Towards a Communist Theory of Value

Introduction

The title of this thesis itself sounds provocative. The ideological burden of using these words is big. It’s the history, the achievements, the mistakes. It’s also the prevailing ideology, to which we must not succumb. This thesis is about communism, its forms in contemporary societies, its present and future. A name that we should claim and fight for (Baltas, 2018). People often identify communism with “communist” regimes like the USSR or modern China. But, as Graeber observes, communism was always a distant and fuzzy ideal in these societies, a form of myth. It is more than fair to stand critically against the bureaucratic and hierarchic practices often associated with these societies. But communistic practices are present in all societies — indeed everywhere where people act upon the principle of “from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs” (Graeber, 2011, pp. 94—102), when communities share resources and govern them through horizontal doing in common — commoning (De Angelis, 2017, p. 10). And it is this broader definition of communism that I have in mind in writing this thesis.

It is also about value. But why value? The act of defining value itself involves consciously reflecting on and comparing principles that guide social behavior. It is a contested concept and a core part of constructing meaning, affecting how people’s identities and culture are created. Defining value lies then in the heart of political struggle (Graeber, 2001). Value is intimately connected to how people and communities assess social action, therefore the concept of social action itself and questions regarding its orientation and constitution are closely related. This is why the discourse around rationality, as developed by theorists like Weber, Horkheimer and Habermas among others is central to the questions this thesis poses around value.

The way value manifests itself in the capitalist societies we live in is the formation and expansion of the price system in coordinating our activity and the mediation of money in more and more realms of our everyday lives. Following Marx (1992), I believe that commodity prices and money are forms of value. I will argue that the logic of quantitatively measuring and comparing contributions in a private property system is the basic principle behind Marx’s conception of value in capitalism. Therefore, this strict and quantified equivalence is the basic principle upon which commodification rests. Also, it shows the hegemony of what Weber refers to as instrumental rationality in the orientation of social action and the formalization of representing how we relate to each other through money and prices. Abolishing this conception of value and its underlying logic becomes then a matter of significant importance for projects and movements with an anti-capitalist character.

But we must not stay on the negative — the abolition part. We need to construct new value conceptions that are suitable for communist societies and the movements that prefigure them. Our conceptions don’t need to (and shouldn’t) be concrete instructions but principles that we can leverage in concrete situations. We should also reflect on them and be ready to revise them as we get more feedback from the actual field of struggle and emancipatory social experiments. An important argument of this thesis is that in order to break out of the limitations we often face in such a project of redefining value, we should break out of the constraints the philosophy of the subject creates in understanding human rationality only under the prism of the orientation of social action. Following this thought, I will build on Habermas’ concept of communicative rationality, which puts equal emphasis on the constitution of social action via communicative acts and natural language. Communication aiming at reaching agreement using refutable validity claims is at the core of rational communicative action, and besides achieving coordination, it also supports socialization, an aspect that is crucial for developing social subjects that can support the increased political, institutional and reflective activity, all very precious for a communist society. Rooting society’s value conception in this type of rationality is intimately related to organizing social life according to the basis of an authentic participatory democracy, manifested in substantial decisions taking place in citizen assemblies. Also, it includes cultivating the philosophical and reflective attitude needed to leave the space open for always questioning and reviewing the principles around value, which resists fixation and becoming a dogma.

Having argued that this shift to communicative rationality is fertile, I then argue that there are some limits within which this rationality can move so that it can support a communist theory of value, and these are mostly ethical (or value-rational, in Weber’s terms). There are also principles and considerations that appear as soon as we consider the material reproduction of society, reflecting upon which some tensions appear in formulating a new theory of value. An important part of this thesis is then devoted to these ethical and material aspects of value related to needs, scarcity, (re)production and the concept of work.

One key tension is between reciprocity in social relations and a needs-based politico-economic arrangement. I will argue that some degree of reciprocity is indeed expected in how people relate to each other and that’s not inherently bad. On the other hand, I believe that a communist society will adopt a needs-based arrangement, following Marx’s “from each according to his abilities to each according to his needs” (2022, p. 59). How this tension is resolved is an essential aspect of redefining value in an emancipatory way. Adopting what Bollier and Helfrich call “gentle reciprocity” (2019, pp. 108—109) strikes a good balance by consciously attempting to avoid quantified measurement.

The second key tension is the one between work and play. While the lines between the two can often be blurred, I think of them as the two opposing sides of a spectrum between a goal-oriented activity where instrumental reasoning is applied and an activity that is performed out of pure pleasure or fun. Capitalist societies impose the former for the vast majority of people, both structurally via the mechanism of competition and the precarious nature of labor and ideologically via the hegemony of instrumental reasoning and the naturalization of scarcity. Drawing primarily from Graeber (2014) and Bookchin (1982), I will argue that we need to restore the balance between the two by moving instrumental rationality to a secondary role and, elevating free time to the true measure of wealth, leave more space for activities done for the sake of fun, exploration, curiosity and artistic expression. This, in my opinion, is one of the biggest promises of communism.

A key distinction to frame and resolve the tensions mentioned above is the one between the “Realm of Necessity” and the “Realm of Freedom” in Marx’s work. Endorsing Murray Bookchin’s early work (1984), I will argue that technology can help us minimize the realm of necessity and therefore make reciprocity and instrumental reason less and less important in our social relations, leaving more space for a purely needs-based arrangement and play. The theorization of scarcity and the vision of a post-scarcity society, as Bookchin conceives it, is central to developing this argument.

Hegemonic theories of value often heavily focus on the aspects of production relevant to manufacture, industry and more recently information and communication. They tend to neglect an essential activity of creating, maintaining and growing life, as manifested in the broader domain of care work. It is no accident that this type of work tends to be penalized by the market system, although it is really demanding. Influenced by the work of feminist theorists like Silvia Federici, this thesis calls for challenging these notions of production whose paradigmatic form is the factory and placing care work back where it belongs: at the core of the theory of value and the activities around which our social life revolves.

What is, then, a suitable environment to experiment with these new value arrangements? How can we practically explore both the ethical and technical aspects of this new theory of value and create a strategy to counter the prevailing structures? I see in the commons and the relevant movements modern forms of communism, “cracks” in the capitalist system, as Holloway puts it (2010b). To the extent that they embody the logic of consciously refusing to subordinate our activity to capital and apply communist value practices here and now, they form the social fabric that can weave emancipatory alternatives. This is why, building on the work of contemporary theorists of the commons (Bauwens et al., 2019; De Angelis, 2017; Pazaitis, 2021), I will argue that the commons are the institutions where concrete resolution strategies to the aforementioned tensions can be explored. Furthermore, a new mode of production — commons-based peer production — has been developed within digital commons in the last few decades, as many theorists have recently argued (Bauwens et al., 2019; Benkler, 2006). This new mode is already revolutionizing production and when, as Marx would say, stands at its feet, it can really be the technical basis for a post-scarcity society. I will also draw from the inspiring work of the team developing the DisCO framework, which is a conscious attempt to re-imagine value and work together in ways that are commons-oriented and are informed by feminist economics.

Finally, I would like to emphasize the significance of a conscious political orientation and coordination of the various initiatives exploring these communist value practices. A major challenge for all such initiatives is that they are and will be operating within a capitalist system that tries to co-opt them and enforce its competitive value practices. Also, the question of creating livelihoods within this system until we manage to sustain alternative structures at scale is critical. Political articulation, federation and solidarity are very important to this end. Drawing from Kioupkiolis’ work on the subject (2020), I will argue that elevating this political element and adopting counter-hegemonic strategies is critical for building a deliberate collective agency that will fight for communist value practices and try to organize society around them.

The Need to Redefine Value

In the beginning, as Holloway famously put it (2010a), we scream. Rage and refusal against a world that is wrong in some fundamental way. I am writing these lines in Greece and the year is 2023. Some days ago, a boat carrying hundreds of migrants sank in the Ionian Sea, children among them. Some months ago, at least 57 people died in an unthinkable train collision at Tempi, which could have easily been avoided had some electronic systems been in place. “Their Profits, Our Lives” echoed everywhere in Greece — a scream vividly capturing a fundamental flaw.

We are witnessing the economization of more and more spheres of our life. The pervasiveness of capitalism reflects this fact (Bookchin, 1982, p. 216). Every decision comes down to a cost-benefit analysis. Human life itself, cynically, is subject to this kind of rationality. The model for being human becomes Homo Economicus, a being characterized by selfishness and maximization of its private interest without worrying about the others (Marx, Capital, Volume 1, p. 280). This is reflected in mainstream economics and game theory, both of which adopt this model in their foundations and are hegemonic in the socioeconomic discourse.

Central, then to the hegemony of this discourse, is a notion of “value” that is morally neutral. We immediately see here an important theoretical challenge with concepts like “value” (or “rationality”, or “democracy”). They are concepts that Gallie (1955) and Connolly (1974, pp. 10—41) describe as essentially contested: They have appraisive connotations, are complex enough, referring to a cluster of dimensions, their rules of applications are relatively open, and thus they inherently become a discursive field of struggle. The discourse that establishes its own definition in people’s sense-making gets a major advantage in guiding how people think.

If we conceive value as Graeber does from an anthropological perspective, informed among other things by how marketless and stateless societies perceive value, we get a broad definition that encompasses but is not restricted to economistic conceptions of value:

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, 2001, p. 45)

Interestingly enough, this is very close to Weber’s conception of rationality. At the risk of an excursus, I would like to briefly discuss the concepts of social action and rationality, as developed by Weber, as they will be important in understanding the different theses about value and also in building my argument using concepts that are well-defined.

Social Action and Rationality

Weber connects action with the subjective meaning that individuals attach to their doing. Not all human action is social. Social action is one that takes into account the behavior of others in the subjective meaning the actor attributes to it (Weber, 2013, p. 4). Connected to social action is the concept of rationality. Rationality can be theoretical and practical. Although these aspects of human reason are connected, theoretical rationality is related to the way according to which we understand the world using abstract concepts, and therefore it is practical rationality that is related to social action (Habermas, 1986, p. 168). Specifically, the domain of practical rationality is the orientation of social action, which may be oriented in four ways:

1. Instrumentally-rational (zweckrational) action is one that is concerned with the more suitable application of means toward given ends, after forming expectations regarding the behavior of objects and people in our environment, which constitute conditions or means. This type of orientation includes setting ends but only to the extent that we rationally choose among alternative lines of action according to clearly defined values and conditions. This “rationality of choice” therefore does not include comparing values or belief systems.
2. Value-rational (wertrational) action is normative and therefore determined by ethics or principles the individual endorses. Such action is determined by a conscious belief that the action has value for its own sake due to ethical, aesthetic, religious or other reasons, independently of its prospects of success.
3. Affectual action is determined by the actor’s affects or feeling states and, contrasted to value-rational action, is not consciously formulated or planned.
4. Traditional action is determined by ingrained habituation, often an unthinking acceptance of customs.

