Labour time as the measure of value posits wealth itself as founded on poverty, and disposable time as existing in and because of the antithesis to surplus labour time; or, the positing of an individual's entire time as labour time, and his degradation therefore to mere worker, subsumption under labour. The most developed machinery thus forces the worker to work longer than the savage does, or than he himself did with the simplest, crudest tools. Marx, Grundrisse (Penguin Classics), p.708-709

Money is the purely quantitative representation of social wealth Agnes Heller, The Theory of Need in Marx, Chapter 2

There are in principle three ways of defining value norms of production for society as a whole. First, through administrative decree, a ‘state body’ or a management body that decrees what must be standard. Second, through community’s consensus, that is the community of the co-producers defining ways of setting standards. Third, through ongoing homeostatic mechanisms, such as market forces, that force individual producers to catch up with or surpass the norm. In reality, all these three are present in capitalist-dominated societies and the question is how they are articulated. While the second type, however, presupposes individual producers’ definitions of their own standards, in the first and the third types discipline come from outside the individual producers. In the first case, the outside is represented by a ‘foreman’, a ‘line manager’, a person holding the whip. In the second case, disciplinary forces of norm creation come from a mechanism, a dispositif, that hides, rather than highlights, particular types of relations among people. There is nobody in particular holding the whip – or at least so it appears for most of us – but still the whip is cracked: restructuring, flexibility, cuts in social spending, debt repayment, structural adjustment, ongoing scarcity, competition, the rat race; and the carrots are distributed: promotions, new cars, credit lines, debt forgiveness. It is this impersonal disciplinary mechanism (re)producing the norms of our social cooperation that must be tackled. There are, however, actual designers of the mechanism, as we have seen in Chapters 10 and 11 on enclosures, and as we shall see in Chapter 14 on Hayek. De Angelis, The Beginning of History, Note 3 of Chapter 3 - The Valuing and Measuring of Capital

In a capitalist system, in which what has worth, 'wealth', takes the form of commodities, the reproduction of people's livelihoods and corresponding value practices is largely subordinated to the production of commodities. De Angelis, The Beginning of History, p.179

As we have seen, value is the importance people attribute to action and as such is measured using discursively and culturally given units of measurement. Commodity value is this importance turned upside down: it is the importance people attribute to the products of their action, in so far as these products are objects of market exchange and the production is production for profit. When things have a price tag, it is these things that have value, not the human labour that has produced them. The importance of all commodities here is measured through money, i.e., units of a particular commodity (gold, silver, etc.) or, in modem times, signs of value (dollars, euros, etc.). We call this the external measure of value, and this is the most obvious measure of value with which we are all familiar. De Angelis, The Beginning of History, p.179

Capitalist Value according to Marx: How do we measure/compare our doing (concrete labor performed) in a quantified manner assuming cultural/societal measurement norms (SNLT)

But benchmarks here are not only informational flows; rather, they are concrete socially defIned norms of production that describe how we produce, what we produce, and how much we produce. It is also clear that individual parts of the social body might deviate from this social definition of norms. Indeed, in disciplinary markets the ongo­ing opposition among these deviations - constitutes what Marx calls socially necessary labour time (SNLT) the norm that emerges from this ongoing opposition across the social body in the production of commodities. SNLT has a double meaning, depending on whether we look at it from the perspective of the whole of a co-producing social body or its parts . From the perspective of the whole, this is an average, the average labour time, which is necessary for the production of a particular commodity. But from the perspective of individual productive nodes, the same average is a benchmark, a discursive device that signals a particular type of information, an aid to decision making and action with respect to conditions of production and working rhythms. But as we have seen, these two perspectives, the perspective of the part and of the whole, are articulated by a process, a feedback loop that constitutes the value norm and that captures Our life activities within it. De Angelis, The Beginning of History, p.186-187

Not until hierar­chy had scored its triumph in the early world and begun its journey into class society did equivalence, "equity," and contract begin to form the context for human social relationships. The quid pro quo of exchange and its ethical balance sheets were simply irreJevant to a community guided by the customs of usufruct, complementarity, and the irreducible mini­mum. The means of life and community support were there to be had rather than apportioned, and even where apportionment did exist, it was guided by egalitarian traditions that respected age, acknowledged infirmities, and fostered a loving care for children. Only "civilization" was to put the figure of Justitia on a pedestal and place its purely quanti­tative weights on her scale. Her blindfold may have very well been a token of her shame rather than her indifference to the realities of inequality. The treaties that existed between preliterate communities were more procedural than distributive in their intent; they were meant to establish agreement in decision-making processes and ways of coordinating com­mon actions, not to apportion power and things. And under conditions of general reciprocity, personal alliances were simply a way of breaking out of the kinship nexus and broadening support systems beyond the perimeter of the tribe. Hence the "commodities" that were exchanged between people seemingly as "gifts" were actually tokens of mutual loy­ alty. By no means did they necessarily have an intrinsic "value" of their own beyond a symbolic one, much less ratios or "price tags" that gave them exchange value. Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom, p.320-321

Exchange is all about equivalence. It's a back-and-forth process involving two sides in which each side gives as good as it gets. This is why one can speak of people exchanging words (if there's an argu­ ment), blows, or even gunfire.25 In these examples, it's not that there is ever an exact equivalence--even if there were some way to measure an exact equivalence--but more a constant process of interaction tend­ ing toward equivalence. Actually, there's something of a paradox here: each side in each case is trying to outdo the other, but, unless one side is utterly put to rout, it's easiest to break the whole thing off when both consider the outcome to be more or less even. When we move to the exchange of material goods, we find a similar tension. Often there is an element of competition; if nothing else, there's always that pos­ sibility. But at the same time, there's a sense that both sides are keeping accounts, and that, unlike what happens in communism, which always partakes of a certain notion of eternity, the entire relationship can be canceled out, and either party can call an end to it at any time. Graeber, Debt, p.103

The main weakness of Holloway’s approach, also revealed in his reply to my intervention (Holloway 2005), is the one-sided privileging of negativity, the no, the limit to capital, while judging the constituent processes, the ‘yeses’, with what can be described as a deflating ‘also important for revolution … but’. What I have tried to emphasise in this book is that we should be able to grasp the problematic of the NO to capital’s value and the articulation of the ‘yeses’, of other values, as both being complementary aspects of the constitution of a new world. De Angelis, The Beginning of History, Note 5 of Chapter 13 (The Value and Measuring of Capital)

