Value arising from relationships - the need for a relational theory of value
Value and the Totalities we Operate in
The ultimate stakes of politics, according to Turner, is not even the struggle to appropriate value; it is the struggle to establish what value is Graeber, Toward an Anthropological theory of value, p.88
if there’s one thing that almost all the classic traditions of the study of meaning agree on—dialectical, hermeneutic, and structuralist alike—it is that for human beings, meaning is a matter of comparison. 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, a process of comparison; for this reason it always, necessarily, implies an at least imagined audience. As I’ve already suggested, for the actor, that’s all that “society” usually is. Graeber, Toward an Anthropological theory of value, p.86-87
Really, society is not a thing at all: it is the total process through which all this activity is coordinated, and value, in turn, the way that actors see their own activity as meaningful as part of it. Doing so always, necessarily, involves some sort of public recognition and comparison. This is why economic models, which see those actions as aimed primarily at individual gratification, fall so obviously short: they fail to see that in any society—even within a market system—solitary pleasures are relatively few. The most important ends are ones that can only be realized in the eyes of some collective audience. In fact, one might go so far as to say that while from an analytical perspective “society” is a notoriously fluid, open-ended set of processes, from the perspective of the actors, it is much more easily defined: “society” simply consists of that potential audience, of everyone whose opinion of you matters in some way, as opposed to those whose opinion of you, you would never think about at all. But value is not created in that public recognition. Rather, what is being recognized is something that was, in a sense, already there. Graeber, Toward an Anthropological theory of value, p.76-77
Value is inherently contrastive; thus it can only be made into a reality (“realized”) in a relatively public context, as part of some larger social whole. Graeber, Toward an Anthropological theory of value, p.70
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

Graeber seems to support something close to Laclau and Mouffe’s theory of Hegemony. His arguments are constructivist and he really seems to be concerned with the hegemonization of the “value” as a concept

Value needs to have some objective form (legitimacy maybe?)

Value and the totalities we operate in

The struggle for alternatives to this must find a way to go beyond that struggle, the struggle the subsumption of which gives rise to the mechanisms described in the last chapter, the constitution of norms of production throughout the social body behind the backs of the producers themselves. To overcome this is to go beyond the value-generating powers of the system and pose new social relations on the basis of new values and new ways of articulating values. The search for new value practices however, cannot be defined in abstract. The issue of alternatives to a mode of articulation is not an ‘ethical’ question that can be addressed with the correct application of abstract principles and norms. Abstract principles must be seen as the emergent properties of concrete subjects positing their concrete values in different contexts. Values of this kind, I would argue, can only emerge from communities in struggle constituting their own measures, their own commons. De Angelis, The Beginning of History, Chapter 13: Measuring and Struggles
Why Value? Definition of Value
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)
The Need to Redefine Value
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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

This strict and quantified equivalence is turned into its opposite (exploitation) (Marx)

Blindness to care-work (reproductive work)

