Values, Measures and Disciplinary Markets
* Article: Massimo De Angelis. Value(s), Measure(s) and Disciplinary Markets. The Commoner,
Summary
Reading notes from Michel Bauwens, 2006:
Value is the meaning that people give for their actions. It is always integrated in some larger totality. It is by pursuing value that we reproduce societies.
Hence different value practices reproduce different types of societies.
Choosing actions depends on comparing values and is dependent on a medium which in our own society is money.
Value depends on norms which is a networked society, are now set by a 'parametric center' (no longer physical). The author does not accept Negri's rejection of the law of value.
Actions are not measured directly but indirectly, bu the price of things (which show us we value an arms dealer much higher than a nurse). We must distinguish money as the external measure of value, from the immanent measure, i.e. the labour that is socially necessary.
Excerpt
On Value
Massimo de Angelis:
"In whatever mode of production and forms of social relation, it is the meaning people give to their action that in the end guides their action, including the actions that reproduce their livelihoods. In a general sense, we understand “value” this meaning. Value, anthropologists tell us, is the way people represent the importance of their own actions to themselves.1 By representing this importance they have a guide to their action. Value however does not spring out of individuals isolated from the rest of society. Any action, or process, “only becomes meaningful (in Hegelian language, takes on ‘concrete, specific form’) by being integrated into some larger system of action”(Graeber 2001: 30, note 16). Human values of whatever kind cannot be intelligible “without some notion of totality.” That human meaning is a matter of comparison, is something that almost all classic traditions of the study of meaning agree on dialectical, hermeneutic, and structuralist alike.... Parts take on meaning in relation to each other, and that process always involves reference to some sort of whole: whether it be a matter of words in a language, episodes in a story, or `goods and services’ on the market. So too for value. The realization of value is always, necessarily, implies an at least imagined audience (Graeber 2001: 23). The articulation between individuals and whole, parts and totality, implies that it is by pursuing value that we reproduce societies. Therefore, different types of value pursuit, hence of value practices, reproduce different types of societies, of wholes, of self-organising systems. Hence the study of how we reproduce capitalist society is a study of how we pursue the values that is characteristics of it. The politics of alternatives is ultimately a politics of value, that is a politics to establish what value, connecting individuals and wholes, is."