Adam GreenfieldI’ve been thinking some about value – what it is, how it’s formed, how we account for it. I’d love to know what you think of the results. https://www.patreon.com/posts/129252509
This feels like one of the most important things I’ve ever written – or important to me, anyway. In founding value in the gifts of *the sun*, *the Earth system* and *the domain of life*, as well as human (physical, intellectual and affective) labor, it’s the first time I’ve been able to offer up a reasonably concise statement of how I think things *are*, fundamentally, with everything that implies for how we should orient ourselves to them.
If we are to build a political economy grounded in the real — in sunlight, soil, care and the capacities of bodies — we need a unit of account capable of spanning that entire register. I’ve always thought the joule, the universal unit of energy, lets us do just that. It encompasses the radiative power of the sun, the labor of bodies (more often measured in kCal), the torque of our tools, even the wattage of servers, all on a single, consistent scale.
While kCal may help us intuit the human metabolic cost of a meal or a day’s labor, joules allow us to integrate those expenditures with the electrical draw of computation, the energy embodied in a concrete building, or the photosynthetic yield of a square meter of crops. If value is to be anchored in the world, this is the language it will have to speak: joules, not dollars; thermodynamic consequence, not price.
We need to tear down the notion of currency, if currency there need be, and refound it in the real before proceeding. This is what crypto could and should have done, and signally failed to do. (I understand perfectly well that crypto was intended to accomplish some other project, but as a failure to grasp the possibilities of a moment, it still feels like a titanic missed opportunity.)
Can we still imagine a crypto that doesn’t suck? That doesn’t differentially raise and empower the worst people? That accounts for its own thermodynamic and social lacunae? I don’t know, but it’s worth pondering.
I know it may feel blithe or ghoulish to uphold these possibilities while grief and terror are being enacted everywhere around us. But what I want to establish here is that while those things are real, *we are only getting started* in establishing the deep conditions of life and justice. The work of establishing those conditions will both sustain us, and open onto ways of being we can scarcely now conceive of.
What I now need to get my head around: Georgescu-Roegen‘s “The Entropy Law and the Economic Process” (thanks @alberto_cottica!) & Salleh’s “Ecofeminism as Politics: Nature, Marx and the Postmodern,” which both sound like they prefigure or maybe even preempt these arguments (and, annoyingly, didn’t turn up in my initial survey). I welcome any other reading suggestions you might have, too.
I’m also really sensitive to a point @mycorrhiza made about the notion that articulating a scale of value is already to collapse back toward the abstraction of something that should never be abstracted: the sovereign and irreducible experience of lived time. I distantly recall Marilyn Strathern saying something about this in a book I read years and years ago called “The Gender of the Gift,” and will have to refresh my memory of that.
Heh, someone just sent me this link as well – looks like it steam-engines when it comes steam-engine time. https://www.routledge.com/Capital-Redefined-A-Commonist-Value-Theory-for-Liberating-Life/Hosseini-Gills/p/book/9781032374772
Capital Redefined: A Commonist Value Theory for Liberating Life
Capital Redefined presents a unique perspective on the nature of “capital,” departing from the prevailing reductionist accounts. Hosseini and Gills offer an expanded perspective on Marxian value theory by addressing its main limitations and building their own integrative value theory. They argue that the current understanding of “value” must be re-examined and liberated from its subservient ties to capital while acknowledging the ways in which capital appropriates value. This is achieved
By the way, as I intend to write this up as a pamphlet or short book about what I’m calling “metabolic realism,” it’d be *hugely* helpful if you could point me at your own favorite sources for post-Marxist thinking about value.
My current TBR list already includes Daggett’s “The Birth of Energy” (via @danmcquillan); Georgescu-Roegen‘s “The Entropy Law and the Economic Process” (thanks @alberto_cottica!); Salleh’s “Ecofeminism as Politics”; “Capital Redefined: A Commonist Value Theory for Liberating Life,” via Fiona Dyer; Odum’s “Environment, Power, and Society” (via @playinprogress); and Marilyn Strathern’s “The Gender of the Gift,” from my own 40-year-old college notes.
play in progress@adamgreenfield @danmcquillan @alberto_cottica ooohhh, tasty 😋
You're not a reading group kinda person, are you? Because with that list I would be in.