Price signaling and strict equivalence
Money is the purely quantitative representation of social wealth Agnes Heller, The Theory of Need in Marx, Chapter 2
Objections to Value Being an Important Concept
Kioupkiolis’ Feedback (27/4/2023) 1. Need to mention/answer newer conceptions on value (on the ones that deny it is applicable). E.g. Hardt & Negri (Multitude & Commonwealth mainly) and Fuchs. 2. Need to emphasize on the novel points of the argument early on 3. Commons theories: De Angelis, Bollier & Helfrich, P2PF (no need to pick one)
There is also another limitation that may be pointed out. It is the fact that our treatment seems not to include a particular form of doing in production, a form that many observers believe is a peculiar contemporary feature of what they call post-Fordism, namely the doing that creates the new, that imagines, that innovates, and that is based on team work, forms of cooperation and relational labour among the doers, which give them a higher autonomy in conceptualisation and production than that possessed by the classic mass workers tied to assembly lines. As we have seen in Chapter 12, Hardt and Negri among others refer to this as ‘immaterial labour’ and argue that this form of labour is beyond capitalist measure precisely because it is a form of social cooperation that is constituted by relational and communicational patterns defined by the doers themselves (hence measured by themselves). While it might be argued that ‘no transcendent power or measure will determine the values of our world [since] value will be determined only by humanity’s own continuous innovation and creation’ (Hardt and Negri 2000: 356), it is also true that when innovating and creating singular producers are pitted against each other in an endless rat race, the values that emerge from this ongoing clash are measurable by capital. Indeed, it is through this antagonistic mode of relation among social producers that capital values are constituted. Thus, the ongoing creation of SNLT is a feature not only of what is called, ‘material’ (capitalist) production, but also of what is referred to as ‘immaterial’ (capitalist) production, i.e., the production of ideas and affects. Here too we can have ongoing competition among producers who are then locked in the feedback loop of their own rat race against each other. What is continuously compared in order to give rise to differentials are here the perceived quality of ideas, whether in the form of creative work for advertising or that leading to product or process innovation, and improvements in the time and efficiency of their execution, of getting the job done. All the same, in terms of affects, what is measured is not only the speed of service, but also the perceived service quality as measured by given indicators: smiling, ‘costumer satisfaction’, and so on. In both these cases, the set of systematic pressures is the same as in the traditional case of ‘material’ work. […] Indeed, with respect to this immaterial labour, the degree of autonomy of the doers has precise limits defined by processes of capitalist measurement and not by the creative workers themselves. The selection of new ideas that can be turned into products or processes of doing occurs with respect to the SNLT process of measurement. The communicational patterns within work teams are bounded by the priorities set by their employers and managers, who measure the results of these communicational patterns in terms of price, quality and profit deviations from benchmarks. Nurses, doctors, teachers have a variety of degrees of autonomy, but are increasingly exposed to measures imposed from outside themselves which are heteronymous, which instruct them, in a context of declining resources and numbers of staff, to meet certain quality targets that relate in one way or another to external benchmarks (Harvie 2005). De Angelis, The Beginning of History, Capital’s measuring of ‘material’ and ‘immaterial’ labour
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
Price Signaling and the Market
But why is continuous ‘change’ necessary? In the presence of Hayek’s rejection of a ‘hierarchy of ends’ to evaluate human societies, the criteria brought forward by Hayek that justify this continuous compulsion are the identification of an abstractly defined ‘progress’ as an end in itself: ‘Progress is movement for movement’s sake’ (Hayek 1960: 41). This idealisation of movement for movement’s sake, irrespective of the direction of the movement, its social outcome, what is produced and how needs are formed and met, and irrespective of the nature of social interaction, makes Hayek the quintessential capitalist apologist. [Note] This philosophical stand is in fact close to what Marx identifies as the nature of the capitalist movement, i.e., ‘production for production’s sake’ or ‘accumulation for accumulation’s sake’. The continuous process of accumulation implies the continuous need for individual private agents to blindly adapt to its movement. De Angelis, The Beginning of History, Chapter 14: Market freedom and the prison: Hayek and Bentham: The Market
The price system is a communication system. Knowledge that is widely dispersed throughout society can thus become effectively utilised (Hayek 1978:181–2, 188), not simply as the know-how necessary for the production of individual commodities, but as a social force that makes it necessary to produce in certain ways and for certain purposes. De Angelis, The Beginning of History, Chapter 14: Market freedom and the prison: Hayek and Bentham: The Market
Catallaxy - Wikipediaen.wikipedia.org
Freedom and Coercion in Hayek
The economic problem of society is thus not merely a problem of how to allocate "given" resources - if "given” is taken to mean given to a single mind which deliberately solves the problem set by these "data." It is rather a problem of how to secure the best use of resources known to any of the members of society, for ends whose relative importance only these individuals know. Or, to put it briefly, it is a problem of the utilization of knowledge not given to anyone in its totality. Hayek, The Use of Knowledge in Society (The American Economic Review, p.519-520)
If we can agree that the economic problem of society is mainly one of rapid adaptation to changes in the particular circumstances of time and place, it would seem to follow that the ultimate decisions must be left to the people who are familiar with these circumstances, who know directly of the relevant changes and of the resources immediately available to meet them. We cannot expect that this problem will be solved by first communicating all this knowledge to a central board which, after integrating all knowledge, issues its orders. We must solve it by some form of decentralization. But this answers only part of our problem. We need decentralization because only thus can we ensure that the knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place will be promptly used. But the "man on the spot" cannot decide solely on the basis of his limited but intimate knowledge of the facts of his immediate surroundings. There still remains the problem of communicating to him such further information as he needs to fit his decisions into the whole pattern of changes of the larger economic system. Hayek, The Use of Knowledge in Society (The American Economic Review, p.524)
We must look at the price system as such a mechanism for communicating information if we want to understand its real function. […] The most significant fact about this system is the economy of knowledge with which it operates, or how little the individual participants need to know in order to be able to take the right action. In abbreviated form, by a kind of symbol, only the most essential information is passed on, and passed on only to those concerned. Hayek, The Use of Knowledge in Society (The American Economic Review, p.526-527)
