all the voices.. indigenous us.. [holmgren indigenous law]

datejie green ..noted that in her work with groups organizing for racial, sexual, gender, ability, worker and Indigenous justice, such critical examinations and reclamations of words that have historically been hateful or colonial in nature are core to re-humanizing those most affected.

Friederike Habermann..could not understand Praetorius’ acceptance of money, and by implication, its role in defining value in the economy: “How can you stick with the concept of ‘value,’ as in economics, since it is always necessarily linked to competition, i.e., structural hate? It goes along with a so-called individualism, as described by Adorno, Horkheimer and Foucault, that simply means ‘who’s the best?’ It’s a kind of ranking that has nothing to do with self-realization as an individual…she emphasized the other side of the coin: “As the Zapatistas say, if someone or a group of people decides to make the world better, they can only do it in the way he, she or the group think the world will be better. But this will only repeat history. It is essential that any person be able to live out their own definition of ‘dignity,’ as the Zapatistas say (or ‘values,’ if you want).

p 14

This rift in thinking and vocabulary is precisely what this workshop sought to overcome. Economists are eager to protect their ideas about “value” as money-based and make them normative. Commoners and others, by contrast, want to broaden the meaning of the term to apply to all of human experience. This conflict prompted Ina Praetorius to conclude, “Language is politics.” For herself, she has no desire to contest with economists over control of the term. Others, however, are determined to continue that very struggle

2\ towards a relational theory of value

p 17

Sian Sullivan, a co-investigator with the Leverhulme Centre for the Study of Value in the UK and Professor of Environment and Culture at Bath Spa University. “This of course leads to

the paradox of capitalism trying to use commodity form, an engine of accumulation, to solve ecological crises that the commodity form created in the first place. It does not know how to protect intrinsic value.”

huge..

[..]

“Value is so fundamental to how we define ourselves,” said Neera Singh. “I cringe when I see value equated with price because I think of value as caring, life and relations, especially with the nonhuman world.”

[..]

Habermann ..The very point, she stressed, is to “break out of this binary understanding of individualism/ community and egoism/altruism,” so that we can come to a richer understanding of actual relationships.

Janis Loschmann of the University of East Anglia, Norwich, agreed that the point of a relational theory of value is to “transcend the subject/object duality.”

binary ness

Janis: “value is an event that takes place before the subjective and objective are separated. Value does not come from any property within an object nor as something that the subject sees as meaningful in it. Value comes from the experience of the relationship itself.” Loschmann said that

our confusion about value stems from trying to assign a location for it, as if it inheres in a static object. “We must try to see value as living within a dynamic process.”

antifragility/emergence‘et-al.. makes exchange value irrelevant

p 18

Andreas Weber, a theoretical biologist and ecophilosopher, shifted the discussion to a much wider plane by noting that

“value is not just a human thing; it’s about being alive.”

andreas

p 19

datejie green, the strategic organizer and Canadian doctoral student, agreed that embodied needs and life itself must be put at the center of any theory of value: “Rationalizing economics has alienated people from our own lives and feelings, and declared that it must be so. Through capitalist processes, our own embodied needs have become distorted, as seen, for example, in the prevalence of mental illness, addiction and trauma. When people don’t know their own bodily needs or social relationship needs, they become trapped in cycles that violate their own rights and collective and social lives.” She added that many people worldwide have become largely oblivious to our actual dependence on planetary ecosystems, a fundamental reality that Indigenous peoples have been bringing to greater global attention.

begs we get back to us.. to indigenous us.. perhaps via rat park ness..

 p 20

To help participants experience this truth, green led a session in which everyone told a personal story about “how I came to care about value.” The stories varied immensely, but often focused on the ethical tensions between the money economy and social well-being.

3\ key challenges in developing a new theory of value

p 22

If there was general agreement that value should be understood as arising from relationships – our relations with each other, with various human and beyond-human communities, and with the Earth – several difficult challenges must be addressed. Workshop participants focused on three of them: the role of abstractions and metrics in representing value; ways to represent the value of natural systems; and the disruptive effects of money itself on authentic human relationships and freedom.

waste/irrelevant.. no?

