Use Value and Politics in the Philosophy of Bolívar Echeverría

Abstract

This article seeks to demonstrate how the closely related notions of “use value” and “natural form” in Bolívar Echeverría’s philosophy are grounded in a long-standing philosophical idea: that the natural life of human beings is subordinated to their reproduction as political animals, whose fundamental condition is freedom understood as “self-sufficiency.” We argue that the contradiction between “value” and “use value,” which is continually reproduced by the capitalist economy, corresponds to the division and contradiction between economics and politics. The analysis unfolds in four stages: (1) the formulation of a hypothesis concerning the origins of Bolívar Echeverría’s interpretation of the category of “use value”; (2) an outline of the relationship established by Marx between “use value,” “natural form,” and the political community’s control over its material conditions, together with the impossibility of exercising such control under the capitalist mode of production; (3) an analysis of Echeverría’s conception of modernity and the aporias arising from the contradiction between “use value” and “value”; and (4) a concluding discussion of the contradiction between economics and politics that stems from the contradiction between “use value” and “value.”