The marvel is that in a case like that of a scarcity of one raw material, without an order being issued, without more than perhaps a handful of people knowing the cause, tens of thousands of people whose identity could not be ascertained by months of investigation, are made to use the material or its products more sparingly; i.e., they move in the right direction. This is enough of a marvel even if, in a constantly changing world, not all will hit it off so perfectly that their profit rates will always be maintained at the same constant or "normal" level. I have deliberately used the word "marvel" to shock the reader out of the complacency with which we often take the working of this mechanism for granted. I am convinced that if it were the result of deliberate human design, and if the people guided by the price changes understood that their decisions have significance far beyond their immediate aim, this mechanism would have been acclaimed as one of the greatest triumphs of the human mind. Its misfortune is the double one that it is not the product of human design and that the people guided by it usually do not know why they are made to do what they do. But those who clamor for "conscious direction" and who cannot believe that anything which has evolved without design (and even without our understanding it) should solve problems which we should not be able to solve consciously should remember this: The problem is precisely how to extend the span of our utilization of resources beyond the span of the control of any one mind; and, therefore, how to dispense with the need of conscious control and how to provide inducements which will make the individuals do the desirable things without anyone having to tell them what to do. Hayek, The Use of Knowledge in Society (The American Economic Review, p.527)
The price system is just one of those formations which man has learned to use (though he is still very far from having learned to make the best use of it) after he had stumbled upon it without understanding it. Through it not only a division of labor but also a coordinated utilization of resources based on an equally divided knowledge has become possible. The people who like to deride any suggestion that this may be so usually distort the argument by insinuating that it asserts that by some miracle just that sort of system has spontaneously grown up which is best suited to modern civilization. It is the other way round: man has been able to develop that division of labor on which our civilization is based because he happened to stumble upon a method which made it possible. Had he not done so he might still have developed some other, altogether different, type of civilization, something like the "state" of the termite ants, or some other altogether unimaginable type. All that we can say is that nobody has yet succeeded in designing an alternative system in which certain features of the existing one can be preserved which are dear even to those who most violently assail it - such as particularly the extent to which the individual can choose his pursuits and consequently freely use his own knowledge and skill. Hayek, The Use of Knowledge in Society (The American Economic Review, p.528)
If the market cannot be said to have a ‘unitary order of ends’, it prioritises a unitary rationale for human social interaction: the endless promotion of efficiency, the endless unqualified ‘progress’, the never-ending rat race, the competitive compulsion that ‘goes on all the time’. This is not an external ‘end product’ of Hayek’s market order, but its raison d’être. De Angelis, The Beginning of History, Chapter 14: Market freedom and the prison: Hayek and Bentham: Market and Panopticism: Two Overlapping Orders
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)
Concerning our modern economic system, understanding of the principles by which its order forms itself shows us that it rests on the use of knowledge (and of skills in obtaining relevant information), which no one possesses in its entirety, and that it is brought about because individuals are in their actions guided by certain general rules. Certainly, we ought not to succumb to the false belief, or delusion, that we can replace it with a different kind of order, which presupposes that all this knowledge can be concentrated in a central brain, or group of brains of any practicable size. The fact, however, that in spite of all the advance of our knowledge, the results of our endeavours remain dependent on circumstances about which we know little or nothing, and on ordering forces we cannot control, is precisely what so many people regard as intolerable. Constructivists ascribe this interdependence to still allowing ourselves to be guided by values which are not rationally demonstrated or given positive proof as justification for them. They assert that we no longer need to entrust our fate to a system, the results of which we do not determine beforehand, although it opens up vast new opportunities for the efforts of individuals, but at the same time resembles a game of chance in some respects, since no single person bears responsibility for the ultimate outcome. The anthropomorphic hypostatisation of a personified mankind, who pursue aims they have consciously chosen, thus leads to the demand that all those grown values not visibly serving approved ends, but which are conditions for the formation of an abstract order, should be discarded to offer individuals improved prospects of achieving their different and often conflicting goals. Scientific error of this kind tends to discredit values, on the observance of which the survival of our civilisation may depend. Hayek - New studies in philosophy, politics, economics and the history of ideas, p.13
So long as we cannot yet agree on crucial questions, such as whether a competitive market order is possible without the recognition of private several property in the instruments of production, it is clear that we still understand only very imperfectly the fundamental principles on which the existing order is based. Hayek - New studies in philosophy, politics, economics and the history of ideas, p.20
Catallaxy vs Economy & Hayek’s Opposition to a Needs-Based Arrangement
When communicative acts take the shape of grammatical speech, the symbolic structure has penetrated all components of interaction; the cognitive-instrumental grasp of reality and the steering mechanism that attunes the behavior of different interaction partners to one another, as well as the actors and their behavior dispositions, get connected to linguistic communication and are symbolically restructured. At the same time, this transposition of cognitions, obligations, and expressions onto a linguistic basis makes it possible in turn for the means of communication to take on new functions-in addition to the function of reaching understanding, those of coordinating action and socializing actors as well. Under the aspect of reaching understanding, communicative acts serve the transmission of culturally stored knowledge-as shown above, cultural tradition reproduces itself through the medium of action oriented to reaching understanding. Under the aspect of coordinating action, the same communicative acts serve the fulfillment of norms appropriate to a given context; social integration also takes place via this medium. Under the aspect of socialization, finally, communicative acts serve the construction of internal controls on behavior, in general, the formation of personality structures; one of Mead's fundamental insights is that socialization processes take place via linguistically mediated interaction. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol 2, p.63

