as endowed rather than inherent. Since it is not predicated on the individual but on the institutional, it is as capable of supporting a particular social formation as it is of radically undermining it, as, for instance, in Mill’s own time when it was considered a radical ideology. Mill’s doctrine, the greatest good for the greatest number, in contrast to Marx’s doctrine, from each according to ability to each according to need, is incapable of further revolutionary motion in the modern social and economic sphere. Mill’s doctrine has been co-opted by virtually every institution, whether emancipatory, oppressive or neutral. The superstructural needs of man are always already less important than his basic needs, since the latter found the former: modern economies are unthreatened by anything other than the starvation of the masses, which it needs in order to sustain itself and reproduce its capitalist functions, no matter the psychological suffering its populations undertake in their pursuit of life. The anti-depressant, friend to both the depressive and the capitalist alike, is the most perfect example of Mill’s utility, for it renders populations docile, yet uncaring of their enduring exploitation.

Social exploitation, under Mill’s utilitarianism, is not necessarily a bad thing provided it results in a net increase of happiness, even if this happiness is not tempered by the knowledge of real conditions of existence. The question of authenticity is nowhere to be found, though Marx himself is critical of the authentic aspects of social reproduction and their ideological simulacra, which are wholly inauthentic and ultimately destructive. The polite hedonism espoused by Mill is a peculiar form of nineteenth-century bourgeois idealism metamorphosed into twentieth-century ubiquity. It is definitively set up to support hegemony, in that, once a social formation is established as having achieved the highest utility, it is, in effect, undisputable. As a hegemon, this social formation, with the caveat that it includes a certain element of freedom as posited by Mill in his other work, reigns supreme, disallowing other competing social formations to meet it at other Schelling points of convergence. Conversely, the same can be said in part of Marxism, although its by-definition dialectical nature makes it more amenable to necessary social change than utilitarianism. Finally, a social structure erected under utilitarianism might easily fall prey to being a mere ideological state apparatus: in maintaining happiness, which is a phenomenal concept that changes over the centuries, states might be forced to repress certain sections of their population if they maintain different ideas of happiness simultaneously, as in, say, the property ownership happiness of bourgeoisies and the sensuous pleasure happiness of proletariats.

Though these last ideas are couched in Marxist terms, Mill recognized the different and distinct lifestyles of the rich and the poor of his own era. Though his aims were, in the end, emancipatory, they left much to be desired in their practical means: Mill was essentially an economic naturalist, who did not envision equality incarnate in civil society, but only buffered zones of liberty around which the tyranny of the economy can continue to determine mankind. He inserted value into the sphere of justice, but it was only exchange value—in a word, he commodified liberties and rendered them paradoxical. He paid no attention to the bodies of the poor, those instruments of the proletariat which make the world turn; he only cared for their minds because, in this sphere, he could most hope they attain a semblance of bourgeois intellectuality. He did not preach that the wealthy ought to, perhaps, perform physical labour. Mill wanted the poor to morph into simulacra of the rich, as though leisure and contemplation were the highest goods, rather than constitutive activity which in itself favours the labouring poor far more than the members of the leisure class.

Oddly enough, Mill’s ideas of utility, even if they were perverted in the process of application, have been applied to the Marxist aims of the Soviet in twentieth century, in that, or so claimed its brute ideologues, the present social formation is worth dismantling if it might give to a future in which more people are more happy no matter the means used. Both doctrines of value border on being economistic, and because economistic, autistic: Marx’s later scientific writings, qua Althusser and his critique of the spontaneous philosophy of science through Bachelard’s epistemology of the break, especially present to readers a set of ideas directly opposed to humanism, in favour of the primacy of structures, the turning of social gears, the denial of human essences as essences. Mill’s quantification of something that can hardly even be qualified, much less quantified—happiness—also borders on the autistic, in that the basic stuff of his discourse is mere qualia, not substance. Thus, his idealism flounders on itself because it talks about an ideal in terms of materiality, or in terms that misuse discursive materiality, as, for example, when he talks about the hedon as though it were a material atom. Mill tries to rupture his thinking from its tainted influences but ultimately fails in ideological hygiene, with that last observation shorn of its usual connotations.

The social origins of both Marx and Mill are similar in their bourgeois orientation and exposure to philosophy: Marx got his doctorate in it; and Mill worked in the field all his life. Because Marx is, at least, consistent in thinking about material in material terms, unlike Mill who confuses the distinction between subject and object throughout his entire philosophy, Marx is the better philosopher. Although Young Marx, in opposition to Old Marx, wrote about human essences and human ideals, he always grounded them in the material workings of man’s society, its base and grounds of production. His humanist manuscripts remain as ripe for economic criticism as they are for humanistic interpretation. Indeed, Old Marx perhaps had more in common with Mill’s teacher, Jeremy Bentham, whom Marx agreed with in his disparaging of the philosophical idea of natural human rights as ‘nonsense on stilts’. The anxiety of influence might be traced down the intellectual generations: both Marxists and utilitarians share a common trait in their value fetishism, nevertheless. Marx writes in Capital that between equal rights, force decides. This observation is, too, a triumph of the material over the ideal. Between vying philosophies, he might continue, consistency in theory and praxis decides the winner.