Unalienated Value
Description
Ron Eglash:
"Marx proposed that capitalism’s destructive force is caused, at root, by the alienation of labor value from its generators. Environmentalists have added the concept of unalienated ecological value, and rights activists added the unalienated expressive value of free speech, sexuality, spirituality, etc. Marx’s vision for restoring an unalienated world by top-down economic governance was never fulfilled. But in the last 30 years, new forms of social justice have emerged that operate as “bottom-up”. Peer-to-peer production such as open source software or wikipedia has challenged the corporate grip on IP in a “gift exchange” of labor value; community based agroecology establishes a kind of gift exchange with our nonhuman allies in nature. DIY citizenship from feminist makerspaces to queer biohacking has profound implications for a new materialism of the “knowledge commons”; and restorative approaches to civil rights can challenge the prison-industrial complex. In contrast to top-down “distributive justice,” all of the above are cases of bottom-up or “generative justice”." (http://revistas.ucm.es/index.php/TEKN/article/view/52847/49997)
Typology
Ron Eglash:
1) Unalienated labor value -- as Marx notes, when labor is alienated from its products, the work becomes meaningless. That is why Barrington-Leigh's examples of open source, where coders often work on passion projects, is so important.
2) Unalienated ecological value -- extracting value from soil, and returning chemicals, is like extracting labor value from workers and returning money. Chemical "amendments" destroy soil ecosystems like consumerism destroys communities.
3) Unalienated expressive value -- free speech, authentic identity around sexuality, spirituality etc., has to feed from the same well springs, and vice-versa.
More Information
- Ron Eglash: "This is explained in depth in our publications: www.generativejustice.wikispaces.com/home. Practical implementations are discussed here: www.generativejustice.wikispaces.com/Projects."