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