Whereas the word economy suggests that people in a community possess a common and congruent set of values and goals, catallaxy suggests that the emergent properties of a market (prices, division of labor, growth, etc.) are the outgrowths of the diverse and disparate goals of the individuals in a community.

After being discussed by Ludwig von Mises the term catallaxy was later made popular by Friedrich Hayek who defines it as "the order brought about by the mutual adjustment of many individual economies in a market".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catallaxy

On the fundamental tensions around money and its place in societycommunity.snowdrift.coop
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

Price signaling is the coordinating activity in capitalism (Hayek)

Price is simply a form of Value (Marx)

Value is based on strict and quantified equivalence

Therefore, price signaling is rooted on strict and quantified equivalence

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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
Communicative Rationality
The critique of instrumental reason, which remains bound to the conditions of the philosophy of the subject, denounces as a defect something that it cannot explain in its defectiveness because it lacks a conceptual framework sufficiently flexible to capture the integrity of what is destroyed through instrumental reason. To be sure, Horkheimer and Adorno do have a name for it: mimesis. And even though they cannot provide a theory of mimesis, the very name calls forth associations—and they are intended: Imitation designates a relation between persons in which the one accommodates to the other, identifies with the other, empathizes with the other. There is an allusion here to a relation in which the surrender of the one to the example of the other does not mean a loss of self but a gain and an enrichment. Because the mimetic capacity escapes the conceptual framework of cognitive-instrumentally determined subject-object relations, it counts as the sheer opposite of reason, as impulse. Adorno does not simply deny to the latter any cognitive function. In his aesthetics he attempts to show what the work of art owes to the power of mimesis to unlock, to open up. But the rational core of mimetic achievements can be laid open only if we give up the paradigm of the philosophy of consciousness—namely, a subject that represents objects and toils with them—in favor of the paradigm of linguistic philosophy—namely, that of intersubjective understanding or communication—and puts the cognitive-instrumental aspect of reason in its proper place as part of a more encompassing communicative rationality. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol 1, p.389-390
If we assume that the human species maintains itself through the socially coordinated activities of its members and that this coordination has to be established through communication—and in certain central spheres through communication aimed at reaching agreement—then the reproduction of the species also requires satisfying the conditions of a rationality that is inherent in communicative action. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol 1, p.397
A subjectivity that is characterized by communicative reason resists the denaturing of the self for the sake of self-preservation. Unlike instrumental reason, communicative reason cannot be subsumed without resistance under a blind self-preservation. It refers neither to a subject that preserves itself in relating to objects via representation and action, nor to a self-maintaining system that demarcates itself from an environment, but to a symbolically structured lifeworld that is constituted in the interpretive accomplishments of its members and only reproduced through communication. Thus communicative reason does not simply encounter ready-made subjects and systems; rather, it takes part in structuring what is to be preserved. The Utopian perspective of reconciliation and freedom is ingrained in the conditions for the communicative sociation of individuals; it is built into the linguistic mechanism of the reproduction of the species. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol 1, p.398
I gave a systematic presentation of Mead's attempt to explain, by way of reconstructing. symbolically mediated interaction and action in social roles. The first of these two stages of interaction is characterized by the emergence of a new medium of communication, the second by the norming of behavioral expectations. In the first phase, communication switches over from expressive gestures that stimulate behavior to the use of symbols; in the second, the transition to normatively regulated action means a shift to a symbolic basis for steering behavior: it is no longer only the means of communication that are symbolically restructured, but behavioral schemes and dispositions as well. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol 2, p.43
When communicative acts take the shape of grammatical speech, the symbolic structure has penetrated all components of interaction; the cognitive-instrumental grasp of reality and the steering mechanism that attunes the behavior of different interaction partners to one another, as well as the actors and their behavior dispositions, get connected to linguistic communication and are symbolically restructured. At the same time, this transposition of cognitions, obligations, and expressions onto a linguistic basis makes it possible in turn for the means of communication to take on new functions-in addition to the function of reaching understanding, those of coordinating action and socializing actors as well. Under the aspect of reaching understanding, communicative acts serve the transmission of culturally stored knowledge-as shown above, cultural tradition reproduces itself through the medium of action oriented to reaching understanding. Under the aspect of coordinating action, the same communicative acts serve the fulfillment of norms appropriate to a given context; social integration also takes place via this medium. Under the aspect of socialization, finally, communicative acts serve the construction of internal controls on behavior, in general, the formation of personality structures; one of Mead's fundamental insights is that socialization processes take place via linguistically mediated interaction. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol 2, p.63
A further consequence of being able to say "no” which was merely suggested above, concerns the actors themselves. If one aims to reconstruct how participants learn to orient their actions explicitly to validity claims, and wants to do so by means of the mechanism of taking the attitude of the other, the model of inner dialogue, which Mead used rather too unspecifically, turns out in fact to be helpful. In anticipating from alter a negative answer to his own speech act, and raising against himself an objection that alter might raise, ego understands what it means to make a criticizable validity claim. As soon, then, as ego masters the orientation to validity claims, he can repeat the internalization of discursive relations once more. Now alter already encounters him with the expectation that ego is not assuming the communicative role of the first person only in a naive manner, but will expand it, if necessary, to the role of a proponent in argumentation. If ego makes this attitude of alter his own, that is to say, if he views himself through the eyes of an arguing opponent and considers how he will answer to his critique, he gains a reflective relation to himself. By internalizing the role of a participant in argumentation, ego becomes capable of self-criticism. It is the relation- to-self established by this model of self-criticism that we shall call "reflective:” Knowing that one does not know has, since Socrates, rightly been regarded as the basis for self-knowledge. The reflective relation-to-self takes on different shadings according to the modes of language use. Ego can take up a relation to himself by way of a critique of his own statement, his own action, or his own self-presentation. The self to which he then relates is not a mysterious something; it is familiar to him from the communicative practice of daily life; it is ego himself in the communicative role of the first person, as he asserts the existence of states of affairs in an objectivating attitude, or enters into an interpersonal relation regarded as legitimate in the norm-conformative attitude, or makes a subjective experience accessible to a public in an expressive attitude. Correspondingly, ego can relate to himself according to the model of self-criticism: as an epistemic subject who is capable of learning and has already acquired a certain knowledge in his cognitive-instrumental dealings with reality, or as a practical subject who is capable of acting and has already formed a certain character or a superego in interactions with his reference persons, or as an affective subject who is sensitive, "passionate" in Feuerbach's sense, and has already demarcated from the external world of facts and norms a special domain of subjectivity marked by privileged access and intuitive presence. The reflective relation to self is the ground of the actor's accountability. A responsible actor behaves self-critically not only in his directly moralizable actions but also in his cognitive and expressive utterances. Although accountability is at bottom a moral-practical category, it also extends to the cognitions and expressions included in the validity spectrum of action oriented to reaching understanding. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol 2, p.74-75

Therefore, free societies should seek to redefine value and experiment on coordination strategies

Human activity must still somehow be guided and coordinated in a society liberated from its capitalist bonds