(Habermas, 1986, pp. 168—174; Weber, 2013, pp. 24—26)

The concepts of rationality and value are intimately connected. Depending on how the two concepts are defined, there is indeed an overlap between them, so it is a point of theoretical difficulty. Weber’s definition of rationality emphasizes on how individuals perceive the importance of their action (without subscribing to individualistic values) (Weber, 2013, pp. 4, 13—18). Value, in my opinion, has more to do with the societal norms that are formed by intersubjective relationships according to which individuals adapt and operate.

Before jumping to more critical views, I will start my analysis with how value is conceived in the neoliberal discourse, drawing primarily from the work of one of its main proponents, Friedrich Hayek.

Value as Price in the Neoliberal Discourse

The way value manifests itself in societies where neoliberalism prevails is the formation and expansion of the price system in coordinating our activity. Society becomes a field where “rational” actors pursue the maximization of their interest (modeled as “utility”) and what is valuable stems from their economic transactions within a free market economy. Value becomes synonymous with prices that arise from these interactions. Moreover, any collectively constructed notions of it must be avoided (Bollier et al., 2016, p. 3; Pazaitis, 2021, pp. 13—14).

The basic pillars of this system are the protection of private property and contracts, as well as a non-intervention policy towards the operation of competition and free markets. Adam Smith’s famous metaphor for the market order is that while people in such a system act selfishly, chasing their private interests, they are led by an invisible hand to unintentionally promote the public interest (1977, pp. 593—594). According to one of its main proponents, Friedrich Hayek, the order we get from the operation of markets and competition is a spontaneous one, and he refers to it as “catallaxy”. Such an order does not intend to ensure that what the majority of people regard as more important needs are satisfied over other needs. At the end of the day, it is based on the assumption that people within a society have different ends and that we shouldn’t strive for a system that serves a definite order of ends, but rather one that provides individuals with the information and knowledge they need to make decisions according to their aims (Hayek, 1978, pp. 182—184). Liberty, in the sense of Berlin’s “negative freedom” - freedom from coercion (Berlin, 2002, pp. 169—178), can thus best be achieved via the market order, and that is the ultimate ideal. It is characteristic that Hayek considers democracy a tool, a means that can protect individuals’ liberty and not an end in itself (2007, pp. 110—111).

Price signaling then offers society a knowledge communication mechanism through which only the essential information is (economically) communicated to the relevant parties in the form of symbols (numbers, prices and any changes to them) so that they can rapidly adapt to changes in their economic environment. Just like the individual mind assesses the relative importance of particular things by attaching numerical indices (“values” or “marginal rates of substitution”) and comparing them to coordinate their individual economic activity, prices coordinate the actions of different individuals in society, obliging people to adapt to each other’s activity (Hayek, 1945, pp. 524—527). At this point, I would like to note that despite, as far as I know, Hayek is not so much concerned with how prices are formed but with their function in the capitalist system, we will see in the following chapter that Marx’s labor theory of value offers an explanation about that aspect.

It is no accident, in my opinion, that we get a society characterized by inequality, selfishness, exploitation and cruelty as a result of the neoliberal principles presented above. Isn’t it expected that the needs of the majority will not be served, when there is no conscious attempt to come down to an arrangement that gathers and respects them? Centuries of capitalism prove Smith’s invisible hand metaphor to be mistaken — there is no public good that comes from people pursuing their self-interest. Also, is it correct to say that coercion is minimal when the majority of people’s lives is an endless rat race to reproduce their livelihood while operating in rules, conditions and values clearly imposed from the outside (De Angelis, 2007, pp. 175—193)? Is it correct to consider that we have distributed decision-making in society and the economy or even individual agency, when capitalist enterprises function with a hierarchy of command?

From the perspective of social action, an important thing to keep for the needs of the argument of this thesis is its instrumental orientation in (neo)liberalism. Rationality is reduced to its instrumental dimension as people aim at maximizing their personal interest and it is the normative principle is to stay neutral, to avoid any objective value judgments toward their ends. A second important element is the price system as a communication mechanism, and specifically the means of communication — prices — which are elementary symbols that end up coordinating our social activity. Apart from the regime of private property, it is the neoliberal’s attachment to individualism and instrumental reason that any theorization of communist reason must oppose. In the following section, we will dive into Marx’s critique of capitalism and try to gather some more insights into the foundations of social action in capitalist societies.

Capitalist Value and Quantified Equivalence

As discussed in the previous chapter, instrumental reason is the dominant kind of orientation of social action in capitalist societies. In this chapter, the focus will be on another aspect of rationality in capitalism: its formalization through the mechanism of strict quantification of contribution, which in my opinion is reflected in Marx’s Labor Theory of Value. To this end, I will first briefly summarize Marx’s main points of critique of the commodity and value in capitalist societies, including the dynamic behavior of these elements like accumulation and appropriation. I will then argue that Marx’s analysis of the commodity and his theory of value reveal that social action in capitalism, as commodification itself, rests upon strictly measuring and quantifying our doing. Finally, I will build on the work of theorists like Heller, Horkheimer and Graeber to highlight the negative effects this logic can have on social life when generalized.

Labor Theory of Value: Marx’s Critique of Capitalist Value

We should start by saying that Marx’s approach to value is critical and was developed to bring to light phenomena of exploitation and the contradictions of a social system whose foundations rest in private property, commodification and wage labor. “Philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways.”, he observed. “The point, however, is to change it” (Marx, 1998, p. 571).

Marx, then, began his analysis of capitalism by focusing on the commodity, which is the elementary form of how wealth appears in capitalist societies. Central to this analysis is the concept of value, whose conception is socio-economic and is related to the sphere of production. Commodities value, according to Marx, is the measure of labor time necessary for their production (Marx, 1992, p. 131). This “necessary” labor time is defined by cultural norms and struggles and must be thought of as an average value in a given society. Marx argues that this conception of value is connected to an abstraction that takes place in measuring contributions and comparing labor which is different in its concrete form. For example, it allows us to compare the labor required to produce a coat with the one required to produce a pair of shoes. This leads to the concept of abstract labor — the expenditure of human energy in the abstract, which forms the value of commodities (Marx, 1992, p. 137). I will come back to this in more detail later, but at this point, I would like to note that the character of a product as a commodity is based on this logic of comparing our contributions and labor in a quantified manner. It involves attempting to quantify how we relate to each other in production.

Continuing with Marx’s analysis, money represents commodity values as magnitudes of the same denomination and therefore acts as a universal measure of value. The money form of value is called price (Marx, 1992, pp. 188—189). Prices can fluctuate, but they do so around an average value or an axis, which reflects that they are forms of value, symbols of objectified social labor expended to produce the commodity (Marx, 1992, p. 269).

Labor-Power and its Value

A major innovation of Marx’s analysis of value and the function of capitalism lies in the concept of labor-power and its distinction from labor. Labor-power is our capacity for labor, mental and physical capabilities we set in motion when we produce anything. It is a characteristic of capitalism that labor-power can appear on the market, sold for a limited period that does not strictly constitute slavery. A basic condition, according to Marx, for people to offer their capacity to work in the market, is that they are deprived of the means of production, without which they cannot produce commodities themselves. He also emphasizes that these conditions are neither natural nor applicable to all human societies, rather that they are the result of historical development.

Since labor-power appears as a commodity, it must have a value itself. Its value, according to Marx, is determined, like with every other commodity, by the labor time (socially) necessary for its (re)production. Therefore, by the value of the means of subsistence necessary for the maintenance of the worker, in a way that they can be able to perform their work with the required health and strength. Except for the natural aspect like the needs for food, shelter and clothing, Marx notes that there is also a historical and cultural element in the value of the reproduction of the worker (Marx, Capital Volume 1, p.274-275).

Surplus Value Capitalist Profit and Accumulation

The whole point of operating a capitalist business is the generation of profit for its owners. Thus, a commodity bearing a greater exchange value than the sum of the exchange values of the commodities used to produce it is needed. This difference comes, according to Marx, from the difference between the value of labor-power and the value it produces (valorizes) within the working day and is what Marx calls surplus value. Simply put, the capitalist pays the worker subsistence wages (which correspond to the value of their labor-power) but the working day is big enough so that the value produced is greater in magnitude. Surplus value must be conceived as a congealed quantity of surplus (unpaid) labor time, objectified surplus labor (Marx, 1992, pp. 300, 325, 672).

This is why, according to Marx, wage labor is a defining characteristic of the capitalist mode of production: Without it, there will be no surplus value and therefore no profit generated. Capitalist profit itself is, after all, just a different form of surplus value (Marx, 1993a, pp. 138—140). This is why capitalism is exploitative, and there also lies the incentive for capitalist businesses to increase the length and intensity of the working day. The limits set to the working day then inevitably become the main terrain of struggle between the working class and the class of capitalists (Marx, 1992, pp. 340—344).

“Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets!” exclaimed Marx (1992, p. 742) in describing the primary driving force and the culminating point of capitalist dynamics. This comes through reproduction on an ever-increasing scale and the absorption of more and more unpaid labor and natural resources. Marx’s analysis shows how, starting from the exchange of equivalents, a law upon which the exchange of commodities is based, the dynamics of capitalism reach a point where only an apparent exchange takes place. What really takes place after a couple of cycles of capital reproduction are run is that the capitalist appropriates, again and again, without an equivalent, a portion of the materialized labor of others (Marx, 1992, pp. 729—730). This observation is really important about the dynamics of commodification and bears the question of whether such a development is inherent in the social logic behind it, namely the attempt to strictly quantify contributions.

Quantified Equivalence and the Formalization of Reason

If we think about Marx’s definition of value more carefully, we will see that it represents how we measure and compare our doing, which always happens in concrete activities, in a quantified manner, assuming cultural and societal measurement norms. A core argument of this thesis is that this strict and quantified equivalence in measuring our contributions within a private property system is the basic principle upon which value and commodification rest. As Agnes Heller put it, “money is the purely quantitative representation of social wealth” (2018, p. 52). This is also an important dimension of how capitalism treats human needs:

Capitalism “quantifies” all its objective expressions and produces them (as it also produces the needs directed towards them) only if it is “profitable” to do so. […] Capitalism at the same time quantifies the complexly qualitative world of human needs, turns into quasi-exchange value and renders it “purchasable”; all qualitative needs that can neither be quantified nor purchased are inhibited.