A. Can Abstract Metrics Help Build a New Value Regime?

Based on his research, David Graeber said that value – which generically expresses “our conceptions of the desirable” – is typically represented by some token, whether it is money or a college degree, which then becomes valued in itself. This is a pattern that recurs.”

p 23

But can we realistically avoid the use of abstractions and metrics? Nick Dyer-Witheford said that “the problem is not too few abstractions, but the dominance of only one master metric, money, which falsely tries to compress everything into one social good.”

nice

He conceded that abstractions are a limited way of seeing, and that they can be malign and destructive. But he insisted that abstractions as such are necessary for *governance and control. Many social movements depend upon statistics about health, industrial injuries and CO2 emissions to advance their goals, said Dyer-Witheford. More broadly, abstractions are necessary for contemporary modern life: “If **life is enriched by complex interchange, then we need abstractions,” he said. At the very least, ***the state finds abstractions useful, a theme explored from a critical point of view in James Scott’s book, Seeing Like a State.

none of these are good enough reason.. for humanity ie: *govt/control **exchange ness ***state

none of these are us.. we waste our energy thinking we need them.. fuller too much ness

[..]

“Is it possible to organize flows of value with currencies without measuring or abstracting?” asked Heike Löschmann. Money itself is an abstraction.

why org flows of value..? if it’s truly value.. it will org itself..

[..]

Silke Helfrich believes that we “rely too much on measurement-based governance systems” to achieve goals even though there are often effective alternatives such as the use of social taboo and other social practices.

thinking.. we need to disengage from them all together..  total..

if we don’t totally disengage.. i don’t think we can expect all of us to be/become indigenous.. and that’s what we need..

p 24

Heike Löschmann noted how indigenous peoples have created their own lifeworlds and non-abstract, *non-measured ways of managing their resources and communities.“You measure things for a certain purpose, or to put things into trade,” she said. This raises another objection to systems of abstract measurement: **they move us away from “enlivened” relationships with each other, and foster the objectification or commodification of living phenomena. The basic problem with abstraction is not just that they oversimplify real-world phenomena, said Helfrich, but that they “wipe out entire knowledge systems. ***Abstraction becomes a thinking technique in which we not only make something visible, we make it normative.” In this way, we can dismiss the value systems used by indigenous or traditional communities as as premodern, unscientific and unserious.

we all need to become indigenous.. *measure\ing things is killing us ..making us **not us

***this is huge.. we quit listening once we see stuff as measure/able

p 25

Helfrich suggested that, since the word value comes from the Latin root valorare, which means “estimate,” perhaps it would be worth thinking about “estimating value” rather than attempting to measure it in “objective,” equivalent units. One could invent a “value-estimation chain” [Wertschätzungskette, according to Uwe Lübbermann/ Premium Cola] similar to what already occurs in open value networks such as Sensorica (see pp. 22-23 below). Perhaps we should talk about “value-estimation chain” or a “value-honoring chain” in this sense.

estimate.. or perhaps even better.. intuit..

intuit of have/need ness..like a mother/father can sense.. listen deeper

p 26

B. How Shall We Value “Nature”?

The use of abstractions can be particularly problematic when applied to nature because so often that is a backdoor process for marketizing and exploiting natural systems.

how can we not see that as clearly for people..? ie: degrees/validation/passport..et al

[..]

Hence the title of Sullivan’s paper: “Fabricating Nature.” Sullivan said that quantifying “nature’s services” and putting a pricetag on them may provide a rough order of valuation, but *cannot reflect the full and unpredictably generative dimensions of nature’s value(s).

again.. totally agree with this.. not only can it *not fully reflect.. the fabrication ness messes with the emergent/natural/iterating antifragility of alive ness.. but even worse that we fabricate people.. nature… the entire ecosystem..  needs indigenous people.. not measured/fake/fabricated people..

we perpetuate not-us ness.. via broken feedback loop

p 27

Yet strangely, monetary valuation of environmental damage is generally regarded as acceptable as a means of reparation or punishment, one participant noted. “Do we have a theory of why this is okay?” Sullivan replied: “Pricing environmental damage to provide for compensation or punishment doesn’t mean that all of the values that have been lost are captured in the prices.” A monetary penalty does not purport to be equivalent to the environmental harm that it is punishing

we need none of if..it’s cancerous.. no matter how small.. copy of copy of copy.. becomes cancerous/kills-us

begs we go more.. your-own-song/indigenous ness

The systemic flaws of objectifying and quantifying nature must be squarely confronted such that a different ethic and framework of human/nature relations can be asserted.

Subsistence societies are already doing this in many instances, noted Andreas Weber. They honor a first-person, emotional response and ignore the supposedly objective, scientific perspective. They do not distinguish between “nature” and “human culture.” But it is not so easy to present this sensibility in political arenas such as legislatures, courts and regulatory bodies, at least in Europe and North America. Several participants agreed that it is difficult to introduce new ontological approaches *within existing policy and power structures.

so we let go of existing policy/power structures.. we can’t not..