It is within these conditions, which are not outside our own daily practices, but that we reproduce through our actions and daily struggles to the extent that they are recuperated, that we must conceive the problematisation of the overcoming of capitalism. The fact that capital depends on recuperating struggles through homeostatic mechanisms does not mean that we must give up fighting. This is impossible, since social conflict understood as value struggles has been our ontological starting point: we are agents of social conflict either as individuals facing in isolation the struggles for our survival and sanity, or as part of networks of collective action. And the fact that we recognise our own implication in the reproduction of the system does not mean we should stop blaming them (states, transnational corporations and other elites of economic, political and ideological powers) for designing, promoting and enforcing conditions within which livelihoods are reproduced in alienating and exploitative forms. The acknowledgment of our being implicated means only and simply this: there is no changing the world without changing our own lives, and there is no changing our own lives without changing our modes of relations to others. The plurality of existing struggles needs to be reconfigured and recoded as a force of social transformation beyond capital’s value practices rather than as the driving engine of its development. We need to decouple from the mechanism of capital’s self-preservation, from the mechanism of homeostasis through which capital derives its oxygen, and ground the reproduction of our livelihoods on a different terrain. This process of decoupling and constitution coincides with the problematisation of the outside. In a word, we must ask again and again how do we (re)produce, sustain and extend an outside to capital’s value practices? De Angelis, The Beginning of History, Chapter 16 (The Beginning of History)

We shouldn’t be looking for an objective measure of value. Value is found in the synthesis of reflecting upon how things should be for the better. Pazaitis, https://soundcloud.com/jivetalking/241-alex-pazaitis-wants-to-replace-the-cult-of-selfishness-with-life-after-growth, 50:54 - 51:06

In light of the freedom to choose products and needs, both as producer and consumer, one can envision a higher ideal of freedom­ one that removes the taint of economism and restores the ethical basis of past times, and that is infused with the options opened by technical achievement. Potentially, at least, we are faced with the broadest con­ception of freedom known thus far: the autonomous individual's freedom to shape material life in a form that is neither ascetic nor hedonistic, but a blend of the best in both-one that is ecological, national, and artistic. Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom, p.218

Labor, perhaps even more than technics, must recover its own creative voice. Its form, its de­ployment in the framework of linear time as a res temporalis, its cruel objectification as mere, homogeneous energy, must yield to the con­creteness of skill, to the festiveness of communal activity, to a recogni­tion of its own subjectivity. Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom, p.266

The exaltation of a hard-working ethos, whether it is salaried work (viz. the stigma attached to unemployment) or working out in a gym point to the internalization of the demand made by capital that every human being maximizes his or her productive effort, whatever the circumstances, and the word work ends up encompassing all human activities that can directly or indirectly be turned into a profit. Olivier Frayssé, Work and Labour as Metonymy and Metaphor (triple-C)

Marx’s ideal workday, when I am able “to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic” (Marx and Engels 1845/46, 53), points to a crucial characteristic of work from a eudemonistic perspective: if a change of work is a holiday, then what makes work an especially painful activity is its continuation through an over-extended period of time […]. The repetition of the same, even innocuous per se, becomes a torment, as in the “Chinese water torture” where the pain comes from a steady dripping of water droplets on the same part of the body. And the classical image of the Fordist worker, chained to the assembly line so that he/she must repeat the same motion relentlessly, resembles that of the galley slave who does nothing but work the oars. Relentless repetition of the same is what Thanatos (the death impulse identified by Freud) is about. Relentlessness and endlessness are the two things that make hell hellish […] All in all, man is living through and craving for variety, alternation and diversity. Just as we alternate inhaling and exhaling, chewing and swallowing, sleeping and waking, we need to alternate our activities. Post-Fordist human resources specialists of Internet work, who have understood this, would allow private Internet surfing (cyberloafing) to employees while at their workstation to increase productivity by lowering stress Chen and Lim 2011). This raises the issue of rhythm. Autonomous work (when I choose to work) is set to individual bio-rhythms, heteronomous work (when I have work imposed on me from outside, whether by necessity or violence) is set to extraneous rhythms: slaves on a galley pulling on the oars to the drum’s rhythm, marching soldiers, workers on the assembly-line, Internet slaves desperately trying to catch up with incoming emails are all subject to a form of torture. In moderate doses, the extraneous rhythm energizes, as when dancing to a tune, while it becomes painful and even lethal in excessive doses, as any stimulus. Olivier Frayssé, Work and Labour as Metonymy and Metaphor (triple-C)

Even in the absence of an actual master, the very nature of work involves a certain form of subordination. As a matter of fact, both the goal of the freely chosen work activity, and the specificities of the chosen work material themselves, impose their irreducible strangeness on the worker. When “I’m committed to my work”, the goal, the end in view becomes my master, imposes a discipline, and, when I carve wood, I have to obey the dictates of the wood grain at the very moment when I transform nature. “Nature to be commanded must be obeyed” wrote Francis Bacon (Bacon 1960, 39). Olivier Frayssé, Work and Labour as Metonymy and Metaphor (triple-C)

The factory was not born from a need to integrate labor with modern machinery. On the contrary, this building block of what we call "in­dustrial society" arose from a need to rationalize the labor process - to intensify and exploit it more effectively than employers could ever hope to achieve with early cottage industries based on a self-regulated system of artisanship. Sidney Pollard, quoting an observer of the prefactory era, notes that workers who were free to regulate their own time as domestic craftpersons rarely worked the modern eight-hour day and five-day week. "The weavers were used to 'play frequently all day on Monday and the greater part of Tuesday, and work very late on Thursday night, and frequently all night on Friday' " to ready their cloth for the Saturday market day. This irregularity, or "naturalness," in the rhythm and inten­sity of traditional systems of work contributed more toward the bour­geoisie's craze for social control and its savagely antinaturalistic outlook than did the prices or earnings demanded by its employees. More than any single technical factor, this irregularity led to the rationalization of labor under a single ensemble of rule, to a discipline of work and regulation of time that yielded the modern factory, often with none of the technical developments we impute to the "Industrial Revolution." Before the steam engine, power loom, and flying shuttle came into use­ indeed, before some of these machines were even invented - the tradi­tional spinning wheel, hand loom, and dyeing vat that once filled the working areas of cottagers were assembled in large sheds primarily to mobilize the workers themselves, to regulate them harshly, and to in­tensify the exploitation of their labor. Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom, p.311

Our central idea is the construction of situations, that is to say, the concrete construction of momentary ambiences of life and their transformation into a superior passional quality. […] Our action on behavior, linked with other desirable aspects of a revolution in mores, can be briefly defined as the invention of games of an essentially new type. The most general goal must be to expand the nonmediocre part of life, to reduce the empty moments of life as much as possible. One could thus speak of our enterprise as a project of quantitatively increasing human life, an enterprise more serious than the biological methods currently being investigated, and one that automatically implies a qualitative increase whose developments are unpredictable. The situationist game is distinguished from the classic notion of games by its radical negation of the element of competition and of separation from everyday life. On the other hand, it is not distinct from a moral choice, since it implies taking a stand in favor of what will bring about the future reign of freedom and play. Debord, Report on the Creation of Situations, theanarchistlibrary.org, p.12