(Heller, 2018, p. 55)

And it is important to note that this happens mostly when we adopt economic definitions of value, like the one Marx uses in Capital. This type of definition has a significant rhetorical advantage over others as it can easily be encapsulated in numbers and manipulated mathematically, reducing the complexity of social life and relations in numbers, simple symbols (Bollier et al., 2016, p. 16). Let’s recall at this point that symbolically and economically transmitting complex systemic changes is the function of the price system in contemporary capitalism according to Hayek, something that he celebrates and considers its major advantage (1945, pp. 525—526).

Now, an important question arises — is the problem in strictly quantifying contributions or in the private property regime? I believe it’s in both — an attempt to emancipate society from its capitalist bonds should on the one hand abolish private property in favor of usufruct and, on the other hand, do it in a way that contributions are not measured in a quantitative manner. And that is because claiming ownership over the product is probably a primary reason why one would strictly measure contributions.

The Formalization of Reason and the Value/Values Problem in Antrhopology

This economic definition of value is the manifestation of the hegemony of what Weber calls formal rationality in our social affairs:

The term “formal rationality of economic action” will be used to designate the extent of quantitative calculation or accounting which is technically possible and which is actually applied. […] A system of economic activity will be caned “formally” rational according to the degree in which the provision for needs, which is es­sential to every rational economy, is capable of being expressed in nu­merical, calculable terms, and is so expressed.

(Weber, 2013, p. 85)

Horkheimer’s critique of the formalization of reason becomes important at this point. He argues that its effects on society and how we think and act are far-reaching, since it strips reason and therefore thinking from the ambition to determine the desirability of goals based on ethical, political or aesthetic criteria. This relegates reason itself to a subordinate position as other factors become the basis of the most important decisions and goals. (Horkheimer, 2004, pp. 6—7). Ironically, although the “rationalization” of society and the corresponding formalization of reason is endorsed and applied by individualistic societies such as the ones we live in, the result, as Adorno and Horkheimer observed, is often the “atrophy of individuality”, conformity and pseudo-culture (Habermas, 1986, p. 354).

The formalization of reason is intimately connected to the instrumental type of rationality we encountered above. Only this aspect of practical rationality can be effectively captured in symbols and therefore become formalized. Weber contrasts it with value-rationality, which does not restrict itself to goal-oriented quantitative economic calculations but is based on certain ultimate ends and values criteria. A rationality of this type also opens the discussion for society reflecting on ends and their relative importance. Granted, it is not guaranteed that these ultimate ends and values will lead to emancipated societies — there is a possibility we could get even authoritarian or dystopian ones. But I still believe this is a critical part of any emancipatory project as it raises the correct questions of what are the values and the norms our actions should be measured against and also, done right, encourages citizen participation in deciding these in a democratic manner.

Graeber also makes an acute observation along these lines: It has long troubled anthropologists that we use the same word to describe the benefits of a commodity sold on the market (the “value” of a coat) and our ideas about what is ultimately important in life (“values” such as justice or freedom). This is referred to as the value/values problem. Examining the matter from the perspective of work, he observes that we speak of value when labor is commoditized, while we start speaking of values in occasions where work is not commoditized, with a primary example being care work and “family values”, but also aspects of the world of work like loyalty and integrity, which resist quantification and commodification. In his words:

It’s the role of money as universal equivalent that allows for the division. That which is thus rendered comparable can be considered under the rubric of “value” and this value, like that of money, lies in its equivalence. The value of “values” in contrast lies precisely in their lack of equivalence; they are seen as unique, crystallized forms. They cannot or should not be converted into money. Nor can they be precisely compared with one another. No one will ever be able produce a mathematical formula for how much it is fitting to betray one’s political principles in the name of religion, or to neglect one’s family in the pursuit of art. True, people do make such decisions all the time. But they will always resist formalization --- to even suggest doing so is at best odd, and probably offensive.

(Graeber, 2013, p. 224)

In the above problem, it is clear that people speak of “value” when it is formalized, subject to calculations and therefore related to instrumental reasoning. “Values”, on the other hand, are connected to the substantive aspect of rationality, which resists formalization.

Beyond an Economistic Theory of Value

As analyzed before, this economic conception of value and correspondingly the price system plays a major role in organizing life in capitalist societies. A communist society would, in my opinion, aim to reverse this trend and de-commodify as many aspects of life as possible. This means that abolishing this conception of capitalist value becomes a matter of strategic importance. So is there any role remaining for value in such a society? And, if yes, how would the notion of the concept change so that it reflects the new arrangement and social priorities?

Many commons advocates have argued that there is great strategic value in developing an alternative theory of value that could challenge the relevant neoliberal conceptions that are prevalent and that this theory should be “positive”, in the sense of using concepts that not merely criticize existing phenomena and structures, but can also be used as theoretical tools to construct alternatives (Bollier et al., 2016, pp. 4, 51, De Angelis, 2007, p. 277). As John Holloway puts it:

If there is to be a future for humanity, we must live differently, we must act differently, we must relate in a different way to one another and to the other forms of life and the natural environment that surround us. We must develop a different doing.

(Holloway, 2010b, pp. 259—260)

Following these theorists, the next chapter of this thesis is devoted to thinking about social action in a different, emancipated society. In this, I will explore how rationality could take a new meaning beyond the constraints of the domination of its instrumental part. Supported by this new kind of rationality, a new theory of value can emerge based on some core communist principles like a needs-based arrangement in society and the primacy of care work. As one would expect, some tensions will appear and this thesis suggests some first approaches to resolving them, which can then be tested and refined in the field of social life.

Elements of a Communist Theory of Value

In the previous chapter, I explored how value is theorized and perceived in economistic societies like capitalism and argued that strict quantification of contribution and the underlying means-end or instrumental rationality that characterizes homo economicus are the basis pillars of commodification and the coordination of our activity in these societies. The transformation of society starts with the conscious reflection and transformation of our activity and the ways we relate to each other. As Holloway observes, a revolution that is not founded in the transformation of human activity is no revolution at all (2010b, p. 260). Following Massimo De Angelis, I believe that our ‘NO’ to Capital’s value should be followed by the articulation of many ‘yeses’, the positing of alternatives and new value practices that lead to the constitution of a new society (De Angelis, 2007, p. 277). In this chapter then, I will try to explore the basic elements of this new theory of value, its principles and the tensions that may appear in formulating them.

Value, Rationality and Democracy

As discussed in a previous chapter, the concept of rationality is intimately related to the concept of value. So the project of redefining value is also related to thinking about its supporting rationality and the constitution and orientation of social action. In Weber’s terms, I understand this project as one of developing a composite type of rationality, which attempts to synthesize value-rational elements, which hold a primary position, with instrumental ones, which do not stop to exist but are constrained and moved to a secondary role, and affectual ones that encompass activity manifested in art and play.

But at this point, an important critique comes to mind, coming from the work of Jurgen Habermas and his theory of communicative action. Weber’s concept of rationality (like Graeber’s definition of value) remains rooted in the philosophy of the subject, as it maintains an important emphasis on an agent/subject that represents and manipulates the objective world in some manner, gaining knowledge about the environment it operates in and then putting this knowledge to effective use by intelligently adapting and acting upon it (Habermas, 1986, pp. 389—390; McCarthy, 1986, p. ix). To be sure, this is a conscious methodological decision on Weber’s side (2013, p. 13). What his approach misses on though, given this methodological decision, is the intersubjective and communicative constitution of the orientation of social action. And this is exactly what Habermas’ theory incorporates and why it is of interest to us. As we will see from its analysis, his theory of communicative rationality can support a theory of value that emerges from the interaction and communication of living beings, a relational theory of value, as contemporary theorists of the commons envision it (Bollier et al., 2016, p. 16).

Communicative Rationality and Value

Habermas’ theory reconstructs and builds on Weber’s work on social action and rationality, as well as The Frankfurt School and critical theory among other thinkers. His goal is to develop a concept of rationality no longer tied to or limited by its subjectivistic and individualistic premises, which has dominated Western thinking since Descartes (McCarthy, 1986, p. viii). This is central to his critique of Adorno and Horkheimer’s work, whose critique of instrumental reason is fertile and valid but cannot sufficiently ground an alternative course (Habermas, 1986, pp. 389—390, 396). And his response is a shift from a paradigm of consciousness to a paradigm of language, as manifested in communication and speech acts. The attention in this model is shifted to the broader context of individual purposive actions and the structure of social interactions that constitute them. Essentially, Habermas develops a concept of rationality that is not limited to the orientation of social action but also its communicative dimension, taking into account the structures and rules that shape it.

Habermas argues that the human species survives and maintains itself through coordinating social activity established through communication, which at least in certain spheres is oriented toward reaching agreement. Therefore, the concept of rationality should encompass these critical aspects of communicative action (1986, p. 397). In order to understand and analyze social action, then, we need to carefully consider patterns of communication and apply tools of the linguistic philosophy:

[…] communicative actors move in the medium of a natural language, draw upon culturally transmitted interpretations, and relate simultaneously to something in the one objective world, something in their common social world, and something in each’s own subjective world.

(Habermas, 1986, pp. 391—392)

In order to employ natural language in a way that is oriented toward reaching understanding, speakers must put themselves within a framework of interpretation that not only accounts for teleological aspects but also for normative and performative ones. In this framework of communication, they are aware that their utterances’ validity can potentially be contested by other actors in three ways:

1. That the statements they make are true (this is the relation to the objective world as the totality of entities about which true statements are possible);
2. That their speech acts are right with respect to the existing normative context (this is the relation to the social world as the totality of legitimately regulated interpersonal relations);
3. That their manifested intention is meant as it is expressed (this is the relation with the subjective world as the totality of experiences to which the speaker has privileged access and has to do with the sincerity and authenticity of utterances).

(Habermas, 1986, pp. 99—100)

Importantly, in order to come to an agreement by reaching understanding, speakers must intersubjectively recognize the validity claims they reciprocally raise, while drawing upon culturally transmitted interpretations. For both parties, the interpretive task consists of incorporating the other’s interpretation of the situation, and in order for understanding to be achieved, the respective situation definitions must sufficiently coincide (Habermas, 1986, pp. 100—101). Another important aspect of communicative rationality is the aspect of reflection. As people learn to orient themselves according to the expectations of refutable validity claims, they start to view their arguments from the position of the other and internalize the role of a participant in argumentation. In viewing themselves through the eyes of an arguing opponent, they become reflective by establishing a relation to themselves and their thoughts, which is the basis for self-knowledge and accountability (Habermas, 1989, pp. 74—75). I would add that this is also the basis for empathy, as people get trained to assume the position of the other, and this cannot but include feelings and affects.