One possible response, said Weber, is to “focus on the taking away of life right now” – not just the organic web of living beings, but the “struggle of all of them, including humans, to be real and whole.

This is the center of the struggle, after all – my possibility of being real and whole.” 

huge.. we have to 100% trust (assume good).. all of us.. or the dance will never dance..

p 28

An interesting inversion occurs in regimes based on gift logic, said Singh: **“The giver becomes more powerful through giving than the receiver” – in contrast to market exchanges, in which the receiver/buyer commands greater power. An objection was raised, however: How does stewardship of nature through a gift economy map onto the feminist critique of reproductive labor? ***Isn’t this precisely what so many women are trying to escape – the coercive use of their “free” labor? Singh explained that she is not arguing for free appropriation of this caring labor, but rather that ****the logic underpinning transfer of resources should be driven by the logic of *gift instead of that of the market

*gift ness.. still a compromise.. because we drift into obligation ness.. ie: can’t play any **power games..

i believe it should be ***free.. as in free\dom for all.. it’t not about.. let’s let the woman in.. equal pay et al.. it’s.. let’s realize we’ve messed things all up.. free does work.. just not when we’re broken..

there is no ****logic underpinning transfer of resources..  we have to trust 100% that have need ness of indigenous/listening people.. it’s the only way for it to work..

we don’t know this.. because we’ve never yet tried.. 100% of us 100% free..

p 30

C. Should We De-Monetize Everyday Life?

yes yes yes yes yes.. we should de monetize everything..

Should we perhaps strive to de-monetize *as much of everyday life as possible?

not *as much as possible.. that’s why nothing has worked yet.. it has to be 100%

let go

[..]

For Habermann, money itself is the problem because the money economy has always been able to capture surplus value and thereby introduce inequalities of power, wealth and social hierarchy. Our challenge is to figure out how to “undo the structures of capitalism,” she said.

let’s try this.. short bp

has to be something 7 bn can leap to.. for (blank)’s sake…

[..]

While Marx conceded that these problems might be solved in a noncapitalist society in which everyone was paid the same wage, he insisted that this still would not eliminate worker alienation, said Habermann.

why ubi isn’t enough.. can only see it as temp placebo.. to get us to quit thinking of money

p 31

Money also imposes extrinsic motivations on people, crowding out intrinsic motivations as well as propensities to cooperate. “Without money and exchange value,” said Habermann, “you don’t have to compete.”

David Harvie, a political economist at Leicester University in the UK, agreed:

“The problem is the (artificial) equivalency among things because of money.

making up money ness

Fundamentally incommensurable things are made commensurable via money.” Friederike noted that even alternative currencies do not solve the problem because the “value equivalency” dynamic remains.

[..]

The only alternative can be a system that accepts the principle, “To each according to her needs, from each according to her abilities,” said Habermann.

yes.. have/need ness

then right after that goes into money ness again..? ie of commons based on money..? don’t get this..?

p 32

Such a shift away from money would be a radical departure, Andreas Weber pointed out, because it would require us to move *beyond private property, too, and develop collective ownership and management systems.

*good.. no need for collective ownership/management either..

Giorgos Kallis argued, “The problem is capitalism, not money per se,” because any *tokens of value would elicit the same sorts of competition and invidious behaviors. Furthermore, as David Graeber had noted, the creation of tokens to represent value – which then become a motivational focus in their own right — is a recurrent human practice. This raises a question about whether “value tokens” and money are more different than alike.

*indeed

Janis Loschmann argued, “The problem is not money itself; the problem is that *everyone depends upon a wage. We need to convert money into a purpose-driven means to serve human freedom. This means getting rid of the notion that one’s labor in markets is the primary source of one’s dignity and value.”

rather *need to disengage from depending on a wage.. (i thought all this was already talked about.. have need ness – i guess.. showing me that i would have freaked out being there..)

Michel Bauwens of the P2P Foundation thinks that the problem is not money itself, but the design of current forms of fiat money managed by the state. “Money is designed and created,” he said, “but in Marxism we don’t have this discussion.” Just as money can be designed to facilitate the extraction of value from nature or people, *so it could be designed to measure and represent different types of value that are fairer and more equally distributed.

*but why..? why do we need any kind of measuring/money to facil have/need ness..?