To transform the world and to change life are one and the same thing for the proletariat, the inseparable passwords to its suppression as a class, the dissolution of the present reign of necessity, and the finally possible accession to the reign of freedom. The radical critique and free reconstruction of all the values and patterns of behavior imposed by alienated reality are its maximum program. Free creativity in the construction of all moments and events of life is the only poetry it can acknowledge, the poetry made by all, the beginning of the revolutionary festival. Proletarian revolutions will be festivals or nothing, for festivity is the very keynote of the life they announce. Play (*) is the ultimate principle of this festival, and the only rules it can recognize are to live without dead time and to enjoy without restraints. (*) [The ending is stronger and more scandalous in the original: the French word jouir (“to enjoy”) also means “to come” in the sexual sense.] On the Poverty of Student Life - Members of Situationist International and Students of Strasbourg University (1966), theanarchistlibrary.org, p.19

The next phase of play’s advance seems to require the disappearance of any element of competition. The question of winning or losing, which has to date been nearly inseparable of ludic activity, appears to be tied to every other expression of competition between people in the appropriation of goods. The sense of importance in winning, which concerns concrete (or more frequently illusory) satisfactions, is the wretched product of a wretched society. The feeling [of winning] is, of course, exploited by every conservative force to conceal the monotony and the brutality of the conditions of life they impose. Simply consider the [social] demands détourned by competitive sports, which was most clearly established in its modern form in Great Britain, alongside the rise of factories. Not only do the crowds identify with professional players or clubs (which assume the same mythic role as the movie stars who live, and the statesmen who make decisions, in their place), but the endless sequence of match results also keeps hold over the passions of the spectators . Direct participation in a game, even in those requiring a certain degree of intellectual exertion, becomes uninteresting as soon as the established rules of play involve the acceptance of competition for its own sake. Contribution to a Situationist Definition of Play, Internationale Situationniste #1, https://libcom.org/article/contribution-situationist-definition-play

The element of competition must vanish in favour of a more authentically collective concept of play: the communal creation of selected ludic ambiences. The central distinction made between play and everyday life, which keeps play as an isolated and temporary anomaly, must be surpassed. Johan Huizinga writes, “Into an imperfect world and into the confusion of life, [play] brings a temporary, a limited perfection.” Everyday life, which was previously determined by the question of survival, can now be rationally controlled (this possibility is at the heart of every conflict of our time). Play, radically breaking with a delimited ludic time and space, must invade the whole of life. Perfection cannot be its endpoint, insofar as this perfection signifies a static construction opposed to life. However one can propose to push the beautiful chaos of life to its perfection. […] In this historical perspective, play — the constant experimentation with ludic innovations — only comes into being alongside ethics and questions of life’s meaning. The only success which we can appreciate in play is the immediate success of its ambience, and the constant increase of its powers. In its present co-existence with the residues of the phase of decline, play cannot completely free itself from a competitive aspect, it must at least aim to provoke conditions favourable to living directly. In this sense it is still both a struggle and a representation: a struggle for a life measured by desire, and a concrete representation of such a life. Play often feels imaginary, owing to its fringe existence in comparison to the oppressive reality of work, but the Situationists’ work is precisely the preparation of the ludic possibilities to come. Contribution to a Situationist Definition of Play, Internationale Situationniste #1, https://libcom.org/article/contribution-situationist-definition-play

The traditional goal of aesthetics is to produce, by means of art, impressions of certain past elements of life in circumstances where those elements are lacking or absent, in such a way that those elements escape the disorder of appearances subject to the ravages of time. The degree of aesthetic success is thus measured by a beauty that is inseparable from duration, and that even goes so far as pretensions of eternity. The goal of the situationists is immediate participation in a passionate abundance of life by means of deliberately arranged variations of ephemeral moments. The success of these moments can reside in nothing other than their fleeting effect. The situationists consider cultural activity in its totality as an experimental method for constructing everyday life, a method that can and should be continually developed with the extension of leisure and the withering away of the division of labor (beginning with the division of artistic labor). Debord, Theses on Cultural Revolution, Internationale Situationniste #1, https://libcom.org/article/theses-cultural-revolution-guy-debord

Mascolo is right in saying (in Le Communisme) that the reduction of the work day by the dictatorship of the proletariat is “the most certain sign of the latter’s revolutionary authenticity.” Indeed, “if man is a commodity, if he is treated as a thing, if human relations are relations of thing to thing, this is because it is possible to buy his time.” But Mascolo is too quick to conclude that “the time of a man freely employed” is always well spent, and that “the purchase of time is the sole evil.” There can be no freely spent time until we possess the modern tools for the construction of everyday life. The use of such tools will mark the leap from a utopian revolutionary art to an experimental revolutionary art. Debord, Theses on Cultural Revolution, Internationale Situationniste #1, https://libcom.org/article/theses-cultural-revolution-guy-debord

There is no revolutionary problem of leisure — of an emptiness to be filled — but a problem of free time. As we have already said: “There can be no free use of time until we possess the modern tools for the construction of everyday life. The use of such tools will mark the leap from a utopian revolutionary art to an experimental revolutionary art” (Debord, “Theses on Cultural Revolution,” Internationale Situationniste #1). The supersession of leisure through the development of an activity of free creation-consumption can only be understood in relation with the dissolution of the traditional arts — with their transformation into superior modes of action which do not refuse or abolish art, but fulfill it. In this way art will be superseded, conserved and surmounted within a more complex activity. Its traditional elements may still be partially present, but transformed, integrated and modified by the totality. The Use of Free Time, Internationale Situationniste #4, https://libcom.org/article/use-free-time-0

What are the organisational perspectives of life in a society which authentically "reorganises production on the basis of the free and equal association of the producers"? Work would more and more be reduced as an exterior necessity through the automation of production and the socialisation of vital goods, which would finally give complete liberty to the individual. Thus liberated from all economic responsibility, liberated from all the debts and responsibilities from the past and other people, humankind will exude a new surplus value, incalculable in money because it would be impossible to reduce it to the measure of waged work. The guarantee of the liberty of each and of all is in the value of the game, of life freely constructed. The exercise of this ludic recreation is the framework of the only guaranteed equality with non-exploitation of man by man. The liberation of the game, its creative autonomy, supersedes the ancient division between imposed work and passive leisure. Situationist Manifesto, Internationale Situationniste #4, https://libcom.org/article/situationist-manifesto

