Love requires attention, affection, and reciprocal flow -- a natural cycle of giving and receiving. Capitalism can easily commodify the first two, but the third resists the market. That's precisely why our economic system is so determined to destroy it.
Each time I relocate to Germany, I buy a mug. This usually entails a trip to the nearest TK Maxx, where I purchase a €4, extra-large vessel for my herbal tea. The dainty European mugs found in my prefurnished lodgings just can't hold the quantities I need. My criteria are simple: it must be large and sturdy. I don't care what it looks like or who manufactured it. In Marxist terms, I'm concerned only with its use value.
If, however, I wished to seem fancy or fashionable, I could purchase a Hermès "H Déco Rouge No. 1" mug for €125. Drinking my ginger brew out of this lovely piece of porcelain might increase my social worth in the eyes of discerning tableware connoisseurs, but its use value remains the same: it holds my tea. Remaining in the vernacular of Marxism, the additional €121 that I could theoretically pay for the Hermès mug represents the difference in their exchange values as commodities.
When Karl Marx discusses the difference between use and exchange values, he refers to material objects that satisfy human wants and needs, only transformed into commodities when traded on a market. In 1857, he used the example of wheat, which
possesses the same use value, whether cultivated by slaves, serfs or free labourers. It would not lose its use value if it fell from the sky like snow. Now, how does use value become transformed into a commodity? [When it becomes a] vehicle of exchange value.
Intrinsic to capitalism as an economic system, then, is the conversion of things that have use values (which, often enough, are abundant and free) into things that have exchange values, i.e., scarce commodities that people must pay for.
Although not a material object, love also has a use value that exists outside of the social relations of exchange that govern capitalist societies. Most, if not all of us, have given and received love, often beginning as children in our families, where we feel nurtured and validated by the people around us. Giving and receiving this most vital of emotions is as essential to human flourishing as food, water, and shelter -- and thus, it follows that it ought to figure prominently in any political program for socialist transformation. Yet if we want to develop a socialist analysis and subsequent politics of love, we must understand how our current economic system deprives us of the time and energy necessary to give and receive it.
To better delineate between the use and exchange values of love, I propose that "love" involves at least three distinct constituent components: attention, affection, and reciprocal flow. All of the different forms of love -- romantic, platonic, filial, spiritual, and so on -- involve some combination of these three components. All three have use values that exist outside of the market, but only two can be directly commodified, leaving the third, reciprocal flow, necessarily beyond the realm of exchange. Understanding how and why capitalism diminishes our ability to give and receive love hinges on its simultaneous devaluation and exploitation of the lone use value that cannot be converted into an exchange value.