Habermas builds on the work of George Herbert Mead and his fundamental insight that socialization processes occur via linguistic interaction, emerging from gesture-mediated interaction and eventually taking the shape of grammatical speech (Habermas, 1989, pp. 7—8, 46, 63). Using these foundations, he develops a critique of strictly individualistic modes of social action, like the ones we see in neoliberal theory and modern economics and game theory models: He argues that individuation and the formation of personalities are simultaneously socialization processes, constituted as they are by communicative acts and our interaction with other people. Motivations and behavior are connected to norms and rules that are tied to language and culture and thus are not essentially private (Habermas, 1989, pp. 43, 63; McCarthy, 1986, p. xx). Along these lines, Castoriadis argued that there cannot be pure individualism as individualist philosophies conceive it. Individuals’ actions are largely determined by the socio-historical field and the specific institutions and culture of the society where these individuals live. And as (neo)liberal theory attempts to evade this fact, what we get in contemporary societies is thoughtless, twisted identification with whatever is readily available, like the nation or the religious community. And the modern individual becomes merely a marionette that reproduces the patterns of action imposed by the socio-historical field: making money, consuming, “enjoying”, at the end of the day its authenticity is reduced to mere conformism (Castoriadis, 2000, pp. 83—84). Habermas is after a notion of self that centers around the ability to be constituted and realize oneself through communicatively shared intersubjectivity (McCarthy, 1986, p. xxi), thus being able to reach individuation processes that are more collective and supporting the formation of more reflective and critical personalities.

Communicative Rationality and the Price System as a Communication Mechanism

At this point, it is interesting to go back to a previous section and recall that, according to Hayek, price signaling is also a communication mechanism and this is really its primary and celebrated function in contemporary capitalism. It is interesting then to pose the question: What are the signals communicated with this system and how rational are they under the prism of Habermas’ theory of communicative action?

Prices are elementary symbols that communicate information of an economic nature (Hayek, 1945, pp. 526—527), quantitatively representing how contributions are compared and capturing fluctuations in the economic environment. So there is definitely a form of social coordination achieved by such signals. But this is really far from what Habermas considers rational communicative action. In this, acts take the shape of grammatical speech and the means of communication take up the following functions:

1. Reaching understanding, as they serve the transmission of culturally-stored knowledge;
2. Coordinating activities, as they serve the fulfillment of norms appropriate to a given context and act as a steering mechanism that attunes the behavior of different interaction partners to one another;
3. Socializing actors via the formation of personality structures through linguistically mediated interaction.

(Habermas, 1989, p. 63)

The communicative acts Habermas has in mind are then much richer semantically than elementary symbols since they are based on refutable validity claims expressed through natural language. Also, despite those endorsing the (neo)liberal theory denying it, the element of coercion is there and actually a very powerful disciplinary mechanism since people’s livelihoods are pitted against each other in an endless rat race through the mechanisms of competition and under the sway of Capital, something that happens within precarious economic conditions they do not choose. Habermas’ rational communicative action aims at communicatively-achieved consensus and in it coming to an understanding requires the rider uncoerced, with the expression acquiring a normative character (Habermas, 1986, p. 392). In terms of socialization and social subjects constitution, the form of it that we get through the expansion of the market system in more and more realms of our activity is people acting selfishly and instrumentally toward others and the environment, and as discussed above, this twisted form of identification with whatever is readily available like the nation or the religious community. On the other hand, subjects shaped by rational communicative acts can develop internal control and self-limitation characteristics and are encouraged to form a personality that enhances the critical, reflective and empathetic dimensions. Thus, they are also able to challenge and transcend the “available pool” of identities. The above differences are all important for adopting rationality standards that are more tailored to collectivist societies like the anarchist communist ones I have in mind.

Of course, one can (and Hayek does) argue that the price system is an efficient communication mechanism (Hayek, 1945, pp. 527—529), unlike more complex communicative acts, which require effort and time to reach understanding and coordination. So are direct commands in a fascist regime though; and as we can see with the expansion of capitalism, it can also be efficient enough to destroy human lives and nature. Also, despite the price system being an efficient and economic coordination mechanism, the expansion of it is inefficient in other respects, as social theorists have argued. As Marx observed, its profit-making motives pose inherent contradictions related to the automation (1992, pp. 530—533) and socialization (1992, pp. 928—929) of labor, which constrains its overall productive efficiency. The barriers placed to disseminating and sharing knowledge and information through artificial scarcity and paywalls in modern digital media and the Internet are a contemporary example of this inefficiency caused by the market system. Also, as Graeber has argued, the emergence of pointless or harmful jobs — bullshit jobs, as he calls them (2019), accounts for more than half of societal work, something that poses important questions regarding the efficiency of the price system. But at the end of the day, in my opinion, efficiency is not really what we should be after when thinking about an emancipated society and the good life. It is a technical factor to consider when making decisions but should not hold such a central position in how we coordinate. Indeed, developing arguments and communicating via refutable validity claims requires effort and time. However, this is what shapes us as critical personalities and what can support participatory democracy, as we’ll see in the upcoming chapter.

Participatory Democracy and Communicative Rationality

Another angle under which the concept of communicative rationality can be examined is its intimate relationship with a conscious political and strategic goal of a participatory, direct and authentic democracy connected to the communist project. Grassroots organization and horizontal doing in common cannot but be at the core of this project, and therefore, standing critically against its twisted and euphemistic implementations that we’ve seen in history, an authentic democracy based on citizen assemblies that discuss and decide on the substantial matters at hand is what we should be aiming for.

Implementing such an authentic democracy requires, as Castoriadis has observed quoting Aristotle, responsible citizens who are “capable of governing and being governed” (2000, pp. 286—287). Therefore, a communist society cannot but make the following substantial political choice that is also connected to how we define value: We want citizens to be autonomous, and learn to self-govern themselves, and this can happen only if they can participate in an equal basis to governing the common affairs (Castoriadis, 1995, pp. 219—220). Social action that leads to the constitution of subjects that can self-govern themselves and their affairs must therefore be highly valued, given the above normative principle. Social institutions that cultivate the education of people, in the broader sense of the term (paideia), toward building and governing the commons, become very important. Municipal life becomes a school for the formation of citizens and the arena for educating people in handling complex civic and regional issues (Bookchin, 2015, pp. 16—17, 20). Critical spirit and the ability to reflect on and question the given institutions and status quo are also highly valued according to this normative principle (Castoriadis, 2000, p. 277).

Going back to Habermas’ theory, communicative acts theorized as rational assume the form of rich grammatical communication, based on refutable validity claims that consider aspects of truth, relation to norms and performativity. Through them, social subjects can transmit cultural knowledge, coordinate and socialize, while developing critical thinking and reflective skills. Social action is then constituted intersubjectively, communicatively and reflectively, all of which are closely related to developing citizens who can govern themselves and be governed and can therefore support the healthy function of a participatory democracy.

A communist theory of value will, in my opinion, move within some limits of value rationality (in Weber’s terms) in terms of orientation, which are shaped after taking into consideration ethical and material aspects of how we can relate. My intention is to dive into more detail regarding these limits and the associated tensions in the upcoming chapter. But these limits and principles can never be absolute, they must be open to reconsideration and a continuous theme of discussion within the community. This continuous questioning and reflection, the rejection of any source of meaning other than the one constituted by the living activity and communication of citizens, is at the heart of philosophy and democracy (Castoriadis, 2000, pp. 266—267). This is why, at its core, value under communism is constituted communicative-rationally and is resistant to becoming a fixed concept, a dogma. It has to do with the principles and tools we develop to assess social action, developed by citizens’ continuous political and philosophic activity within an authentic democracy. Communicative rationality then is the basis, on top of which more concrete principles, fitting to a communist society, can be developed. In the following chapters, I will try to outline some of these principles and important tensions that may appear in balancing them.

Principles and Tensions Around Value

Having argued that communicative rationality is the basis under which people can transmit knowledge, coordinate and form their personalities, I will now explore some more concrete principles and factors that can guide social action and the redefinition of value in emancipated societies. And this is because the concept of communicative rationality itself is abstract enough and therefore cannot by itself be used to support all the aspects of communist reason. One such aspect is the mode or disposal under which people relate and communicate with each other, as guided by ethics. For example, communicative rationality by itself is not enough to explain how human action is guided in extreme events like disasters, and how eventually human sociability itself is grounded on communist practices:

[…] in the immediate wake of great di­sasters — a flood, a blackout, or an economic collapse — people tend to behave the same way, reverting to a rough-and-ready communism. However briefly, hierarchies and markets and the like become luxuries that no one can afford. Anyone who has lived through such a moment can speak to their peculiar qualities, the way that strangers become sisters and brothers and human society itself seems to be reborn. This is important, because it shows that we are not simply talking about cooperation. In fact, communism is the foundation of all human socia­bility. It is what makes society possible.

(Graeber, 2011, p. 96)

Also, importantly, communicative rationality does not incorporate factors that belong to the sphere of material (re)production of society. Although it is fair to stand critical of Marx’s theory that it is, at the end of the day the economy and the relations of production that define the ideological superstructure (Castoriadis, 2005, pp. 24—29; Laclau & Mouffe, 2013, pp. 47—90), his work shows the major importance of the sphere of production in our lives, which we should acknowledge. Material factors become very important in resolving the various tensions that arise when thinking about value and eventually reconceptualizing work itself.

The Realm of Necessity and The Realm of Freedom

Having to work to produce the necessities for life is a material condition of our existence, independent of all forms of society (Marx, 1992, p. 133). This kind of labor can be creative but is often repetitive and mundane, even brutalizing. This is what Marx refers to as “the realm of necessity” and which he contrasts with the “realm of freedom”, which is characterized by artistic and creative activity people engage in their free time:

The realm of freedom really begins only where labour determined by necessity and external expediency ends; it lies by its very nature beyond the sphere of material production proper. Just as the savage must wrestle with nature to satisfy his needs, to maintain and reproduce his life, so must civilized man, and he must do so in all forms of society and under all possible modes of production. This realm of natural necessity expands with his development, because his needs do too; but the productive forces to satisfy these expand at the same time. Freedom, in this sphere, can consist only in this, that socialized man, the associated producers, govern the human metabolism with nature in a rational way, bringing it under their collective control instead of being dominated by it as a blind power; accomplishing it with the least expenditure of energy and in conditions most worthy and appropriate for their human nature. But this always remains a realm of necessity. The true realm of freedom, the development of human powers as an end in itself, begins beyond it, though it can only flourish with this realm of necessity as its basis. The reduction of the working day is the basic prerequisite.

