Value

Value

What is Value? There are different implementations of value. Is there value in trash? There are in fact two different concepts of value that answer this question. It is how you value it, what you can do with it and how useful it is to you. But also it is the value that, before dumpstering the food, there already was a process happening of value-creation - people making a profit out of it. Even things that are trash, have a social history of value-creation, even though the food that had been dumpster dived was given no value to by the market-people.

This interpretation is use-value and abstract value. Use value is something that you need, for example me getting information and figuring how to wpa on my laptop. From use-value to abstract value is a commodification / fetishisation process. This means that you take relations between objects as social relations and the relation between subjects as objectified relations. The labour that you put in making one thing is expressed in money-value. So we don't speak about people doing things, but about the products or things that people have done. What happens when labour becomes the prime determinant from value. How do you value your time?

A theory of value is needed to define a society of Sharism. A new theory of value would be an initial stage of creating sustainable forms of sharing.


 * Over accumulation
 * Affluence
 * David Graeber - Towards an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams.

Additional propositions to create a 'new' theory of value:
 * Ethical Economy. The next economy will be an ethical economy where value is no longer based on labour as in the capitalist economy (nor on land as in the feudal economy that preceded it), but on the ability to construct ethically significant social relations.