Value is a measure of the socially necessary activity and its results, money is the material expression of value. In practical terms, money is both a means of calculating value on the basis of the individually necessary amounts of activity and a means of calculating the consumption share of individuals and groups. Value is a socio-cultural phenomenon, and money and prices are a technology that builds on the programming of this phenomenon and mediates the evolution from the simplest to more complex forms of exchange.
Individual needs can only coincide with socially necessary needs by chance, otherwise individuals would be only an external manifestation of society as a kind of “superorganism.” Thus, the totality of individually necessary meanings can only coincide with the totality of socially necessary meanings by chance. In the general case, the aggregate of individually demanded goods and their prices should not be equal to the set of use values and their exchange values. “Through the mediation of money, subjects maintain relationships with what is not themselves, with the social as an institution” (Aglietta and Orléan 2002, p. 19).
Exchange value is the substance of money; price is the sum of money that an individual consumer, producer or intermediary is willing to pay for a given good. Exchange value is the measure of use value, price is the measure of utility. Although the meanings of existence are ordered among themselves, they are not ordered with the meanings of communication or self-expression. Exchange value is not the measure of dreams, morals and ideals, they cannot be bought with money. But exchange value and money are impossible without dreams, morals and ideals, since they make social choice possible and hence social necessity and value as a socially necessary mass of cultural bits embodied in use values. Loves and hopes, morals and ideals are not for sale, money is not paid for them. But goods are sold (or not sold) at a price determined with loves and hopes, morals and ideals in mind.
Value as a socially necessary mass of use values evolves in the process of self-reproduction of culture-society, while price as an individually necessary mass of utility develops in scattered acts of individual or collective self-reproduction. Value and price are linked through money: “Economists have the habit of thinking about prices starting from value, while for us their basis is to be found in money” (Aglietta and Orléan 2006, p. 27).