Presence Value

Discussion

James Quilligan:

" Civilization can recover the ordinary sense of value that arises from the direct experience of Being by refocusing on the freedom and equality inherent in polycentricism — the spontaneous, self-correcting order of socially negotiated rules. This does not mean reinstating the practice of pure gift exchange across the world. But it will mean recovering its core meaning—the inalienable value of presence—through the experience of what is already right before us and within us, whether preexisting or created. This requires an economics which does not separate subjects from objects or persons from things. The essence of the gift economy is not use value (C) or exchange value (M), but presence value (PV). As a completely independent center of economic activity (from those outlined in Figure 1), presence value allows us to restore the context and wholeness of intersubjective experience through new forms of common action and practice. (Author’s note: I had previously called this preservation value in ‘The Commons of Mind, Life and Matter,’ Kosmos, spring/summer 2010, and ‘Interest Rates and Climate Change,’ Kosmos, fall/winter 2010, but now believe that presence value is a more accurate term.)

Here’s how presence value is expressed in a commons-based economy: the users of resources become the co-producers of their own goods (through mutual platforms, networks and technologies, peer-to-peer production, employee-operated businesses and cooperatives). When the motivations, skills, knowledge, ideas, learning and imagination of these users/producers are embodied directly in their collaborative activities, nature and society are fully present. As in a gift economy, natural and social growth are fused together through the realization of biopolitical labor. To sustain this process in social policies, rules and institutions, resource users/producers develop legal entities called commons trusts, alongside a plurality of other commons-based organizations in civil society and local government. " (http://www.kosmosjournal.org/wp-content/article-pdfs/toward-a-common-theory-of-value-part-one-common-being.pdf)