In the first three pages of his Capital, without any warning to the reader, Marx intro-duces a modification of the traditional meaning of the term “use value”. For Locke,Quesnay, and Smith, “use value” was the ability of a thing to satisfy human needs,for Marx it becomes the thing itself. This change of meaning has not been properlyperceived, and many authors continue to attribute to Marx the same conceptionof use value than his predecessors have. When Marx translates some passages ofAristotle’sPoliticsfrom English to German, his translation surprisingly attributesthe term “use value” to Aristotle; worse, Marx does not attribute to Aristotle thepredominant meaning of this term but the new meaning adopted by him.This note offers a brief history of the term “use value”, summarizes the significantchange of meaning introduced by Marx, conjectures about the possible motivationsof Marx to act this way, and finally documents the amazing translation of Marx.