Abstract
Utility claims that everything useful is commensurable and can be ordered quantitatively; usefulness involves no such claim. Usefulness is a reasonable general concept; utility is a pseudo-concept. There is nothing for utility to be the concept of. Utility is a bad abstraction because useful things are inseparable from useful properties and social forms and purposes. When the social form of wealth is overlooked, pricing commodities prompts the notion that everything useful is commensurable on a scale of utility. Utility is the usual answer to the question: what makes commodities commensurable? What makes commodities commensurable is their social form, value, which is necessarily expressed in price and presupposes production for profit. Utility masks value and profit. Against the liberal embrace of markets as free of compulsory collective aims, Marx demonstrates that a commercial society—which lends plausibility to utility—is a capitalist society. Endless capital accumulation is its compulsory aim, the truth about utility.