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This is a straw man of the labor theory of value. And also equally applies to capitalist speculative bubbles. This is what Marx calls commodity fetishism: the divorcing of use value from monetary value.
The trick here is claiming there's such thing as quantifiable "use value". It's actually two tricks. The first one that there's some objective fixed value that an object has, regardless of anybody's opinions, and it can be calculated, even if it required omniscient entity having total view of the economy. The second trick is that a specific person or organization (Gosplan if you will) can calculate it. Both are wrong. This is actually one of the fundamental reasons why socialism fails - it can not produce proper prices, and without proper prices, economic cooperation can not function, as prices drive resource allocation. The Soviets tried to implement non-price resource allocation and failed miserably. You can just "assign" prices but as they would be disconnected from actual economic value, you will either get massive deficits, or a ton of resources wasted on producing useless widgets. In a socialist economy, you usually have plenty of both.
Sure, bubbles are a consequence of resource misallocation. But you know what is also true of bubbles? None of them can last for long. Exactly because this is a self-defeating process - the longer the price remains misaligned, the higher is the pressure to correct. Until the bubble bursts. On the contrary, the misallocation that is driven by directive prices and resource assignment can last indefinitely, it does not have the feedback mechanism.
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Is there a way to quantify "use value"? If not, this seems to be a rhetorical trick. Why would I care about a notion of value that exists simply to win arguments about communism?
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Whether or not they will be exchanged for money or handed out for free, nobody wants those widgets. They are useless crap. They are worthless.
That would mean the corresponding labor was not "socially necessary" labor time. Marx was trying to avoid getting down into supply & demand fluctuations, to mainly make a more core scientific approach to investigating where value/profit comes from. But that "socially necessary" term is where he had to bundle it in anyway.
Hm then where do you draw the line? What if the widgets just suck but aren't totally useless?
Yeah I think it's just backward-looking in his conception. To the extent it was profitable at all, then that's the extent that the labor turned out to have been 'socially necessary'. So it's supply & demand after all.
I think it basically works as a way to think of where the profit value comes from: putting together inputs and selling the output for more money, thus you got more 'use-value' out of the inputs than you paid for their 'exchange-value'. But I agree with others that there's no reason for Marx to have said that only labor can have a use-value greater than their fair exchange-value (apparently he just switched on a dime while writing Capital and declared that, in order to make the theory of value into a classical labor theory of value, and then got tied in knots trying to justify that declaration).
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That just shows that the marxian concept of "use value" isn't fully capturing what people find...useful...about the things they buy, because money is entirely fungible into other "useful" items, and insofar as people are willing to spend it on one thing, they're revealing their utility function about both that thing and the other things they could have bought but aren't.
Money is entirely fungible -- that is, one unit of currency is the same as another unit of the same currency -- but it is not entirely convertible into other useful items (although it's pretty good at this). The divorcing of use value from exchange value doesn't make sense for commodities or bulk manufactured goods, but it does for other things -- real estate in particular.
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This again assumes humans are rational actors, and fails to adequately capture the reasons for an economic booms and busts in a capitalist system and the kind of behavior you see from the ultra-rich.
...No? That's literally the opposite of what I said. "Use value" assumes some objective, rational value of "use"; exchange value includes all the irrational feelings and opinions people can have about goods and services like risk aversion, FOMO, status, or just idiosyncratic preference. People also make secondary bets on what other people will find useful/interesting/worth buying, introducing further fuzziness into the system.
That's not commodity fetishism; it's the opposite. Recognizing that when people are buying things, they're not just buying things - they're communicating with other people as well.
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