“Arthur Brock of the MetaCurrency Project has described currency as *“a symbolic system with a feedback mechanism that organizes flows”; the currency enables one to see the currents,” making it a “current-see.”

*ok.. but not one we need.. and one that is damaging us.. if we see the flow.. we start measuring (which leads to all the competition et al).. but aliveness can’t be seen like that.. it’s constantly changing.. why antifragility matters so much.. we have to let go of this thinking.. it’s based on thinking we have to be in control.. and so.. we’re missing it/life

Arthur – metacurrency project

p 33

While it may be possible to design money to serve different purposes, we should not lose sight of larger historical forces at play. Historically, money has been used as an instrument of capitalist power to colonize entire peoples and dehumanize them, noted datejie green, citing the work of African-American historian Orlando Patterson in studying the Atlantic slave trade and various ancient forms of slavery as “social death.” Attempts to imagine and design different flows of value and types of social relationships must therefore “*prioritize history and ongoing historical processes of power,” she emphasized. They must also look to “other worldviews, especially non-European ones

yes.. datejie again..

but.. beyond being careful.. and ie: *prioritizing history/power.. we have to let go.. just let go.. of the measuring/validating..

those who have been oppressed, exploited and excluded; including the worker but not only, and especially the women, must be at the heart of its re-definition. One way this can be done is through daily struggle against its operation and creation of life and meaning by them. But this definition should be a means to flourish, a life that is democratic, ecological, based on women’s freedom

based on everyone’s freedom.. rev of everyday life.. let’s try this: a nother way (book)  – based on 2 convos.. as the day..

4\ commons -based peer production: a fundamental shift in understanding value?

let’s not focus on production.. ay..

p 35

Bauwens recommended a presentation by Zygmunt Bauman, “Living in Times of Interregnum,”10 which describes our times as “a situation in which the old ways of doing things do not work any longer, but new ways of doing things have not yet been designed and put in place.”

[..]

A new value theory is needed today, he said , “to explain how commons-based peer production is sustainable as a different mode of value creation.”

let’s try this guys: short bit

p 36

bauwens talking moneys ie: “fair use economy” – …constituted one-sixth of US Gross Domestic Production in 2007 (the latest year for which statistics were then available), employing 17 million people and generating $4.7 trillion in revenues.11

?

Peer production points to a different social and moral logic than that of capitalism – the pooling of resources and knowledge – even though it *must operate within the market/state.

*why.. ?

p 38

A. Practical Strategies for Building New Systems of Value

What might be done to overcome the “value crisis” that Bauwens and Niaros describe? They suggest several approaches: a strategy of “transvestment” to shift investment from capitalist enterprises to commons-based alternatives; the creation of “generative business models” such as “open value accounting” that co-create the commons and create livelihoods for contributors; and other innovations in the financing, ownership and governance of regenerative organizations.

???

i thought we were going.. a nother way..? this sounds like shifting current way to a kinder venue..??

“Transvestment” can be understood as “the transfer and use of value from one system of production to another.” It describes the techniques for achieving a net “exvestment” of resources from capitalist value-extraction enterprises and structures to autonomous (commons-based) ones.14 The term was originally developed by software developer Dmytri Kleiner and media artist Baruch Gottlieb to describe a kind of “reverse co-optation,” in which capitalist enterprises become dependent upon commons value-generation.

perhaps this is where the problem lies.. in thinking.. production ness

Dmytri

.Instead of the co-optation of the commons economy by capital, in the form of the netarchical capitalist platforms which capture value from the commons, *we co-opt capital inside the commons, and subject it to its rules,” writes Bauwens. This leads to people **self-identifying as commoners rather than as labor, a market-oriented identity.

? why keep any of the money ness..? why **id as anything..?

p 39

Michel Bauwens believes that market exchange and commoning can be constructively conjoined. He cited the example of “moral markets” and “just pricing theory” in medieval markets as examples,17 but cautioning that “you need to be able to protect against corporate appropriations of commonly created value.”

seems we can’t let go of B ness..

but we have to.. we can’t not..

p 40

good god to the B ness..