(Marx, 1993a, pp. 958—959)

Murray Bookchin draws from this excerpt and argues that how the two main radical traditions (Marxism and Anarchism) deal with the problem of necessity within conditions of a relatively low level of technical development to a big extent produced their divergence. In “Post-Scarcity Anarchism” (1984), he envisions a non-distant future where technology eliminates the realm of necessity entirely and replaces it with the realm of freedom. It needs to be said at this point that Bookchin, rightly so in my opinion, stands critical to Marx’s perception of nature as “stingy” and as standing against humans in this endeavor of producing the necessities for life. He goes further than that and argues that the seeming conflict between the “realm of necessity” and the “realm of freedom” has been used ideologically to justify domination. This criticism is actually a central point of one of his major works (Bookchin, 1982, p. 10). He also describes how preliterate societies had a different view of the matter and handled it in a way that doesn’t enforce this type of distinction (Bookchin, 1982, pp. 319—320).

I agree with Bookchin’s criticism of perceiving nature as “stingy” and standing against us. I believe that a perception of an abundant nature, of which we are part, is key to building ecological societies. On the other hand and acknowledging that I may very well be the victim of the aforementioned ideology, I feel that the rest of his criticism about the distinction is harsh and that having to work for the necessaries of life will indeed always be a material condition of our existence, as Marx said. I don’t mean to say that this kind of work cannot be creative or collectivized, but rather that it cannot always be pleasant and that we must accept that and aim to reduce it. This condition bears, as we will see, some tensions, which will be analyzed below.

Needs and Reciprocity

It is at the core of a communist type of rationality to coordinate social and economic life according to a needs-based arrangement, where people share contributions according to their capacity and wealth is distributed according to what members of the community need. Graeber argues that unless people consider themselves enemies, this principle will be assumed to apply in many everyday situations in all societies and calls this “baseline communism” (2011, pp. 97—98). On the other hand, members of an emancipated society will face each other as equal (but different) human beings and as a result, especially when it comes to the realm of necessity — working for the necessaries of life in tasks that cannot be automated — a degree of reciprocity is indeed expected. There is then, a tension between a pure needs-based arrangement and a reciprocal arrangement, and resolving it becomes important when thinking about value and practical rationality.

Needs-Based Arrangement

Blanc’s and Marx’s slogan “from each according to his abilities to each according to his needs” (2022, p. 59) cannot but be the guiding normative principle in a communist society. And this is one of the main elements we must add to the communicative rationality we have as a basis in order to approach a communist type of rationality. It is under this prism that the reconstruction of value and economy itself is understood by the Kurds and the Rojava model, according to Guneser:

We are trying to understand what ‘the economy’ is. It should be about serving needs, in the original Greek sense,” she said, and not simply about advancing the commodification process under capitalism. “The reconstruction of value should serve care and empathy.”

(Bollier et al., 2016, p. 13)

The above is in direct opposition to how Hayek and the neoliberal discourse think about the economy. Hayek actually argues against using the word “economy” in favor of “catallaxy”, which is a spontaneous order that emerges through the function of markets and pursuit of private interest, and which does not aim to fulfill a collectively discussed configuration and prioritization of needs (1978, pp. 183—184).

A core principle of a needs-based economic arrangement is the “irreducible minimum”, which was introduced by Paul Radin and which Bookchin uses and develops in his work. It represents the guarantee of the material means of life to all of its members irrespectively of their productive contribution:

Radin’s concept of the irreducible minimum rests on an unarticulated principle of freedom. To be assured of the material means of life irrespective of one’s productive contribution to the com­munity implies that, wherever possible, society will compensate for the infirmities of the ill, handicapped, and old, just as it will for the limited powers of the very young and their dependency on adults. Even though their productive powers are limited or failing, people will not be denied the means of life that are available to individuals who are well-endowed physically and mentally.

(Bookchin, 1982, pp. 143—144)

I don’t believe that Bookchin’s argument is that we should accept inequality as a natural state of things and not try to relate with each other as equals. I like how Castoriadis put it: I wish to be able to meet the other person as a being like myself and yet absolutely different […] . I wish to see the other, and for the other to see me, as another human being (2005, p. 92). Facing the other as equal but different is key to living together. Bookchin, rather, argues that an emancipated society should acknowledge the inequality of physical and mental powers and skills within the community and try to compensate for them, establishing a culture of social responsibility and solidarity. This is why he calls for the “equality of unequals”.

A concept of need that is free of the psychological connections with property, ownership and individuality is intimately connected with such an arrangement in society. Bookchin is right to argue that we must connect need with use and specifically the application and expansion of the practice of usufruct in covering people’s needs (1982, p. 50).

How are then needs to be prioritized and evaluated? Despite there are limits set by the principle of the irreducible minimum and the basic biological needs that are common to all people, this matter must be a subject of continuous reflection and discussion within the community and its citizen councils. And this is because human needs exceed the purely biological ones and are always constituted by culture and constructed socially (Castoriadis, 2005, pp. 150, 171). Communicatively achieved agreement or compromise, based on mutual understanding and criticizable validity claims (Habermas, 1989, p. 72) should be the basis under which this evaluation happens.

Needs and Scarcity

A concept that has historically played an important role in how people think about the economy is scarcity, a property often used when we think about it in terms of resources and goods and specifically the fact that most resources are limited or finite, in contrast to human needs, which can be thought of as infinite. But, as Bookchin observes, scarcity is not merely a matter of quantity or kind of resource, it is a matter of how society treats needs as such. And in contemporary capitalist societies, scarcity has to do more with a twisted hypostatization of need and less with the products’ natural properties:

Just as capitalism leads to production for the sake of production, so too it leads to consumption for the sake of consumption. The great bourgeois maxim, “grow or die,” has its counterpart in “buy or die.” And just as the production of commodities is no longer related to their function as use-values, as objects of real utility, so wants are no longer related to humanity’s sense of its real needs.

(Bookchin, 1982, p. 68)

Bookchin talks about the “fetishization of needs” as they acquire a blind life of their own, devoid of any rational discussion and critical thought about humanity’s actual needs. The mechanism of competition imposes the constant creation of new needs, and this is why commodification expands to more and more spheres of human activity. Connected to this is the perception of “stingy” nature, which he argues has been polluting the social imaginary at least since the Victorian era.

There is then this cultural aspect related to needs and scarcity, and Bookchin argues that there is a point where this twisted conception of needs begins to produce a special kind of scarcity — artificial scarcity — which is created using barriers and enclosures even when technical development enables free sharing and abundance, expressing as such social contradictions (1982, p. 68). This is most evident nowadays in the enclosure of knowledge products like software behind paywalls. Meretz reaches a similar conclusion to Bookchin’s when analyzing patterns developed by the Oekonux project since over ten years of research on Free Software and commons-based peer production, emphasizing the social character of scarcity:

It seems justified to keep material goods as commodities while immaterial goods are required to be free. However, this assumption turns a social property into a natural one. No produced good is scarce by nature. Scarcity is a result of goods being produced as commodities, thus scarcity is a social aspect of a commodity created for a market. In the digital era this is obvious for immaterial goods, as we can clearly see the measures to artificially make the good scarce. Such measures include laws (based on so-called “intellectual property”) and technical barriers to prevent free access to the good. It seems to be less obvious for material goods, because we are used to the non-accessibility of material goods unless we have paid for them. But the measures are the same: law and technical barriers, accompanied by continuous destruction of goods to keep the commodities rare enough to obtain a suitable price on markets.

(Meretz, 2011)

Interestingly, a technology that has generated much hype recently, cryptocurrencies, starting with the invention of Bitcoin and its underlying blockchain technology, pioneered a new way to create artificial scarcity in the digital realm without even the need for a central authority that guarantees it (Nakamoto, 2008). The blockchain is a techno-social artifact that is used to achieve consensus in a decentralized manner using a peer-to-peer network. It assumes instrumental agency and relies on self-interest and economic incentives to accomplish this and therefore create the required artificial scarcity needed for a decentralized currency to work without a centralized authority maintaining the account balances. Various use cases emerged by generalizing this pattern in applications beyond currencies (most prominently, Ethereum and its corresponding blockchain (Buterin, 2014)). Artificial scarcity and instrumental rationality are at the core of these technologies, and it is no accident that the majority of use cases involve commodification (usually, using some decentralization mechanism) and the formalization of reason in attempting to regulate social behavior. Bauwens, Kostakis and Pazaitis rightly characterize this model as “distributed capitalism”, as it embraces the idea that “everyone can become an independent capitalist or trader”, with profit maximization remaining the primary motive (2019, pp. 37—38).

This scarcity dogma then, as Meretz calls it, is closely related to commodification and commons enclosures inherent in capitalism. The argument here is not that resources are infinite and natural scarcity is non-existent. Clearly, we humans need to work in order to obtain the necessities for life. Also, these means of life are often rivalrous - their use prevents other people from using them. The main point is that our notions of scarcity and abundance are, to a large extent, constructed socially. They are connected to our view of nature and also our definition and prioritization of needs.

Post-Scarcity

The society of the future is a society of material wealth; this idea is, according to Heller, encountered in virtually all of Marx’s writings on the subject (Heller, 2018, p. 101). Real wealth manifests itself in a great disproportion between the labor employed for a given activity and its product, as production is more and more operated by machines and becomes automated. Humans gradually become regulators of the production process instead of its instruments and operatives. Science, the collective understanding and knowledge of nature and its laws, and its applied form — technology — become the main lever of production instead of labor time (Marx, 1993b, pp. 705—706). Along the same lines, Bookchin argues that machines evolving from an extension of human muscles into an extension of the human nervous system marks an important historical development in the sphere of production. Automated control, especially enhanced by the advent of the computer and the information and communication technology revolution this marked, can be key to a future where brutalizing and degrading work like raw material mining gets completely operated by machines. The abolition of mining would symbolize a triumph of liberatory technology and be a milestone toward a post-scarcity society (Bookchin, 1984, pp. 28—29).

But material abundance alone is not enough. The answer Bookchin gives to the question of scarcity is a post-scarcity mindset, one that emphasizes a critical discussion and selectivity of needs in society and consequently the cultivation of autonomous individuals that have a sense of measure and can choose their needs rationally:

The problems of needs and scarcity, in short, must be seen as a problem of selectivity - of choice. […] Although choice presupposes a sufficiency in the means of life, it does not imply the existence of a mindless abundance of goods that smothers the individual’s capacity to select use-values ration­ally, to define his or her needs in terms of qualitative, ecological, human­istic, indeed, philosophical criteria. Rational choice presupposes not only a sufficiency in the means of life with minimal labor to acquire them; it presupposes above all a rational society.