Price signaling mechanism leading to exploitation

Value and its underlying logic of strict equivalence must be abolished

Capitalist Value and Measurement
In the final analysis, capitalism consists of nothing more than a reduction of all relations into relations of production. From business to the family, consumption itself appears as another episode in the general production, the production of society. The overthrowing of capitalism will come from those who are able to create the conditions for other types of relations. Therefore the communism we are talking about is the exact opposite of what has been historically termed “communism,” which was mostly nothing but socialism, a form of monopolist state capitalism. Communism is not made through the expansion of new relations of production, but rather in their abolition. Not having relations of production within our milieu or among ourselves means never letting the search for results become more important than paying attention to the process, bankrupting all conventions of value, and watching that we do not disconnect affection and co-operation. Being attentive to worlds, to their perceptible configurations, is exactly what renders the isolation of something like relations of production impossible. In the places we open, around the means we share, it is this favor that we seek, that we experience. To name this experience, we often hear about everything being free. Instead of free, we prefer to speak of communism — for we cannot possibly forget what the practice of this freedom implies in terms of organization, and in the short term, of political antagonism. Anonymous, Call, p.22-23
It's necessary above all to maintain the reign of the economy beyond the extinction of the wage system. This has to do with the fact that if there is less and less work, everything is all the more mediated by money, be it in very small amounts. Given the absence of work, the need to earn money in order to survive must be maintained. Even if a universal basic income is established one day, as so many liberal economists recommend, its amount would need to be large enough to keep a person from dying of hunger, but utterly insufficient to live on, even fru­ gally. We are witnessing a change of regime within economy. The majestic figure of the Worker is being succeeded by the puny figure of the Needy Opportunist [le Crevard]-because if money and control are to infiltrate everywhere, it's necessary for money to be lacking everywhere. Henceforth, everything must be an occasion for generating a little money, a little value, for earning "a little cash." The present technological offensive should also be understood as a way to occupy and valorize those who can no longer be exploited through waged labor. What is too quickly described as the uberization of the world, unfolds in two different ways. Thus on the one hand you have Uber, Deliveroo and the like, that unskilled job opportu­nity requiring only one's old machine as capital. Every driver is free to self-exploit as much as they like, knowing that they must roll around fifty hours a week to earn the equivalent of the minimum wage. And then there are Airbnb, BlaBlaCar, dating sites, "coworking," and now even "cohoming" or "costorage," and all the applications that enable the sphere of the valorizable to be extended to infinity. What is involved with the "collaborative economy," with its inexhaustible possibilities of valorization, is not just a mutation of life-it's a mutation of the possible, a mutation of the norm. Before Airbnb, an unoccupied room was a "guest room" or a room available for a new use; now it's a loss of income. Before BlaBlaCar, a solo drive in one's car was an occasion to daydream, or pick up a hitchhiker, or whatever, but now it's a missed chance to make a little money, and hence a scandal, economically speaking. What one gave to recycling or to friends one now sells on Le bon coin. It's expected that always and from every point of view one will be engaged in calculating. That the fear of "missing an opportunity" will goad us forward in life. The important thing is not working for one euro an hour or making a few pennies by scanning contents for Amazon Mechanical Turk, but where this participation might lead someday. Henceforth everything must enter into the sphere ofprofitability. Everything in life becomes valorizable, even its trash. And we ourselves are becoming needy opportunists, human trash, who exploit each other under the pretext of a "sharing economy." If a growing share of the population is destined to be excluded from the wage system this is not in order to allow it the leisure to go hunt Pokemons in the morning and to fish in the afternoon. The inven­tion of new markets where one didn't imagine them to be the year before illustrates this fact that is so difficult to explain to a Marxist: capitalism doesn't so much consist in selling what is produced as in rendering accountable whatever is not yet accountable, in assigning a measureable worth to what seemed to be absolutely unsusceptible to that the day before, in creating new markets. That is its oceanic reserve of accumulation. Capitalism is the universal expansion of measurement. The Invisible Committee, Now, p.96-98
With the theory of human capital, man is less the possessor of an indefinite duster of capitals-cultural, relational, professional, financial, symbolic, sexual, health­ than he is himselfthat duster. He is capital. He constantly arbitrates between increasing what he is as capital, and the fact of selling it in some market or other. He is inseparably the producer, the product, and the seller of the product. Football players, actors, stars, and popular YouTubers are logically the heroes of the era of human capital, people whose value fully coincides with what they are. Micro-economics thus becomes the general science of behaviors, whether this is in commerce, at church, or in love. Everyone becomes an enterprise guided by a constant concern with self­ valorization, by a vital imperative of self-promotion. In essence man becomes the optimizing creature­ the Needy Opportunist. The Invisible Committee, Now, p.99-100
The folly of evaluation obviously dominates every aspect of contemporary work, but it also rules as a mistress over everything that escapes that sphere. It determines even the solitary jogger's relationship with themselves, the jogger who, in order to improve their performances, needs to know them in detail. Measurement has become the obligatory mode of being of all that intends to exist socially. The Invisible Committee, Now, p.101
Price signaling and strict equivalence
Money is the purely quantitative representation of social wealth Agnes Heller, The Theory of Need in Marx, Chapter 2
Objections to Value Being an Important Concept
Kioupkiolis’ Feedback (27/4/2023) 1. Need to mention/answer newer conceptions on value (on the ones that deny it is applicable). E.g. Hardt & Negri (Multitude & Commonwealth mainly) and Fuchs. 2. Need to emphasize on the novel points of the argument early on 3. Commons theories: De Angelis, Bollier & Helfrich, P2PF (no need to pick one)