What would be the principle characteristics of the new culture and how would it compare with ancient art? Against the spectacle, the realised situationist culture introduces total participation. Against preserved art, it is the organisation of the directly lived moment. Against particularised art, it will be a global practice with a bearing, each moment, on all the usable elements. Naturally this would tend to collective production which would be without doubt anonymous (at least to the extent where the works are no longer stocked as commodities, this culture will not be dominated by the need to leave traces.) The minimum proposals of these experiences will be a revolution in behaviour and a dynamic unitary urbanism capable of extension to the entire planet, and of being further extensible to all habitable planets. Against unilateral art, situationist culture will be an art of dialogue, an art of interaction. Today artists - with all culture visible - have become entirely separated from society, just as they are separated from each other by competition. But faced with this impasse of capitalism, art has remained essentially unilateral in response. This enclosed era of primitivism must be superseded by complete communication. At a higher stage, everyone will become an artist, i.e., inseparably a producer-consumer of total culture creation, which will help the rapid dissolution of the linear criteria of novelty. Everyone will be a situationist so to speak, with a multidimensional inflation of tendencies, experiences, or radically different "schools" - not successively, but simultaneously. We will inaugurate what will historically be the last of the crafts. The role of amateur-professional situationist - of anti-specialist - is again a specialisation up to the point of economic and mental abundance, when everyone becomes an "artist," in the sense that the artists have not attained the construction of their own life. However, the last craft of history is so close to the society without a permanent division of labour, that when it appeared amongst the S.I., its status as a craft was generally denied. Situationist Manifesto, Internationale Situationniste #4, https://libcom.org/article/situationist-manifesto

The next form of society will not be based on industrial production. It will be a society of realized art. Situationist International, The Bad Days will End, Internationale Situationniste #7, https://libcom.org/article/bad-days-will-end-0

The Situationist International (SI) inherited the surrealists’ opposition between the concrete political means of the liberation of work and the utopian end of its abolition. In this sense the SI's theory represents the last sincere gesture of faith in a revolutionary conception of self-management integral to the programmee that propelled their conception of revolutionary activity. This latter consisted of a radical rethinking of the liberation of work, along lines which emphasised the refusal of any separation between revolutionary action and the total transformation of life — an idea expressed implicitly in their original project of “creating situations”. The importance of this development should not be underestimated, for the “critique of separation” here implied a negation of any temporal hiatus between means and ends (thus of any period of transition), as well as a refusal of any synchronic mediations — insisting on universal (direct democratic) participation in revolutionary action. […] It was thus on the basis of an existing workers’ power at the points of production that they saw the abolition of work as becoming possible, both from a technical and organisational standpoint. In transposing the techniques of the cyberneticians and the gestures of the bohemian anti-artist into the trusted, calloused hands of the organised working class, the situationists were able to imagine the abolition of work as the direct result of its liberation; that is, to imagine the overcoming of alienation as a result of an immediate technical-creative restructuring of the workplace by the workers themselves. In this sense the SI's theory represents the last sincere gesture of faith in a revolutionary conception of self-management integral to the programme of the liberation of work. Endnotes, Bring out your Dead, Endnotes #1, https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/bring-out-your-dead

The neoliberal gambit was that the destruction of social security would have a dynamic effect on culture and the economy, liberating an entrepreneurial spirit that was inhibited by the red tape of bureaucratic social democratic institutions. The reality, however, is that innovation requires certain forms of stability. The disintegration of social democracy has had a dampening, rather than a dynamic, effect on culture in highly neoliberalised countries such as the UK. Fredric Jameson’s claims that late-capitalist culture would be given over to pastiche and retrospection have turned out to be extraordinarily prophetic. We’ve grown so accustomed to repetition and recycling that we no longer notice them. Yet it’s no surprise that this is the case. New cultural production requires a use of time that communicative capitalism is profoundly hostile towards. Most social energy is sucked into the vortex of late-capitalist labour and its vast simulation of productivity. Innovation depends upon an absorbed (rather than distracted) drift; but it is increasingly difficult to muster the attentional resources necessary for such immersion. Cyberspatial urgencies — the smartphone’s flashing red light, the siren call of its alert — function like trance-inhibitors or alarm clocks that keep waking us out of collective dreaming. In these conditions, intellectual work can only be undertaken on a short-term basis. Only prisoners have time to read, and if you want to engage in a twenty-year-long research project funded by the state, you will have to kill someone. To understand the time-crisis, we only have to compare the current situation with the height of punk and post-punk in the UK and the US. It’s no accident that the efflorescence of punk and post-punk culture happened at a time when cheap and squatted property was available in London and New York. Now, simply to afford to pay rent in either city entails giving up most of your time and energy to work. The delirious rise in property prices over the last twenty years is probably the single most important cause of cultural conservatism in the UK and the US. In the UK, much of the infrastructure which indirectly supported cultural production has been systematically dismantled by successive neoliberal governments. Most of the innovations in British popular music which happened between the Sixties and the Nineties would have been unthinkable without the indirect funding provided by social housing, unemployment benefit and student grants. These developments precisely opened up a kind of time that is now increasingly difficult to access: a time temporarily freed from the pressure to pay rent or the mortgage; an experimental time, in which the outcomes of activities could neither be predicted nor guaranteed; a time which might turn out to be wasted, but which might equally yield new concepts, perceptions, ways of being. It is this kind of time, not the harassed time of the business entrepreneur, which gives rise to the new. This kind of time, where the collective mind can unfurl, also allows the social imagination to flourish. The neoliberal era — the time when, we were repeatedly told, there was no alternative — has been characterised by a massive deterioration of social imagination, an incapacity to even conceive of different ways to work, produce and consume. It’s now clear that, from the start (and with good reason) neoliberalism declared war on this alternative mode of time. It remains tireless in its propagation of resentment against those few fugitives who can still escape the treadmill of debt and endless work, promising to ensure that soon, they too will be condemned to performing interminable, meaningless labour — as if the solution to the current stagnation lay in more work, rather than an escape from the cult of work. If there is to be any kind of future, it will depend on our winning back the uses of time that neoliberalism has sought to close off and make us forget. Mark Fisher & Darren Ambrose, Time-Wars: Towards an Alternative for the Neo-Capitalist Era, K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher, 2018, p.521-522

We suggest two principles here: shadow and time. Shadow is an unintended consequence, an event vacuum, which remains invisible for passers-by. It does not register on the development maps of the managerial class. Time is needed in order for the substantially different to grow. Maturation, which is creative growth, requires time. Don’t be afraid of the cycle. Who’s afraid of the longue durée? The time of creativity is that of idleness and procrastination, indeed otium. This turns out to be the opposite of frantic entrepreneurship and instant valorization. This is why creative industries policy can only propose fixed formats and known concepts: template capitalism. Maker labs, with their standard 3D printers and software, can only produce more of the same. Open source is not the solution to this problem. Neither is it sufficient to place the wild, weird bohème at the helm. https://networkcultures.org/geert/2014/11/20/the-creative-question-nine-theses/