Alberto Cottica@adamgreenfield Adam, small request for my own TBR. I would like to read something on the evolution of the smart cities concept in the last ten years, roughly since you wrote your pamphlet. I thought it had killed it for good, but it seems to be re-emerging in connection with concepts like "digital twin" and, uhm, "artificial intelligence". Would you happen to have a reference for me?
Dubious Blur@adamgreenfield I have been wondering when we start to measure currency in watts, given the obscured but real relationship between productive capacity and money.
Giles@adamgreenfield @alberto_cottica Bookmarking… :-)
@adamgreenfield This part makes me want to throw Odum's concept of "emergy" at you very hard: "While kCal may help us intuit the human metabolic cost of a meal or a day’s labor, joules allow us to integrate those expenditures with the electrical draw of computation, the energy embodied ..., or the photosynthetic yield of a square meter of crops. If value is to be anchored in the world, this is the language it will have to speak: joules, not dollars; thermodynamic consequence, not price."
@adamgreenfield That would be Howard T. Odum, "Environment, power, and society for the twenty-first century : the hierarchy of energy"
https://archive.org/details/environmentpower0000odum
https://archive.org/details/environmentpower0000odum
@adamgreenfield I think you have a special added value in weighing in this debate. Georgescu-Roegen made obvious sense – I remember coming across his work as an undergraduate and thinking "OK, why are we not doing THIS stuff instead?" – and yet it was not picked up: that was almost 40 years ago, and we just went on doing neoclassical econ. Given your past work, you might be able to point out why this happened, and what would be needed for this approach to become mainstream.
danmcquillan@adamgreenfield Cara New Dagget's 'The Birth of Energy - Fossil Fuels, Thermodynamics, and the Politics of Work' is well worth a read https://www.dukeupress.edu/the-birth-of-energy. I'm still digesting it, but its argument that 'energy' itself is a historical and political concept seems like a vital point to keep in mind.
@adamgreenfield As an ex-physicist, it also reminded me of some of the lightbulb moments that I got from reading Isabelle Stengers.
Simon Brooke@adamgreenfield no. #CryptoCurrency is inherently a scam, of benefit only to fraudsters, those involved in corruption, and those seeking to pay for or conceal criminal actions. It cannot and will not ever benefit normal people.
Jonathan Schofield@adamgreenfield this is beautiful. Will read the post at the top in full later
@adamgreenfield you likely know him already, but on the off chance you did not this is your man: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Georgescu-Roegen?wprov=sfla1
Jeff Zugale - Z Factory@adamgreenfield yes definitely. Money really is a counter for energy already, albeit a clumsy one that can be manipulated. Investing in future growth is really betting that there will always be more cheap energy available every year. Basing currency on actual energy cost of doing things would be much better.
mycorrhiza@adamgreenfield I like where you’re going with this, but I’d like to push back a bit on your premise. The concept of “value” itself, as a construct that can be meaningfully reasoned about separately from the effort that created it, is at the core of the Capitalist ontology. But what if we reject THAT?
E.g.: what if a Joule created by human effort is NOT the same as a Joule created by a photovoltaic array, because one required the contribution of a human being’s life — a precious resource that, I believe, simply cannot be compared to or exchanged with anything else — and the other just happens (after the array has been set up, and maintenance accounted for, etc.)? For that matter, perhaps “value” created by a person enjoying themself shouldn’t even be compared to “value” created by toil or coerced labor. The notion that some things in this universe can even be understood as commodities is an ideological decision, and increasingly I think it’s imperative that we reject it.
Am I making sense?
Matt Noyes@adamgreenfield I will try to comment on your blog post, starting, perhaps, from the definition of value as a social form specific to particular social relations.
Fait partie des meubles@adamgreenfield "Capital as Power" (https://bnarchives.net/id/eprint/259/2/20090522_nb_casp_full_indexed.pdf) is, imho, not read enough.