There is also another limitation that may be pointed out. It is the fact that our treatment seems not to include a particular form of doing in production, a form that many observers believe is a peculiar contemporary feature of what they call post-Fordism, namely the doing that creates the new, that imagines, that innovates, and that is based on team work, forms of cooperation and relational labour among the doers, which give them a higher autonomy in conceptualisation and production than that possessed by the classic mass workers tied to assembly lines. As we have seen in Chapter 12, Hardt and Negri among others refer to this as ‘immaterial labour’ and argue that this form of labour is beyond capitalist measure precisely because it is a form of social cooperation that is constituted by relational and communicational patterns defined by the doers themselves (hence measured by themselves). While it might be argued that ‘no transcendent power or measure will determine the values of our world [since] value will be determined only by humanity’s own continuous innovation and creation’ (Hardt and Negri 2000: 356), it is also true that when innovating and creating singular producers are pitted against each other in an endless rat race, the values that emerge from this ongoing clash are measurable by capital. Indeed, it is through this antagonistic mode of relation among social producers that capital values are constituted. Thus, the ongoing creation of SNLT is a feature not only of what is called, ‘material’ (capitalist) production, but also of what is referred to as ‘immaterial’ (capitalist) production, i.e., the production of ideas and affects. Here too we can have ongoing competition among producers who are then locked in the feedback loop of their own rat race against each other. What is continuously compared in order to give rise to differentials are here the perceived quality of ideas, whether in the form of creative work for advertising or that leading to product or process innovation, and improvements in the time and efficiency of their execution, of getting the job done. All the same, in terms of affects, what is measured is not only the speed of service, but also the perceived service quality as measured by given indicators: smiling, ‘costumer satisfaction’, and so on. In both these cases, the set of systematic pressures is the same as in the traditional case of ‘material’ work. […] Indeed, with respect to this immaterial labour, the degree of autonomy of the doers has precise limits defined by processes of capitalist measurement and not by the creative workers themselves. The selection of new ideas that can be turned into products or processes of doing occurs with respect to the SNLT process of measurement. The communicational patterns within work teams are bounded by the priorities set by their employers and managers, who measure the results of these communicational patterns in terms of price, quality and profit deviations from benchmarks. Nurses, doctors, teachers have a variety of degrees of autonomy, but are increasingly exposed to measures imposed from outside themselves which are heteronymous, which instruct them, in a context of declining resources and numbers of staff, to meet certain quality targets that relate in one way or another to external benchmarks (Harvie 2005). De Angelis, The Beginning of History, Capital’s measuring of ‘material’ and ‘immaterial’ labour
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
Price Signaling and the Market
But why is continuous ‘change’ necessary? In the presence of Hayek’s rejection of a ‘hierarchy of ends’ to evaluate human societies, the criteria brought forward by Hayek that justify this continuous compulsion are the identification of an abstractly defined ‘progress’ as an end in itself: ‘Progress is movement for movement’s sake’ (Hayek 1960: 41). This idealisation of movement for movement’s sake, irrespective of the direction of the movement, its social outcome, what is produced and how needs are formed and met, and irrespective of the nature of social interaction, makes Hayek the quintessential capitalist apologist. [Note] This philosophical stand is in fact close to what Marx identifies as the nature of the capitalist movement, i.e., ‘production for production’s sake’ or ‘accumulation for accumulation’s sake’. The continuous process of accumulation implies the continuous need for individual private agents to blindly adapt to its movement. De Angelis, The Beginning of History, Chapter 14: Market freedom and the prison: Hayek and Bentham: The Market
The price system is a communication system. Knowledge that is widely dispersed throughout society can thus become effectively utilised (Hayek 1978:181–2, 188), not simply as the know-how necessary for the production of individual commodities, but as a social force that makes it necessary to produce in certain ways and for certain purposes. De Angelis, The Beginning of History, Chapter 14: Market freedom and the prison: Hayek and Bentham: The Market
Catallaxy - Wikipediaen.wikipedia.org
Freedom and Coercion in Hayek
The economic problem of society is thus not merely a problem of how to allocate "given" resources - if "given” is taken to mean given to a single mind which deliberately solves the problem set by these "data." It is rather a problem of how to secure the best use of resources known to any of the members of society, for ends whose relative importance only these individuals know. Or, to put it briefly, it is a problem of the utilization of knowledge not given to anyone in its totality. Hayek, The Use of Knowledge in Society (The American Economic Review, p.519-520)
If we can agree that the economic problem of society is mainly one of rapid adaptation to changes in the particular circumstances of time and place, it would seem to follow that the ultimate decisions must be left to the people who are familiar with these circumstances, who know directly of the relevant changes and of the resources immediately available to meet them. We cannot expect that this problem will be solved by first communicating all this knowledge to a central board which, after integrating all knowledge, issues its orders. We must solve it by some form of decentralization. But this answers only part of our problem. We need decentralization because only thus can we ensure that the knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place will be promptly used. But the "man on the spot" cannot decide solely on the basis of his limited but intimate knowledge of the facts of his immediate surroundings. There still remains the problem of communicating to him such further information as he needs to fit his decisions into the whole pattern of changes of the larger economic system. Hayek, The Use of Knowledge in Society (The American Economic Review, p.524)
We must look at the price system as such a mechanism for communicating information if we want to understand its real function. […] The most significant fact about this system is the economy of knowledge with which it operates, or how little the individual participants need to know in order to be able to take the right action. In abbreviated form, by a kind of symbol, only the most essential information is passed on, and passed on only to those concerned. Hayek, The Use of Knowledge in Society (The American Economic Review, p.526-527)