The pressure of the instantaneous — of what, in their new manifesto, “On the Creative Question — Nine Theses”, Geert Lovink, Sebastian Olma and Ned Rossiter call “frantic entrepreneurship and instant valorisation” — inevitably weighs heavy on cultural producers. In an enigmatic but suggestive formulation, Lovink, Olma and Rossiter argue that the urgencies of the immediate need to be replaced by principles of “shadow and time”. “Shadow,” they write, "is an unintended consequence, an event vacuum, which remains invisible for passers by. It does not register on the development maps of the managerial class. Time is needed in order for the substantially different to grow. Maturation, which is creative growth, requires time. It is imperative that we carve out some spaces beyond the hyper-bright instant. This instant is insomniac, amnesiac; it locks us into a reactive time, which is always full (of outrage and pseudo-novelty). " There is no continuous time in which shadows can grow, only a time that is simultaneously seamless (without gaps: there is always “new” content streaming in) and discontinuous (each new compulsion makes us forget what preceded it). The result is a mechanical and unacknowledged repetition. Is it still possible for us to cultivate shadows? Mark Fisher & Darren Ambrose, A Time for Shadows, K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher, 2018, p.560-561

So far therefore as labour is a creator of use value, is useful labour, it is a necessary condition, independent of all forms of society, for the existence of the human race; it is an eternal nature- imposed necessity, without which there can be no material exchanges between man and Nature, and therefore no life. Marx, Capital, Volume 1, Marx Engels Collected Works Volume 35 (International Publishers), p.53

For us, labour will be defined, in its opposition to non-labour, as an activity that is socially validated as such, because of its specific function, its specific social character in a given mode of production. Other bases for definitions of labour are also possible, to cite a few: exchange between man and nature, expense of energy, distinction between pleasant/unpleasant activities. However, we think that none of these definitions can help us understand anything about the character of unwaged IMM activities. These definitions only take into account their concrete characteristics, and in the case of unwaged IMM activities, this leads to banal or absurd descriptions. Is comforting a child an exchange with nature? Is sleeping a labour that reproduces labour-power? Is brushing one’s teeth labour? Brushing somebody else’s teeth? We think that our definition of labour, while it may seem banal at first glance, is the only one capable of passing over these meaningless questions, and that it constitutes the right starting-point for research into the specific character of these activities. Endnotes, The Logic of Gender, Endnotes #3 (2013), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/the-logic-of-gender

In the Grundrisse it is made clear that the new human being who develops with communist society does so through the expansion of ‘free time which is both leisure and time for higher activity’, which transforms ‘its possessor into another subject’. Work remains a realm of necessity in contrast with the realm of freedom outside work, where human development is an end in itself. This does not mean, however, as one commentator has suggested, that the problem of freedom is in the Grundrisse reduced to the problem of free time, nor does it mean that the realm of work consists of alienated labour. Work does not become ‘pure fun, pure amusement, as in Fourier’s ... childishly naive conception’, since ‘really free work ... is also the most damnably difficult, demanding the most intensive effort’. But if ‘labour cannot become a game, as desired by Fourier’, it remains to his great credit that he ‘stated that the ULTIMATE OBJECT is the raising of the mode of production itself, not [that] of distribution, to a higher form’. And the nature and conditions of work are to be transformed so that work, while necessary, is nevertheless free: "Work involved in material production can achieve this character only if (1) its social character is posited; (2) if it is of a scientific character and simultaneously general [in its application], and not the exertion of the worker as a natural force drilled in a particular way, as a subject, which appears in the production process not in a merely natural, spontaneous form, but as an activity controlling all natural forces.” (Marx, Grundrisse, Collected Works of Marx and Engels (Lawrence & Wishart: London), Vol. 28, p. 530; Collected Works of Marx and Engels (Lawrence & Wishart: London), Vol. 29, p. 97) Work in communist society is both greatly reduced and transformed in character. These features depend upon the expansion of productive powers, made possible in the first instance by capitalism but then exponentially so by its demise. Abundance is a necessary condition for communism. These four key features – the abolition of the division of labour, the development of individual potential, the transformation of work and the increase in material prosperity (made possible by the social ownership of the means of production) – are summed up in the Critique of the Gotha Programme: "In a higher phase of a communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labour, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labour, has vanished; after labour has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-round development of the individual, and all the springs of common wealth flow more abundantly – only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!“ (Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme, Collected Works of Marx and Engels (Lawrence & Wishart: London), Vol. 24, p. 87.) Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p.49-50

Till now we have been considering the estrangement; the alienation of the worker only in one of its aspects, i.e., the worker's relationship to the products of his labour. But the estrangement is manifested not only in the result but in the act of production, within the producing activity itself. How could the worker come to face the product of his activity as a stranger, were it not that in the very act of production he was estranging himself from himself? The product is after all but the summary of the activity, of production. If then the product of labour is alienation, production itself must be active alienation, the alienation of activity, the activity of alienation. In the estrangement of the object of labour is merely summarised the estrangement, the alienation, in the activity of labour itself. What, then, constitutes the alienation of labour? First, the fact that labour is external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his intrinsic nature; that in his work, therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind. The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself. He feels at home when he is not working, and when he is working he does not feel at home. His labour is therefore not voluntary, but coerced; it is forced labour. It is therefore not the satisfaction of a need; it is merely a means to satisfy needs external to it. Its alien character emerges clearly in the fact that as soon as no physical or other compulsion exists, labour is shunned like the plague. External labour, labour in which man alienates himself, is a labour of self-sacrifice, of mortification. Lastly, the external character of labour for the worker appears in the fact that it is not his own, but someone else's, that it does not belong to him, that in it he belongs, not to himself, but to another. Just as in religion the spontaneous activity of the human imagination, of the human brain and the human heart, operates on the individual independently of him—that is, operates as an alien, divine or diabolical activity—so is the worker's activity not his spontaneous activity. It belongs to another; it is the loss of his self. […] This relation [the relation of labour to the act of production] is the relation of the worker to his own activity as an alien activity not belonging to him; it is activity as suffering, strength as weakness, begetting as emasculating, the worker's own physical and mental energy, his personal life—for what is life but activity?—as an activity which is turned against him, independent of him and not belonging to him. Here we have self-estrangement, as previously we had the estrangement of the thing. Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, Marx Engels Collected Works Volume 3 (International Publishers), p.274-275

How this tension between reciprocity and a need-based arrrangement is resolved is key to redefining value.