(Bookchin, 1982, p. 69)

We see then that at its core the concept of scarcity is connected to how a society theorizes needs and the extent to which its members act according to a rationality that enables them to be wise enough and set limits to themselves within an environment of material wealth. Post-scarcity is contrasted by Bookchin with consumerism, which is the capitalist version of it. He argues that at the core of anarchism is to increase choice, not needs.

Reciprocity

Reciprocity is a mode of relating in which two parties act, or are disposed to act toward one another in equivalent ways (Graeber, 2001, p. 225). Graeber revisits the work of fellow anthropologists Mauss, Malinowski and Sahlins and argues that we need to distinguish between different types of reciprocity, especially when we think about the concept in a broad sense.

On the one extreme, we have what he refers to as open-ended or generalized or communistic reciprocity (which can be thought of as reciprocity only in the broadest sense), which are relations that are seen as permanent and where parties, without taking any accounts, offer one another anything when in need (2001, p. 218, 2011, p. 100). In this kind of relationship, people expect no repayment when they act because they know that, in a similar situation, the other would do the same. It is a kind of relationship that prevails among close kin but can also apply to groups like moieties or clans. For example:

A Melanesian who needed a new canoe could call on his sister’s husband and his people: since he had given them a wife, they in effect owed him everything and had to provide him not in accord with any principle of repayment, but simply in response to his needs.

(Graeber, 2001, p. 159)

On the other extreme, we have closed or balanced reciprocity, the stricter version of which is commercial exchange, where there is an expectation of an exact equivalence, often measured in formal ways (e.g. monetary value). In this type of reciprocal relationship, both parties keep accounts and the relationship lasts until a perceived state of equivalence is met (Graeber, 2001, pp. 219—220). This type of reciprocity can also apply to gift-giving, in cases when the practice of giving a gift creates an obligation, which is erased when the other party gives a counter-gift of approximately equivalent value. This is the point where the relationship is ended until a new cycle begins. In this case, “gift economy” practices are essentially not really much different than market exchange, since equivalence is the main principle. When people exchange gifts this way, the relationships can get competitive and anthropologists have observed cases where what really is going on are contests of generosity, or people showing off by giving more away (Graeber, 2011, p. 103).

Interestingly, one case where reciprocity is absent is when an explicit hierarchy — one party being clearly superior to the other — is accepted by both parties as the framework of the relationship. Graeber argues that in this type of relationship, people act by the logic of precedent or custom and there is little need for explanation for the actions each party is expected to do. For example, people don’t expect panhandlers to reciprocate when they give them coins. Conquest or force that becomes systematized falls into the same category and by the passage of time often stops being framed as predatory relations but as the moral one, the framework upon which the relationship between people is built. Examples of this are pillage turned into tribute or rape turning into the “right of the first night” (Graeber, 2011, pp. 109—113).

Clearly, we have to discard and oppose hierarchy as the framework of people’s relationships in a communist society — its members seeing each other as equals cannot but be one of its main principles. Reflecting upon how we relate with each other and bringing into light arrangements that are maintained using permanent hierarchic relations is critical to improving how we live together. It will be the case, then, that among equals reciprocity will be expected, so we must carefully think about which types of reciprocity should be favored in an emancipated society. As Graeber argues, it is better to think about reciprocity as a matter of degree, with the extremes described above in the two opposing sides of a spectrum. This means that closed relations can become more open and vice versa (2001, p. 220).

Resolving the Tension: Gentle Reciprocity

Although the needs-based arrangement must be the guiding principle, we must expect some reciprocity in our social relations, especially as there will always be tasks that cannot be automated, even difficult and mundane ones. In these cases, people will expect that they will share the burden with other community members and I don’t believe this is inherently bad. Where it gets harmful is when these reciprocity expectations get strict and quantified, and their expression in commodities and the development of markets becomes the organizing principle of society. As discussed in the previous chapter for capitalist value, it is based on the principle of equivalence, which is not meant to be loose but clear and codifiable. And as Marx argued, this principle of equivalence, expressed in the law of exchange, develops into its opposite as capitalist relations are generalized, as capital becomes the command over unpaid labor. Quantifiable equivalence is this extreme, “closed” type of reciprocity that turns even gift-giving into a competitive game.

At this point, I will turn to Silke Helfrich and her argument that we rely too much on measurement-based governance systems, even though we have alternatives like social taboo and other social practices (2016, pp. 23—24). Along with David Bollier, in their attempted ontological shift when analyzing the Commons, they call for “gentle” reciprocity:

Gentle reciprocity has a different character than strict reciprocity, in which trading partners try to calculate in precise terms who owes what to whom. In any tit-for-tat relationship, the goal is to achieve greater value than one spends, or at least a monetary equivalent. The reciprocity that exists in a commons is generally a gentle reciprocity in which people choose not to calculate in precise terms who owes whom a favor, time, money, or labor. In a commons, it is important to be neighborly, and not just behave as a “rational” market actor. Commons offer a hospitable context for turning gentle reciprocity into a habit, which builds social trust and the capacity to work together in constructive ways.

(Bollier & Helfrich, 2019, p. 81)

This means that what we can aim for is a rough equivalence of contributions. And, thinking about the concept of value, Helfrich makes the acute observation that the word value is etymologically derived from the Latin root valorare, which means “estimate”. Estimating value instead of attempting to measure it in objective, quantifiable units makes much more sense when we think about it this way (Bollier et al., 2016, p. 25).

Graeber also argues that although tit-for-tat exchange relations can create ongoing social relationships, they only become truly supportive relationships when they stop being tit-for-tat. Seeing reciprocity as a spectrum, he calls us to make “closed” reciprocity relations more “open” and therefore less formalized (2001, pp. 218—220). Taking no accounts, even considering the practice itself to be offensive or weird, is indeed the simplest way to tell that communist relations are in place (Graeber, 2011, p. 99).

Finally, as discussed in the relevant chapter, the development of productive forces and the corresponding material abundance a post-scarcity society can achieve drastically limit the scope of the realm of necessity in favor of the realm of freedom. This, in turn, reduces the occasions where reciprocity is expected in our socio-economic relations and therefore becomes an important factor in the tensity between reciprocity and a needs-based arrangement getting resolved.

Care Work

One of the most important contributions of the theory of feminism to the Marxist discourse is the argument that Marx’s theory overlooks the essential role of unpaid and reproductive labor in modern capitalism, which is performed mainly by women. This includes activities like child and elderly care, housework and emotional support, all really important for sustaining and nurturing life. Along the same lines, Graeber observes:

The value of labor is seen as producing things. […] But when you stop to think about it, most labor is not about producing something. It’s about maintaining something to keep it the same — as in washing a cup. Or labor is about nurturing something or creating an environment in which something can grow, as in agriculture, rather than constructing something inside a factory.

(Bollier et al., 2016, p. 8)

And indeed, this kind of work tends to be penalized by the market system, even devalued and exploited resulting in lowering the costs of reproduction of the workforce and therefore of producing commodities (Federici, 2018, pp. 156—157). Taking childcare as an example, the most the capitalist system can do is to monetarily compensate parents (under social welfare programs established through struggles, of course). But we must start asking the question: Is this enough? Even taking professional development in isolation, a parent (of course, most frequently and in the beginning necessarily, a mother) definitely misses on professional education, connections and experience that cannot simply be compensated with a monetary allowance. Not to mention the absurdity of the task itself — monetarily compensating for childcare — which becomes apparent as soon as one breaks out of naturalizing the commodification of everything and the economization of our life. This argument is not meant to reject or be against childcare allowances or movements like Wages for Housework (Jaffe, 2018). In a world where money is the primary medium of building and maintaining our livelihoods and when we need to work with what we have as we are building our alternatives, it is important to redistribute it in ways that are fairer and recognize the time people take in supporting each other (Troncoso et al., 2021, p. 74). It is rather meant to convey the problem with the underlying value system and its attempt to formalize (monetarily compensate for) actions that should be evaluated in a value-rational manner, in Weber’s terms (2013, pp. 85—86). And this is a situation that shows the consequences of therapeutocracy, a state of affairs where a “welfare” state attempting to pacify class conflict and offers a safety net to those that need it, ends up spreading the net of client relationships over private spheres of life and commodifies or bureaucratizes them (Habermas, 1989, pp. 363—364). And it is a great advantage of a communist theory of value that we wouldn’t have to think this way.

The above is in direct opposition to how stateless societies value care work and the process of human development and socialization, according to Graeber and Turner:

[…] the sort of activities we would define as economic, particularly subsistence activity, are by no means that on which they spend the greater part of their time, or “creative energies” however defined (Turner 1979c; 1984). Most dedicate far more to what, broadly speaking, could be called socialization, at least if one defines the latter to include not only primary child care but all those other actions that go into shaping human beings. This would make socialization a continual process that does not simply stop with adolescence, or whatever arbitrary cut off point most people implicitly impose: over the course of one’s life, people are almost always engaged in a constant process of changing their social position, roles and statuses, and doing so having to learn how to behave in them. Life is thus a constant educational process.

(Graeber, 2001, p. 68)

The communist theory of value positions care work into the very core and essence of human creative life and therefore provides an elegant solution for the value/values problem in anthropology, restoring the importance of activities that cannot or should not be converted into money and resist formalization (Graeber, 2013, pp. 23—24). Federici brilliantly connects the communist vision with the feminist movement in the following excerpt:

I argue that Marx’s vision of communism as a society beyond exchange value, private property, and money, based on associations of free producers, and governed by the principle “to each according to their needs from each according to their abilities” represents an ideal that no anticapitalist feminist can object to. Feminists can also embrace Marx’s inspiring image of a world beyond the social division of labor, although they may want to ensure that between hunting in the morning, fishing in the afternoon, and criticizing after dinner, there would remain some time for everyone to share cleaning and childcare.

(Federici, 2018, pp. 153—154)

Care Work’s Resistance to Automation

Another key observation made by feminist theorists is that care work belongs to a domain of our activity that, while really demanding in nature, cannot (or at least should not) be automated or mechanized. Yes, we can automate various household chores and also leverage technology to assist learning and development, but what about intimate care services like cuddling, consoling, feeding or washing? What about child socialization, which is slowly built by communicating with other people, playing, laughing or crying? What about providing assistance to the elderly or the ill? It is clearly absurd and undesirable to have machines handle these tasks that depend deeply on human-to-human communication and the emotions associated with it (though, admittedly, capitalism will never stop surprising us in this respect). As Federici argues, the only guarantee of proper care is shared responsibility and cooperative work which is not given at the cost of the health of the caregivers (2018, pp. 110—111, 162—163).