The marvel is that in a case like that of a scarcity of one raw material, without an order being issued, without more than perhaps a handful of people knowing the cause, tens of thousands of people whose identity could not be ascertained by months of investigation, are made to use the material or its products more sparingly; i.e., they move in the right direction. This is enough of a marvel even if, in a constantly changing world, not all will hit it off so perfectly that their profit rates will always be maintained at the same constant or "normal" level. I have deliberately used the word "marvel" to shock the reader out of the complacency with which we often take the working of this mechanism for granted. I am convinced that if it were the result of deliberate human design, and if the people guided by the price changes understood that their decisions have significance far beyond their immediate aim, this mechanism would have been acclaimed as one of the greatest triumphs of the human mind. Its misfortune is the double one that it is not the product of human design and that the people guided by it usually do not know why they are made to do what they do. But those who clamor for "conscious direction" and who cannot believe that anything which has evolved without design (and even without our understanding it) should solve problems which we should not be able to solve consciously should remember this: The problem is precisely how to extend the span of our utilization of resources beyond the span of the control of any one mind; and, therefore, how to dispense with the need of conscious control and how to provide inducements which will make the individuals do the desirable things without anyone having to tell them what to do. Hayek, The Use of Knowledge in Society (The American Economic Review, p.527)
The price system is just one of those formations which man has learned to use (though he is still very far from having learned to make the best use of it) after he had stumbled upon it without understanding it. Through it not only a division of labor but also a coordinated utilization of resources based on an equally divided knowledge has become possible. The people who like to deride any suggestion that this may be so usually distort the argument by insinuating that it asserts that by some miracle just that sort of system has spontaneously grown up which is best suited to modern civilization. It is the other way round: man has been able to develop that division of labor on which our civilization is based because he happened to stumble upon a method which made it possible. Had he not done so he might still have developed some other, altogether different, type of civilization, something like the "state" of the termite ants, or some other altogether unimaginable type. All that we can say is that nobody has yet succeeded in designing an alternative system in which certain features of the existing one can be preserved which are dear even to those who most violently assail it - such as particularly the extent to which the individual can choose his pursuits and consequently freely use his own knowledge and skill. Hayek, The Use of Knowledge in Society (The American Economic Review, p.528)
If the market cannot be said to have a ‘unitary order of ends’, it prioritises a unitary rationale for human social interaction: the endless promotion of efficiency, the endless unqualified ‘progress’, the never-ending rat race, the competitive compulsion that ‘goes on all the time’. This is not an external ‘end product’ of Hayek’s market order, but its raison d’être. De Angelis, The Beginning of History, Chapter 14: Market freedom and the prison: Hayek and Bentham: Market and Panopticism: Two Overlapping Orders
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)
Concerning our modern economic system, understanding of the principles by which its order forms itself shows us that it rests on the use of knowledge (and of skills in obtaining relevant information), which no one possesses in its entirety, and that it is brought about because individuals are in their actions guided by certain general rules. Certainly, we ought not to succumb to the false belief, or delusion, that we can replace it with a different kind of order, which presupposes that all this knowledge can be concentrated in a central brain, or group of brains of any practicable size. The fact, however, that in spite of all the advance of our knowledge, the results of our endeavours remain dependent on circumstances about which we know little or nothing, and on ordering forces we cannot control, is precisely what so many people regard as intolerable. Constructivists ascribe this interdependence to still allowing ourselves to be guided by values which are not rationally demonstrated or given positive proof as justification for them. They assert that we no longer need to entrust our fate to a system, the results of which we do not determine beforehand, although it opens up vast new opportunities for the efforts of individuals, but at the same time resembles a game of chance in some respects, since no single person bears responsibility for the ultimate outcome. The anthropomorphic hypostatisation of a personified mankind, who pursue aims they have consciously chosen, thus leads to the demand that all those grown values not visibly serving approved ends, but which are conditions for the formation of an abstract order, should be discarded to offer individuals improved prospects of achieving their different and often conflicting goals. Scientific error of this kind tends to discredit values, on the observance of which the survival of our civilisation may depend. Hayek - New studies in philosophy, politics, economics and the history of ideas, p.13
So long as we cannot yet agree on crucial questions, such as whether a competitive market order is possible without the recognition of private several property in the instruments of production, it is clear that we still understand only very imperfectly the fundamental principles on which the existing order is based. Hayek - New studies in philosophy, politics, economics and the history of ideas, p.20
Catallaxy vs Economy & Hayek’s Opposition to a Needs-Based Arrangement
When communicative acts take the shape of grammatical speech, the symbolic structure has penetrated all components of interaction; the cognitive-instrumental grasp of reality and the steering mechanism that attunes the behavior of different interaction partners to one another, as well as the actors and their behavior dispositions, get connected to linguistic communication and are symbolically restructured. At the same time, this transposition of cognitions, obligations, and expressions onto a linguistic basis makes it possible in turn for the means of communication to take on new functions-in addition to the function of reaching understanding, those of coordinating action and socializing actors as well. Under the aspect of reaching understanding, communicative acts serve the transmission of culturally stored knowledge-as shown above, cultural tradition reproduces itself through the medium of action oriented to reaching understanding. Under the aspect of coordinating action, the same communicative acts serve the fulfillment of norms appropriate to a given context; social integration also takes place via this medium. Under the aspect of socialization, finally, communicative acts serve the construction of internal controls on behavior, in general, the formation of personality structures; one of Mead's fundamental insights is that socialization processes take place via linguistically mediated interaction. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol 2, p.63