Durkheim first discusses the Kantian opposition between duty and inclination from the standpoint that the relation of moral precepts to the interests of the individual is one of tension. Imperatives of self-maintenance, interests in the satisfaction of private needs and desires - in short, action orientations that are utilitarian and related to oneself- are not as such in accord with moral requirements, which demand, rather, that the actor raise himself above himself. The selfiessness of the morally acting individual corresponds to the universality of morally normed expectations, which are directed to all the members of a community: "Morality begins with membership in a group, whatever that group may be.’ Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 2, p.48

The surest way to know that one is in the presence of commu­nistic relations is that not only are no accounts taken, but it would be considered offensive, or simply bizarre, to even consider doing so. Graeber, Debt, p.99

[…] the collectivization of our everyday reproductive work […] is an essential part of our education to collective government and our recognition of history as a collective project, which is perhaps the main casualty of the neoliberal era of capitalism. On this account, we too must include in our political agenda the communalization of housework, reviving that rich feminist tradition that in the U.S. stretches from the utopian socialist experiments of the mid-nineteenth century to the attempts that “material feminists” made from the late nineteenth century to the early twentieth century to reorganize and socialize domestic work, and thereby the home and the neighborhood, through collective housekeeping […]. These practices and, most importantly, the ability of past feminists to look at reproductive labor as an important sphere of human activity not to be negated but to be revolutionized must be revisited and revalorized. One crucial reason for creating collective forms of living is that the reproduction of human beings is the most labor-intensive work on earth and, to a very large extent, is irreducible to mechanization. We cannot mechanize childcare, health care or the psychological work necessary to reintegrate our physical and emotional balance. Despite the efforts that futuristic industrialists are making, we cannot robotize care except at a terrible cost for the people involved. No one will accept nursebots as caregivers, especially for children and the ill. Shared responsibility and cooperative work not given at the cost of the health of the providers are the only guarantees of proper care. For centuries, the reproduction of human beings has been a collective process. It has been the work of extended families and the communities upon which people could rely, especially in proletarian neighborhoods, even when they lived alone, so that old age was not accompanied by the desolate loneliness and dependence with which so many of our elderly live. It is only with the advent of capitalism that reproduction has been completely privatized, a process that is now extended to a degree that destroys our lives. This trend must be reversed, and the present time is propitious for such a project. Federici, Re-Enchanting the World, Feminism and the Politics of the Commons, p.110-111

[…] Marx’s vision of a society in which necessary labor can be drastically reduced through automation clashes with the fact that the largest amount of work on earth is of a highly relational nature and hardly subject to mechanization. Ideally, in a post-capitalist society we would mechanize several household chores, and we would certainly rely on new forms of communication for company, learning and information, once we controlled what technology is produced, for what purposes, and under what conditions. But how can we mechanize washing, cuddling, consoling, dressing, and feeding a child, providing sexual services, or assisting those who are ill or the elderly and not self-sufficient? What machine could incorporate the skills and affects needed for these tasks? Attempts have been made with the creation of nursebots and interactive lovebots, and it is possible that in the future we may see the production of mechanical mothers. But even assuming that we could afford such devices, we must wonder at what emotional cost we could introduce them in our homes in replacement of living labor. But if reproductive work can only in part be mechanized, then the Marxian scheme that makes the expansion of material wealth dependent on automation and the reduction of necessary labor implodes; for domestic work, and especially the care of children, constitutes most of the work on this planet. The very concept of socially necessary labor loses much of its cogency. How is socially necessary labor to be defined if the largest and most indispensable sector of work on the planet is not recognized as an essential part of it? And by what criteria and principles will the organization of care work, sexual work, and procreation will be governed if these activities are not considered part of socially necessary labor? Federici, Re-Enchanting the World, Feminism and the Politics of the Commons, p.162-163

If we limit ourselves to stateless societies—the ones that have up until now proved the least amenable to Marxist styles of analysis—it quickly becomes obvious that the sort of activities we would define as economic, particularly subsistence activity, are by no means that on which they spend the greater part of their time, or “creative energies” however defined (Turner 1979c; 1984). Most dedicate far more to what, broadly speaking, could be called socialization, at least if one defines the latter to include not only primary child care but all those other actions that go into shaping human beings. This would make socialization a continual process that does not simply stop with adolescence, or whatever arbitrary cut off point most people implicitly impose: over the course of one’s life, people are almost always engaged in a constant process of changing their social position, roles and statuses, and doing so having to learn how to behave in them. Life is thus a constant educational process. Graeber, Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value, p.68

For Hayek, the end result of the market order (say a particular distribution of income, or any other particular ‘snapshot’ of the socio-economic condition) cannot be judged ‘by criteria which are appropriate only to a single organised community serving a given hierarchy of ends’, because such a hierarchy of ends is not relevant to the ‘complex structure composed of countless individual economic arrangements’ (Hayek 1978: 183). The word ‘economy’ is in fact inadequate to describe a multitude of individual ends, because it refers to ‘an organisation or arrangement in which someone deliberately allocates resources to a unitary order of ends’. Instead, the market order, or catallaxy, does not have any particular end. De Angelis, The Beginning of History, Chapter 14: Market freedom and the prison: Hayek and Bentham: Market and Panopticism: Two Overlapping Orders

An economy, in the strict sense of the word, is an organisation or arrangement in which someone deliberately allocates resources to a unitary order of ends. Spontaneous order produced by the market is nothing of the kind; and in important respects it does not behave like an economy proper. In particular, such spontaneous order differs because it does not ensure that what general opinion regards as more important needs are always satisfied before the less important ones. This is the chief reason why people object to it. Indeed, the whole of socialism is nothing but a demand that the market order (or catallaxy, as I like to call it, to prevent confusion with an economy proper) should be turned into an economy in the strict sense, in which a common scale of importance determines which of the various needs are to be satisfied, and which are not to be satisfied. The trouble with this socialist aim is a double one. As is true of every deliberate organisation, only the knowledge of the organiser can enter into the design of the economy proper, and all the members of such an economy, conceived as a deliberate organisation, must be guided in their actions by the unitary hierarchy of ends which it serves. On the other hand, advantages of the spontaneous order of the market, or the catallaxy, are correspondingly two. Knowledge that is used in it is that of all of its members. Ends that it serves are the separate ends of those individuals, in all their variety and contrariness. Out of this fact arise certain intellectual difficulties which worry not only socialists, but all economists who want to assess the accomplishments of the market order; because, if the market order does not serve a definite order of ends, indeed if, like any spontaneously formed order, it cannot legitimately be said to have particular ends, it is also not possible to express the value of the results as a sum of its particular individual products. What, then, do we mean when we claim that the market order produces in some sense a maximum or optimum? The fact is, that, though the existence of a spontaneous order not made for a particular purpose cannot be properly said to have a purpose, it may yet be highly conducive to the achievement of many different individual purposes not known as a whole to any single person, or relatively small group of persons. Indeed, rational action is possible only in a fairly orderly world. Therefore it clearly makes sense to try to produce conditions under which the chances for any individual taken at random to achieve his ends as effectively as possible will be very high - even if it cannot be predicted which particular aims will be favoured, and which not. As we have seen, the results of a discovery procedure are in their nature unpredictable; and all we can expect from the adoption of an effective discovery procedure is to improve the chances for unknown people. The only common aim whicll we can pursue by tIle choice of this technique ofordering social affairs is the general kind of pattern, or the abstract character, of the order that will form itself. Hayek - New studies in philosophy, politics, economics and the history of ideas, p.183-184