This observation though, as Federici and especially Mies have figured out, is a direct challenge to the distinction between the realm of necessity and the realm of freedom and it points to a new conceptualization of work itself. Because even in a post-scarcity society, as Marx and Bookchin have envisioned it, we will have this big domain of our activity that, on the one hand is demanding and impossible to get automated and on the other hand cannot be strictly considered to belong to the realm of necessity. The argument gets more clear if, as Mies suggests, our model is not an industrial worker but a mother:

[…] the development of a feminist concept of labour has to begin with a rejection of the distinction between socially necessary labour and leisure, and the Marxist view that self-realization, human happiness, freedom, autonomy - the realm of freedom - can be achieved only outside the sphere of necessity and of necessary labour, and by a reduction (or abolition) of the latter. If we take as our model of a worker not the white male industrial wage-worker (irrespective of whether he works under capitalist or socialist conditions), but a mother, we can immediately see that her work does not fit into the Marxian concept. For her, work is always both: a burden as well as a source of enjoyment, self-fulfillment, and happiness. Children may give her a lot of work and trouble, but this work is never totally alienated or dead.

(Mies, 1986, p. 216)

As discussed above, I don’t believe that the realm of necessity can be completely diminished. But the argument here is important: there are cases, with childcare being a primary example, where lines between necessity and enjoyment become blurred. As we will see in the next chapter, if done right, the autonomy people get over the nature and the purpose of work under communism can redefine the concept of work itself, incorporating more elements of play and exploration and thus approaching more Marx’s realm of freedom.

Work, Play and Exploration

The second key tension that is directly connected to the distinction between the realm of necessity and the realm of freedom is the one between work and play. In this section, we will explore the use of these terms in language and in the social imaginary and argue that a communist society must try to synthesize the two in the process of redefining work itself.

Work as Labor

We can think of work in this context as a goal-oriented activity, close to Marx’s concept of labor - a mode of acting where we consciously discipline our physical and mental powers and direct them toward achieving what we have in mind to produce (Marx, 1992, pp. 283—284). It is no accident that work today is used pretty much interchangeably with labor, as the emphasis is on the one hand on the goal orientation, on the other on the effort exerted to accomplish the given task. So the concept of labor also involves this instrumental character of our activity — any reflection on the goal itself is absent.

Frayssé found there are at least six types of metonymies while researching the words denoting work or labor in various languages. Some of them just denote activity, but more often they denote effort, difficulty, pain, subordination or even torture. Interestingly, in both French and American sign languages, the sign for work mimics the action of hammering and includes a connotation of pain and repetition (2014, pp. 474—483). And this makes sense given the nature of working conditions throughout history.

Another element of the signification of the terms is the maximization of productive effort, even appearing in the term used to denote physical exercise and which is the ideal shaped by the mandate of growth:

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

(Frayssé, 2014, p. 473)

The element of externally imposed rhythm, like marching songs or the drum dictating the rhythm to slaves rowing in a galley, is another characteristic of the heteronomous nature of work. Human beings then become mere instruments of the production process and the system of social activities instead of the primary subjects of it (Marx, 1992, pp. 425—426). Today, one must not merely look toward the factory and assembly line to find occurrences of this phenomenon. Everywhere work (and more and more, leisure time) is mediated by computing it feels like you are fighting against the technology trying to make you do things you don’t want to do, distract you, or do any kind of chores it needs you to do (clicks, updates, filling forms, etc.). At the end of the day, it’s the various business needs, primarily today via technology, setting the rhythm of our activity and making us serve them instead of the opposite (Wiggins et al., 2021, 25:26-26:54).

Frayssé’s great contributions on the matter don’t stop there. He argues that a factor that makes work an especially painful activity is its continuation over long periods of time. Another crucial factor is the element of repetition, which is dominant in the Fordist paradigm and which is really paralyzing for human creativity and energy.

The repetition of the same, even innocuous per se, becomes a torment, as in the “Chinese water torture” where the pain comes from a steady dripping of water droplets on the same part of the body. And the classical image of the Fordist worker, chained to the assembly line so that he/she must repeat the same motion relentlessly, resembles that of the galley slave who does nothing but work the oars. Relentless repetition of the same is what Thanatos (the death impulse identified by Freud) is about. Relentlessness and endlessness are the two things that make hell hellish.

(Frayssé, 2014, p. 480)

The alienated character of work, the endless rat race to reproduce our livelihoods, pitting them against each other via the mechanism of competition that pervades the social sphere (De Angelis, 2007, pp. 41, 180—181, 189—193) and the amount of effort dedicated to perpetuating existing hierarchies are taking their toll. The result is over half of the societal work being pointless or harmful — bullshit jobs, as Graeber describes them (2019). Having worked for most of my career as a software engineer, the meaninglessness of developing such complex artifacts only to gather personal data to better target people with ads or enclose knowledge that could benefit all of society behind paywalls is apparent. We could be working to solve disease, to create abundance, to explore new directions in scientific problems. Yet we must discipline ourselves, our creative energies, in making these meaningless products. But why should we remain sellers or advertisers when we can become explorers, scientists and artists? This is the limitation that the hegemony of instrumental reason and private interest impose as a social force: Our activity must be subordinated and alienated to generate profit. This is an essential point of Marx’s analysis. It doesn’t have to be like that. This is the promise of a post-capitalist society — the promise of communism.

Creativity, Exploration and Play

The emphasis on work as purposeful activity makes us forget some essential, maybe even the most defining characteristics of being human: creativity, exploration and an artistic mindset. One can feel these fundamental elements missing from work in hierarchical societies like capitalism, where work becomes repetitive and alienated, subordinated as it is to the generation of surplus for those in power. And a communist theory of value must revive them.

Graeber’s intuition is that any new theory of value must speak to our propensity for play. He claims the simple idea of animals playing just for the sake of it is kind of scandalous as we have confined ourselves to associating rationality with the means/end calculations of an economic transaction and the maximization of utility. And he plays with the idea that freedom, as a fundamental principle of the universe, is manifested in it, as Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and the movement of sub-atomic particles hint (Bollier et al., 2016, p. 8; Graeber, 2014). Much of the inspiration for this argument comes from Kropotkin’s work, who researched animal life in Northern Asia and claimed that much of the action, sociability and cooperation happening there has nothing to do with the functional connotations of survival and reproduction but mere pleasure and expression of an excess of forces (Kropotkin, 1989, pp. 54—55). Play is engaged in for the pleasure of the activity in itself and is not well-planned but capricious, spontaneous and does not follow rules in an explicit and uniform way. It involves lots of negotiations and improvisation and can even break rules; this is why it doesn’t fit the instrumentally rational activity (Lund, 2014, pp. 738—741). But it doesn’t mean that it cannot be productive in its own way, without falling into the category of work. So, if we think of play as an activity that is open-ended, one where you do not have a specific or at least clearly defined goal in mind, one where you allow yourself to carve the path and the goal of the activity itself as you exercise it (Wiggins, McGranaghan, & Andersson, 2021, 19:30-21:35), we get some fundamental aspects of having fun while at the same time being creative and expressive.

Clearly, it is not possible to transform all work activities into play — there will always be goal-oriented tasks, fitting to instrumental action and reasoning. These are usually purely technical tasks, ones that the end itself is accepted as beyond question but there is some doubt over the choice of the best means to satisfy it (Weber, 2013, pp. 65—66). But much more than disciplining our creative energies to achieve a goal, the essence of human work lies in reflecting on the actual goal. It also lies in reflecting on the actual method of doing work and then in communicating insights and improving it collectively. And, of course, it lies in deep understanding and inspiration, in conceiving new ideas to solve a problem after a combination of factors that need to be present for this to happen, including becoming an expert in a field, having multi-disciplinary background and skills and creating a suitable environment (Wiggins & McGranaghan, 2020). It lies in maintaining a critical mindset and a spirit of curiosity, questioning authority and existing methods, pioneering new solutions. As Miller argues, play involves a relative autonomy of means. Ends are not necessarily obliterated, but they don’t determine the means; the actor has autonomy in manipulating the processes at their disposal and the freedom to assume roles that are otherwise unreal. Also, they can voluntarily place obstacles and experiment with various paths to navigating a situation. Rules can be there but can also be flexibly adapted. Play is not means without the end; it is a crooked line to the end. (Miller, 1973, pp. 92—93)

Play can also be contrasted with the discipline goal-oriented work requires. Indeed, even in the absence of an actual master, the very nature of work includes some kind of subordination, in the form of internal discipline and drive to make things work or pursue an idea against the current (Frayssé, 2014, p. 480). But this kind of discipline is not bad in my opinion, I would argue it’s even necessary and in cases where it is not combined with repetition and alienation it can set our mental and physical powers in motion and can be very satisfying. And it is not common anymore since the prevailing culture is one of consuming easily digested material. We are losing the ability to read a text in detail, to express something in more than 140 characters, to construct a proper argument (Pazaitis & Zetland, 2023, 1:12:10). I believe we should distinguish this kind of discipline from the externally imposed one that is associated with hierarchical relations and alienation.

So how can a communist society balance work and play? How can its communicative rationality synthesize aspects of instrumental reasoning with those more related to affects and emotions? A key element here is the alteration and variety in our activity, which the human mind needs to stay energized (Frayssé, 2014, p. 480). Switching between modes that are more playful, exploratory and open-ended and those that are more focused and goal-oriented can eliminate monotony and make our activity more enjoyable, creative and fulfilling.

Reflecting on and changing the rhythm of our work activities is another aspect of resolving the tension. Frayssé argues that when people work autonomously, they do it in their individual bio-rhythms (2014, p. 480), in contrast to the regularity of working hours observed in heteronomous work. Bookchin, quoting Polland, makes a similar claim about work in the pre-industrial era and argues that the birth of the factory marks the rationalization and discipline of our working rhythms:

Sidney Pollard, quoting an observer of the prefactory era, notes that workers who were free to regulate their own time as domestic craftpersons rarely worked the modern eight-hour day and five-day week. “The weavers were used to ‘play frequently all day on Monday and the greater part of Tuesday, and work very late on Thursday night, and frequently all night on Friday’ ” to ready their cloth for the Saturday market day. This irregularity, or “naturalness,” in the rhythm and inten­sity of traditional systems of work contributed more toward the bour­geoisie’s craze for social control and its savagely antinaturalistic outlook than did the prices or earnings demanded by its employees.