Whereas the word economy suggests that people in a community possess a common and congruent set of values and goals, catallaxy suggests that the emergent properties of a market (prices, division of labor, growth, etc.) are the outgrowths of the diverse and disparate goals of the individuals in a community.

After being discussed by Ludwig von Mises the term catallaxy was later made popular by Friedrich Hayek who defines it as "the order brought about by the mutual adjustment of many individual economies in a market".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catallaxy

On the fundamental tensions around money and its place in societycommunity.snowdrift.coop
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

Price signaling is the coordinating activity in capitalism (Hayek)

Price is simply a form of Value (Marx)

Value is based on strict and quantified equivalence

Therefore, price signaling is rooted on strict and quantified equivalence

Currently the employer federation MEDEF is proposing that a SIRET number, a business identification number, be assigned to every French citizen at their birth. The value of beings becomes the set of their "individual characteristics"-their health, their humor, their beauty, their know-how, their relations, their "social skills," their imagination, their creativity, and so on. That's the theory, and the reality, of "human capital." The value field has incorporated so many dimensions that it has become a complex space. It's become the whole ensemble of the socially sayable, legible, and visible. The Invisible Committee, Now, p.104
To leave the economy is to bring out the plane of reality it covers over. Commodity exchange and all that it comprises in the way of harsh negotiation, mistrust, deceit, and wabu wabu, as the Melanesians say, is not exclusively Western. In places where people know how to live, one only practices this type of relations with outsiders, people one is not connected with, who are distant enough so that a mix-up cannot develop into a general conflict. To pay, in Latin, comes from pacare, "to satisfy, to calm," for example by distributing money to sol­diers so they can buy themselves some salt-thus a wage. One pays in order to have peace. The whole vocabulary of economy is basically a vocabulary of avoided war. "There is a link, a continuity, between hostile relations and the provision of reciprocal prestations: Exchanges are peacefully resolved wars, and wars are the result of unsuccessful transactions." (Levi-Strauss). Economy's defect is to reduce all possible relationships to hostile rela­tions, every distance to foreignness. What it covers over in this way is the entire gamut, all the grada­tion, all the heterogeneity among the different existing and imaginable relations. Depending on the degree of proximity between beings, there is a commonality of goods, a sharing of certain things, exchange with an adjusted reciprocity, mercantile exchange, or a total absence of exchange. And every form of life has its language and its notions for expressing this multiplicity of regimes. Making the bastards pay is good warfare. When you love you don't count the cost. Where money talks, words are worth nothing. Where words matter, money's worth nothing. Thus, exiting the economy is being able to dearly distinguish between the possible divisions and, from where one is, to deploy a whole art of distances. It's to push the hostile relations - and the sphere of money, accounting, measurement - as far away as possible. It's to banish to the margins of life that which is presently its norm, its core, its essential condition. The Invisible Committee, Now, p.107-108
Dynamics of the generalization of capitalist value as the dominant social relation
However much the capitalist mode of appropriation may seem to fly in the face of the original laws of commodity production, it nevertheless arises, not from a violation, but, on the contrary, from the application of these laws. Let us make this clear once more by briefly reviewing the consecutive phases of motion whose culminating point is capitalist accumulation. We saw, in the first place, that the original conversion of a sum of values into capital was achieved in complete accordance with the laws of exchange. One party to the contract sells his labor-power, the other buys it. The former receives the value of his commodity, whose use value – labor – is thereby alienated to the buyer. Means of production which already belong to the latter are then transformed by him, with the aid of labor equally belonging to him, into a new product which is likewise lawfully his. The value of the product includes: first, the value of the used-up means of production. Useful labor cannot consume these means of production without transferring their value to the new product, but, to be saleable, labor-power must be capable of supplying useful labor in the branch of industry in which it is to be employed. The value of the new product further includes: the equivalent of the value of labor-power together with a surplus-value. This is so because the value of labor-power – sold for a definite length of time, say a day, a week etc – is less than the value created by its use during that time. But the worker has received payment for the exchange-value of his labor-power and by so doing has alienated its use value – this being the case in every sale and purchase. The fact that this particular commodity, labor-power, possesses the peculiar use value of supplying labor, and therefore, of creating value, cannot affect the general law of commodity production. If, therefore, the magnitude of the value advanced in wages is not merely found again in the product, but is found there augmented by a surplus-value, this is not because the seller has been defrauded, for he has really received the value of his commodity; it is due solely to the fact that this commodity has been used up by the buyer. The law of exchange requires equality only between the exchange-values of the commodities given in exchange for one another. From the very outset, it presupposes even a difference between their use-values and it has nothing whatever to do with their consumption, which only begins after the deal is closed and executed. Thus the original conversion of money into capital is achieved in the most exact accordance with the economic laws of commodity production and with the right of property derived from them. Nevertheless, the result is: 1. That the product belongs to the capitalist and not to the worker 2. That the value of this product includes, besides the value of the capital originally advanced, a surplus-value which costs the worker labor but the capitalist nothing, and which nonetheless becomes the legitimate property of the capitalist 3. That the worker has retained his labor-power and can sell it anew if he can find a buyer. Simple reproduction is only the periodical repetition of this first operation; each time money is converted afresh into capital. Thus the law is not broken; on the contrary, it is merely enabled to operate continuously. [...] Nor does it matter if simple reproduction is replaced by reproduction on an extended scale, by accumulation. In the former case the capitalist squanders the whole surplus-value in dissipation, in the latter he demonstrates his bourgeois virtue by consuming only a portion of it and converting the rest into money. Marx, Capital, Volume 1 (Progress Publishers, 1887), p.413-414
To be sure, the matter looks quite different if we consider capitalist production in the uninterrupted flow of its renewal, and if, in place of the individual capitalist and the individual worker, we view in their totality, the capitalist class and the working class confronting each other. But in so doing we should be applying standards entirely foreign to commodity production. Only buyer and seller, mutually independent, face each other in commodity production. The relations between them cease on the day when the term stipulated in the contract they concluded expires. If the transaction is repeated, it is repeated as the result of a new agreement which has nothing to do with the previous one and which only by chance brings the same seller together again with the same buyer. If, therefore, commodity production, or one of its associated processes, is to be judged according to its own economic laws, we must consider each act of exchange by itself, apart from any connexion with the act of exchange preceding it and that following it. And since sales and purchases are negotiated solely between particular individuals, it is not admissible to seek here for relations between whole social classes. However long a series of periodical reproductions and preceding accumulations the capital functioning today may have passed through, it always preserves its original virginity. So long as the laws of exchange are observed in every single act of exchange the mode of appropriation can be completely revolutionised without in any way affecting the property rights which correspond to commodity production. These same rights remain in force both at the outset, when the product belongs to its producer, who, exchanging equivalent for equivalent, can enrich himself only by his own labour, and also in the period of capitalism, when social wealth becomes to an ever- increasing degree the property of those who are in a position to appropriate continually and ever afresh the unpaid labour of others. This result becomes inevitable from the moment there is a free sale, by the labourer himself, of labour-power as a commodity. But it is also only from then onwards that commodity production is generalised and becomes the typical form of production; it is only from then onwards that, from the first, every product is produced for sale and all wealth produced goes through the sphere of circulation. Only when and where wage labour is its basis does commodity production impose itself upon society as a whole; but only then and there also does it unfold all its hidden potentialities. To say that the supervention of wage labour adulterates commodity production is to say that commodity production must not develop if it is to remain unadulterated. To the extent that commodity production, in accordance with its own inherent laws, develops further, into capitalist production, the property laws of commodity production change into the laws of capitalist appropriation. Marx, Capital, Volume 1, p.414-415