The Hellenic ideal of freedom - an ideal confined to the citizen -­ was different. Freedom existed for activity, not from activity. It was not a realm but a practice-the practice of being free by participating in free institutions, by daily recreating, elaborating, and fostering the activity of being free. One was not merely "free" in the passive sense of freedom from constraint, but in the active sense of "freeing," both of oneself and one's fellow citizens. An authentic community is not merely a structural constellation of human beings but rather the practice of communizing. Hence, freedom in the polis was a constellation of relationships that was continually in the process of reproduction. Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom, p.263

In DisCOs, production is explicitly guided by need, including social and environmental priorities. This orientation towards positive outcomes is the heart of a DisCO’s values. The needs-based priorities defined by the cooperative are embedded in each DisCOs legal statutes, as well as the technologies and cultural practices that let DisCOs assess and reflect on the outcomes of their effort. The disco elements

In DisCOs, production is communal and value measurement aims to be transparent. Three types of value are highlighted and rewarded: - Livelihood Work: productive market value (the DisCO’s goods and services are paid for); - Love Work: productive pro-bono value (the commons created through self-selected volunteer work); and - Care Work: reproductive work value (towards the collective and among its members, see above). All are tracked through complementary value metrics that apply to all DisCO members. Recognizing different types of value influences functions including payments, work priorities and certain key decisions. This recognition gives visibility and empowerment to other The DisCO Elements

We may experience social change driven by the intangible and immaterial (like P2P networks), but until social change has reached the realm of the tangible, we haven’t had any radical change, or any change has not been translated into a change in the material conditions of existence. De Angelis, Omnia Sunt Communia, p.69

My first concern about all the P2P stuff ... is ... the fact that it depends on both other modes of labour and extraction (like digging coltan in the Eastern Congo) and other modes of enforced and very material (guns, fences, guards, borders etc.) social division within and between societies. (Pithouse 2010; private correspondence) in De Angelis, Omnia Sumn Communia, p.73

Bollier, Benkler and Bauwens thus converge on a techno-legal and economic fix when they anticipate transitions in the direction of the commons. Despite allusions to ‘commonist’ movements, we are left completely in the dark as to how these will gather a critical mass, how they will overhaul the ‘neoliberal dominance’ and how they will reform the state and the market (Bauwens 2005; see also Bauwens 2014: 28). Instead, we are served a list of techno-economic conditions that will pro- mote peer-to-peer production (Bauwens 2005). The ‘vital condition’ for a historical transition towards a commons-based society is not political but the existence of commons-based peer production, as proto-practices for a full mode of production. . . . These proto-practices have to evolve within the older system, first as emergent practices, then on a parity level, before they can become dominant themselves. (Bauwens 2011; emphasis added) In the technocratic outlook that has prevailed from the beginning of the millennium in the digital commons literature, technology, economic practices, the law and vague references to ‘social movements’ are the main entries. Change society by designing a new model that makes the existing model obsolete, not by fighting ‘the system’. Kioupkiolis, The Common and Counter-Hegemonic Policies, p.59

The commons is…. - A social system for the long-term stewardship of resources that preserves shared values and community identity. - A self-organized system by which communities manage resources (both depletable and and replenishable) with minimal or no reliance on the Market or State. - The wealth that we inherit or create together and must pass on, undiminished or enhanced, to our children. Our collective wealth includes the gifts of nature, civic infrastructure, cultural works and traditions, and knowledge. - A sector of the economy (and life!) that generates value in ways that are often taken for granted – and often jeopardized by the Market-State. Bollier, https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/commons-short-sweet/2017/09/25

Starting from the position that we should not confuse the commons with resources held in common, I approach commons as social systems in which resources are pooled by a community of subjects who also govern these resources to guarantee the sustainability of the resources (if they are natural resources) and the reproduction of the community, and who engage in commoning, that is, doing in commons that has a direct relation to the needs, desires and aspirations of the commoners. De Angelis, Omnia Sunt Communia, p.90

It is obvious that, stated in these terms, class struggle is pervasive in society. It is in the workers demanding higher wages, and in ‘consumers’ boycotting a brand. It is in environmentalists stopping the construction of a new airport terminal, and in women questioning the traditional division of labour and its corresponding relations. It is in refugees crossing borders, in landless peasants reclaiming land and in indigenous people reclaiming dignity. But it is also in the universe of micro-conflictuality happening at any scale of social cooperation. All these and many others are instances of non-monetary value practices and the corresponding social forces that in given contexts and circumstances posit a limit to capital and its own specific value practices. Unless the different value practices posited by these movements are able to weave themselves into self-sustaining social feedback processes that are alternative to the parametric centre of capital’s value mechanism and its corresponding mode of relations, these struggles risk being either repressed or assimilated into capitalism’s evolving forms. We need to work through a politics of value that problematises strategically how we sustain new social relations of production, new value practices through which we reproduce our individual livelihoods and their articulation, vis-à-vis the value practices of capital that, through enclosures and a pointless competitive rat race, reproduce scarcity while we could be celebrating abundance. De Angelis, The Beginning of History, Chapter 13: Measuring and Struggles

Indeed, in order to be subsumable, struggles must to some extent be dispersed across the social field, because their dispersion and relative isolation facilitates their integration into capitalist markets. If struggles circulate and coagulate, there emerges a political recomposition that is able to articulate all these values opposing capital’s value, to sustain them, to give force to their constitutive action as a new mode of relations, an absolute limit to capital in that it is a limit to the production of its value. De Angelis, The Beginning of History, Chapter 13: Measuring and Struggles

A political critique of the more technocratic imaginary of the commons should not catapult us into a diametrically opposite error. Indeed, material social practices can help to educate people in alternative values. They can also stage an appealing prefigurative example that serves to win over larger swathes of the population. Moreover, they could manufacture an infrastructure that reduces dependence on the power of dominant structures and elites, yielding the base for an effective counter-hegemonic bloc. Yet ‘the political’ needs to be alive and kicking throughout, even within the techno-economic advances. If, for instance, ‘open communities of peer producers are largely oriented towards the start-up model and are subsumed to profit maximization’ (Bauwens and Kostakis 2014b: 358), how are they going to rally around the cause of an autonomous peer production of the commons without a political articulation of a commons vision and a deliberate collective agency around it? A political perspective should not simply turn this scheme upside down by positing a voluntarist primacy of the political as the paramount factor of historical change. More plausibly, it should reassert the required activation of the political and the need to combine progress in the modes of production with concerted cultural and political activity in order to push forward a systemic reform (see Rigi 2014: 403). Kioupkiolis, The Common and Counter-Hegemonic Policies, p.61-62