Pedro Jardim, the Berlin-based cofounder of Agora, Coliga, Apoio and steward of Neotribes, is deeply committed to this mission as a “business activator around collaborative lifestyles in online and offline fields.” He noted that in recent years projects such as Ouishare, Sensorica and Enspiral “have been *experimenting with groundbreaking ways of mixing the idea of community while building technologies that combine new methods of governance and ownership, and allow participants to operate in much more collaborative ways. 

let’s try hosting-life-bits via self-talk as data

Pedro

p 42

said Jardim. *The challenge in coming years, he said, is to create “transnational types of organizations that can work within the traditional economy and hold assets in a centralized way while enabling distributed autonomous access in decentralized ways.” He cited some examples:

*that’s the challenge..? holy cow.. i thought we were trying to get away from money..?

p 43

B. The Dangers of Co-optation and Wishful Thinking

p 44

The same problems afflict the marketization of ecosystem protection: Once a price system is put in place establishing an equivalence of value, it simply opens the door for debt dependency, trade and speculation, in the usual extractive ways

exactly.. so why has so much of this convo/conference.. been spent on assuming a price system..?

p 45

David Bollier responded that the sharing and cooperation on corporate platforms such as Facebook or Twitter amounts to a faux commons because commoners are not in fact devising the rules of self-governance and exercising control. The struggle underway is to prevent freely directed, purposeful commoning from being captured and controlled by capital. The goal is to protect the integrity and independence of commoning. While many commons are indeed being appropriated by capital, a commons theory of value seeks to name the generative social value that arises from commons, and to protect it. It is an affirmative theory of value, not just a critique of capital.

p 46

C. But Peer Production Still Relies Upon (Unpaid) Care Work and Nature!

Bauwens believes that commoners and care work thinkers and activists need to enter into a deeper dialogue. He conceded that commons communities are “struggling to sustain ourselves” as it is. “We are volunteering,” said Bauwens. “We are de-monetizing huge aspects of our lives. But creating enough [market exchange] value to support livelihoods is a huge challenge.”

indeed.. deeper.. beyond money for livelihood..

p 47

Friederike Habermann, the political economist and historian. She cited her own role in a German network called Noncommercial Life, which provides products and services to the general public without relying on any exchange logic. Having such “spaces of mutuality” is important in experimenting with other options and developing them, she said.

A standing challenge is how to *mediate the relations between a commons and market. Should the commons devise a membrane or a shield to protect itself against standard market forces? asked Heike Löschmann. A shield can protect against market appropriation, but it also excludes potentially useful opportunities

why..?

disengage.. model a nother way

5\ notes toward a commons theory of value

p 49

Participants identified a number of essential elements for a commons theory of value, such as the primacy of the human condition and basic human freedoms and capacities: • the notion of Ubuntu, “I am because you are,” and constant selfreproduction via caring and commoning (Silke Helfrich); • self-realization through aliveness (Andreas Weber); • the rights to life and dignity, and to travel freely (David Harvie); • the freedom to create and the play principle (David Graeber); • the nature of being (Janis Loschmann); • the role of the nonhuman world (Sian Sullivan, Neera Singh)

see.. all these non measure/money thinkings.. let’s boldly go there.. do/be that..

p 50

*innovative forms of law, technology and social practice that support and protect commoning (David Bollier); •

*mech simple enough..

would have loved to hear more from David..

Conclusion

p 51

any new theory of value must aspire to be a positive theory about freedom and emancipation, and not a “negative theory” in the manner of the labor theory of value, which focuses on capitalist capture of value.

so why was there so much focus on mimmicks of capitalist/market value

And yet, as the discussions showed, we also aspire to a shared grand narrative about “value.” Or, if we are to avoid a word freighted with so much economic baggage, there is a clearly felt need to find a way to develop an alternative vocabulary, perhaps focused on “meaning,” “grace,” “beauty” or other words that point to human flourishing and fulfillment. Although a new theory of value may be elusive for now, we know that the idea of “value” speaks to the question of who we are and how we shall live, work and be in the world. Participants in the workshop were united in hoping that their dialogues could provide guidance in developing politically relevant, modern-day theories of value

p 52

participants

Joanna Barelkowska (Germany) Michel Bauwens (Belgium/Thailand) David Bollier (US) Tiberius Brastaviceanu (Canada) Nick Dyer-Witheford (Canada) David Graeber (US/UK) datejie green (Canada) Aetzel Griffioen (Netherlands) Havin Guneser (Kurdistan) Friederike Habermann (Germany) David Harvie (UK) Silke Helfrich (Germany) Pedro Jardim (Germany) Giorgos Kallis (Greece/Spain) Heike Loeschmann (Germany) Janis Loschmann (UK/Germany) Ina Praetorius (Switzerland) Neera Singh (India/Canada) Sian Sullivan (UK) Andreas Weber (Germany)

____________

value

theory of value

re imagine value report

value in commons econ

generative value

____________