Similarly, the ultimate freedom is not the freedom to create or accumulate value, but the freedom to decide (collectively or individually) what it is that makes life worth living. In the end, then, politics is about the meaning of life. Any such project of constructing meanings necessarily involves imagining totalities (since this is the stuff of meaning), even if no such project can ever be completely translated into reality—reality being, by definition, that which is always more complicated than any construction we can put on it. Graeber, Toward an Anthropological theory of value, p.88

[…] human action, or even human thought, can only take place through some kind of material medium and therefore can’t be understood without taking the qualities of that medium into account. Hence the importance in Turner’s analysis of the notion of material media of circulation. The media have qualities in and of themselves. For all the (often quite legitimate) criticisms of Jack Goody’s dichotomies between orality and literacy, for example, it is simply obvious that technologies of writing allow for possibilities that do not exist in speech (and equally, vice versa). Graeber, Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value, p.83

In fact, the notion of value implies a critical reversal. On the one hand, values appear or are given as principles: and evaluation presupposes values on the basis of which phenomena are appraised. But, on the other hand and more pro­foundly, it is values which presuppose evaluations, "perspectives of appraisal", from which their own value is derived. The problem of critique is that of the value of values, of the evaluation from which their value arises, thus the problem of their creation . Evaluation is defined as the differential element of corresponding values, an element which is both critical and creative. Evaluations, in essence, are not values but ways of being, modes of existence of those who judge and evaluate, serving as principles for the values on the basis of which they judge. […] This is the crucial point; high and low,noble and base, are not values but represent the differential element from which the value of values themselves derives. Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, p.1-2

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, of forms of social cooperation. Hence the study of how we reproduce capitalist social rela­tions is a study of how we pursue the values that are characteristic of it. The politics of alternatives is ultimately a politics of value, that is a politics of establishing what the value is that connects individuals and wholes. De Angelis, The Beginning of History, p.176

To introduce the question of measures is thus to introduce the question of process and feedback in the articulation between social body and body sub­jects. This articulation can be conceptualised as in a feedback relation: this is a modern way of looking at an old insight, namely that we are social individuals (or subjects), and that we change the world, but in conditions that we do not choose (yet it is we who change it!). To introduce the problematic of measur­ing is to open up the question: how do we measure what we measure? Who or what sets the standard for the measurement? What forms of measurement are used in different discourses? What powers have been deployed and/or repressed with this or that measuring processes? And what loops articulate human practices to practices of measuring? De Angelis, The Beginning of History, p.178

Marxists start by asking how what we call “society” is continually being re-created through various sorts of productive action, and how a society’s most basic forms of exploitation and inequality are thus rooted in the social relations through which people do so. Graeber, Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value, p.24

Marx himself did develop a theory of value. In Capital, and elsewhere, he argued that the value of commodities is derived from the human labor that went into producing them, but that this fact tends to be forgotten when the object is bought and sold on the market, so that it seems that its value somehow arises naturally from the qualities of the object itself. This is of course a very famous argument that has generated a vast literature. But there were few explicit attempts to see how it might be applied to non-capitalist systems, or if indeed it could be. Graeber, Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value, p.26

Value, then, is the way people represent the importance of their own actions to themselves - though […] we are not talking about something that could occur in isolation: […] it can only happen through that importance being recognized by someone else. Graeber, Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value, p.45

Commodities have to be produced (and yes, they also have to be moved around, exchanged, consumed…), social relations have to be created and maintained; all of this requires an investment of human time and energy, intelligence, concern. If one sees value as a matter of the relative distribution of that, then one has a common denominator. One invests one’s energies in those things one considers most important, or most meaningful. […] We are clearly dealing with something along the lines of a labor theory of value. But only if we define “labor” much more broadly than almost anyone working in the Marxist tradition ever has. […] creative action exists everywhere, and one would be justified in being highly suspicious of anyone who claims that a given society completely fails to recognize this fact. The problem is that if you define action this broadly, there’s clearly no way to make any exact count of how much of it has been invested in any given object or relation. Even the outside analyst can at best make an extremely rough estimate. Graeber, Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value, p.45

Capitalist Value according to Marx: How do we measure/compare our doing (concrete labor performed) in a quantified manner assuming cultural/societal measurement norms (SNLT)

We shall speak of "action" insofar as the acting individual attaches a subjective meaning to his behavior - be it overt or covert, omission or acquiescence. Action is "social" insofar as its subjective mean­ing takes account of the behavior of others and is thereby oriented in its course. Weber, Economy and Society, p.4

Social action, like all action, may be oriented in four ways. It may be: 1. Ιnstrumentally rational (zweckrational), that is, determined by expectations as to the behavior of objects in the environment and of other human beings; these expectations are used as "conditions" or "means" for the attainment of the actor's own rationally pursued and calculated ends; 2. Value-rational (wertrational), that is, determined by a conscious belief in the value for its own sake of some ethical, aesthetic, religious, or other form of behavior, independently of its prospects of success; 3. Affectual (especially emotional), that is, determined by the actor's specific affects and feeling states; 4. Traditional, that is, determined by ingrained habituation. Weber, Economy and Society, p. 24-25

It is always a question of the relative importance of the particular things with which he is concerned […]. Even the single controlling mind, in possession of all the data for some small, self-contained economic system, would not every time some small adjustment in the allocation of resources had to be made - go explicitly through all the relations between ends and means which might possibly be affected. It is indeed the great contribution of the pure logic of choice that it has demonstrated conclusively that even such a single mind could solve this kind of problem only by constructing and constantly using rates of equivalence (or "values," or "marginal rates of substitution"), i.e., by attaching to each kind of scarce resource a numerical index which cannot be derived from any property possessed by that particular thing, but which reflects, or in which is condensed, its significance in view of the whole means-end structure. In any small change he will have to consider only these quantitative indices (or "values") in which all the relevant information is concentrated; and by adjusting the quantities one by one, he can appropriately rearrange his dispositions without having to solve the whole puzzle ab initio, or without needing at any stage to survey it at once in all its ramifications. Fundamentally, in a system where the knowledge of the relevant facts is dispersed among many people, prices can act to coordinate the separate actions of different people in the same way as subjective values help the individual to coordinate the parts of his plan. Hayek, The Use of Knowledge in Society (The American Economic Review, p.525)