(Bookchin, 1982, p. 311)

Following Lund (Lund, 2014, p. 747), I don’t believe we should treat work and play dualistically but dialectically, focusing both on similarities and differences in the interaction between them.

Value and the Commons: Prefiguring New Value Arrangements

In the previous chapters, I argued that the capitalist, economistic conception of value must be abolished in favor of a theory of value that is constituted upon the basis of communicative rationality, and to this end I explored some more concrete ethical and technical aspects of such a theory, namely the emphasis on a needs-based arrangement in our societal affairs and how it can be balanced with reciprocity expectations, the reposition of care work in the center of economic life and finally the redefinition of work itself in a post-scarcity society, incorporating more elements of play and exploration. At this point, the question arises: What is a suitable environment to experiment with these new value practices and refine them using our practical experience in the social terrain? In this chapter, I will build on the theory of the commons, as I see in them and their supporting movements modern, even germ, forms of communism and the social institutions where concrete resolution strategies to the aforementioned tensions can be explored.

The Commons: From Common-Pool Resources to Commoning

In order to better frame how communism, commons and the value practices mentioned in the previous chapter are related, I will briefly describe the various schools of thought around the commons and some important points of discussion around them, mostly informed by Kioupkiolis’ analysis on the subject (2020).

Common-Pool Resources

Interest and research around the Commons was greatly revived by the work of Elinor Ostrom (2015), who challenged predominant views on the subject, particularly the “Tragedy of the Commons” thesis developed by Garett Hardin (1968). There, Hardin used the metaphor of a group of herders sharing a common parcel of land for grazing their cattle and he assumed open access, therefore no restrictions on the number of cattle each herder can graze. The herders, acting rationally (in the instrumental sense), try to maximize their personal interest and add more and more cattle to the common pasture, ending up depleting it. In order to avoid this situation, the resource should either be regulated by a central authority like the state or privatized and thus be managed sustainably. Ostrom, in turn, offering many empirical examples, argued that communities can and do govern common pool resources using institutions that resemble neither the market nor the state. She also went further in listing some design principles that have emerged from the successful management of such resources by communities:

1. Clearly defined boundaries;
2. Congruence between rules regarding the appropriation or provision of resources and local conditions;
3. Collective-choice arrangements, so that those affected actively participate in setting the rules;
4. Effecting monitoring, carried out by monitors who are accountable to the appropriators;
5. Graduated sanctions applicable to those who violate the community rules;
6. Conflict resolution mechanisms, which are cheap and easy-to-use;
7. Recognition of rights to organize on behalf of external authorities;
8. Layered or nested structure for common pool resources that are parts of larger structures;

(Ostrom, 2015, p. 90)

Although many social theorists have pointed out important limitations in Ostrom’s analysis, mostly related to how structures and relations of power affect the Commons (Caffentzis, 2012; De Angelis, 2017, pp. 167—172; Kioupkiolis, 2020, pp. 47—48), her in-depth case studies then are significant empirical evidence that communities can self-organize and co-manage a common resource on the basis of relative equality, without needing mechanisms such as the market or the state (Kioupkiolis, 2020, p. 41). Her work therefore directly challenges hegemonic theses that deny the ability of collectives and communities to self-manage their affairs and the inevitability of prevailing structures and forms of organization. Ostrom’s design principles can also be a great starting point for thinking about how we can balance community needs with reciprocity. It indicates that we should always account for the local conditions and include in our decision-making a broader set of stakeholders to people and communities that are even indirectly affected by our initiatives.

Digital Commons

The coming of the new millennium signaled the emergence of a new type of commons, the digital commons, which extended the sphere of research and interest around the commons beyond the traditional ones centered around resources like forests, fisheries and open meadows. In these new commons, information and communication technology, especially the Internet, becomes the primary medium (Dafermos, 2020, p. 10). Paradigmatic cases are online encyclopedias like Wikipedia and FLOSS software like the Linux operating system. According to leading theorists of these types of commons, what sets them apart from the traditional commons is the emergence of a new mode of production, commons-based peer production, which has the potential to dominate the economy (Bauwens, 2005; Benkler, 2006). This mode of production relies on peer-to-peer mechanisms that change the way people organize and work together. In commons-based peer production, producers create value through open contributory systems, govern the resource and the cooperation workflow through participatory social practices and create outputs that are commonwealth and which can be used as inputs in the next iteration or other work processes (Bauwens et al., 2019, p. 6). The networked environment enables people to cooperate in ways that are radically decentralized or distributed. It also increases the scale of cooperation, which no longer depends on co-location, being supported by the Internet protocols and their applications like the Web, email, instant messaging and distributed version control systems. Crucially, like in traditional commons, people can and do cooperate without relying on market signals, managerial commands, or the centralized planning observed in state bureaucracies (Bauwens et al., 2019, p. 5; Benkler, 2006, p. 60; Bollier, 2009, pp. 1—20; Rigi, 2013).

There are serious limitations regarding the political orientation and articulation of digital commons initiatives (Kioupkiolis, 2020, pp. 58—66) and due to the fact that these initiatives operate within a capitalist environment and people must also support their livelihood, a common consequence is the burden of maintenance falling into a handful of people, the project maintainers or stewards (Eghbal, 2020, pp. 89—113). Furthermore, the loose affiliation of people building the digital commons does offer technical advantages, but on the other hand, it raises important questions about how much people care about each other and develop meaningful relationships through their activity. In recent years, researchers of the digital commons have been indeed shaping more radical approaches that incorporate the political element and aim at building a counter-power to capitalism, its value practices and structures, constructing a commons transition strategy (Bauwens et al., 2019, pp. 64—68).

Anti-Capitalist Commons

There is a third school of thought in commons research, heavily influenced by Marx’s theory and the autonomist Marxist discourse and placing struggles between the commons and capital at the center of their analysis (Kioupkiolis, 2020, pp. 66—70). Central in the autonomist Marxist approach is the position that workers, not historical necessity and its deterministic tendencies, are the primary agents of societal change, with the formation and development of Capital theorized as reactionary to workers’ struggles, according to which it adapts its strategies (De Angelis, 2007, p. 166). These theorists, rightly so in my opinion, see the commons in an endless conflict with capitalism since its origins (Linebaugh, 2009, 2014). The capitalist class continuously resorts to practices similar to those of the primitive, or originary, accumulation, in times of crisis, thus gaining the upper hand in the class struggle:

In the era of neoliberalism and globalization this strategy has been developed in the extreme and normalized, making primitive accumulation and the privatization of the ‘commonwealth’ a permanent process, now extending to every area and every aspect of our existence. Not only are lands, forests, and fisheries appropriated for commercial uses in what appears to be a new ‘land grab’ of unprecedented proportions, we now live in a world in which everything, from the water we drink to our body’s cells and genomes, has a price tag or is patented and no effort is spared to ensure that companies have the right to enclose all the remaining open space on earth and force us to pay to gain access to it. From New Delhi and New York to Lagos and Los Angeles, urban space is being privatized. Street vending or sitting on the sidewalks or stretching on a beach without paying are being forbidden. Rivers are damned, forests logged, waters and aquifers bottled away and put on the market, traditional knowledge systems are sacked through intellectual property regulations, and public schools are turned into for-profit enterprises.

(Federici, 2018, pp. 87—88)

This tradition puts the emphasis on the actual social relations formed through practices of sharing and provisioning in common, in contrast to the resource-based approach. Commons are indeed defined by the existence of shared property, material or immaterial, over which a community claims ownership and which it collectively (re)produces. But central is the practice of commoning, a term that underscores the activity of provisioning for the needs, desires and aspirations of the community, which constitutes cohesive social relations and solidarity bonds and also maintains the commonwealth (De Angelis, 2017, pp. 90, 98; Federici, 2018, p. 94; Linebaugh, 2009, pp. 278—279). Along with maintaining the common resource, the community itself and its institutions are (re)produced. Let’s reflect at this point on how much this conception is connected to the primacy of care work, as developed by feminist theorists and analyzed in the previous chapter.

Commons and Prefiguration

So how are the above theories of the commons related to a communist theory of value? The commons, as described above, operate today within an environment where capitalism and its hierarchic structures are hegemonic. But to the extent they embody the communist value practices analyzed in the previous chapter here and now, they prefigure a communist society, even only as a germ form. And this is an important element of a revolutionary tradition that opposes vanguardism (Boggs, 1977; Holloway, 2010a, pp. 153—154). As Richard Day puts it:

Avoiding the quest for masters requires some experience in alternatives to slavery; it requires prefiguration of other ways of being within and alongside existing practices.

(Day, 2005, p. 34)

The classification of the schools of thought mentioned above is not strict; the lines are often blurred between the paradigmatic forms of theoretical models and it is not always easy to say that a commons initiative clearly belongs to one category or the other. I feel close to the school of anti-capitalist commons as they consciously try to build an alternative that can support livelihoods outside the circuits of capital, therefore setting the socio-economic conditions upon which different value practices can blossom. Any emancipatory transformation of society cannot but be anti-capitalist; otherwise, the economization and commodification of our lives will continue, and we will continue working on bullshit jobs and pitting our livelihoods against each other in this endless rat race. To the extent that the digital commons also have this orientation, I believe that they truly have unique and emancipatory characteristics. As we will see in the following chapter for DisCOs, these types of commons statutorily declare their purposes and values and, therefore, get political by consciously attempting to affect the social sphere. In the following sections, we will dive deeper into how initiatives around commons engage with new value arrangements in their theory and practice.

Commoning and Participatory Culture

Commoning - doing in common - is characterized by modes of producing, distributing and governing resources in participatory and not hierarchical ways, guided by the needs and values of community members (De Angelis, 2017, p. 121). As described in Ostrom’s work, it includes reflecting on and setting rules, democratic processes for managing resources, pooling capacities, developing conflict resolution procedures and applying sanctions. The decision-making processes and the collective governance of the affairs related to a common resource therefore constitute an important moment of contributing to a commons (De Angelis, 2017, pp. 122—123). As discussed in a previous chapter, an authentic democracy based on citizen assemblies that decide on the important matters at hand is at the core of the communist project. The commons are social institutions where people learn to self-govern themselves and become autonomous. Especially in the anti-capitalist commons, there is a clear and deliberate orientation toward direct democracy and practices like the rotation of leadership and the goal of achieving consensus within the community that can support it. These types of commons are opposed to the hierarchical structures of political parties when thinking about the transformation of society. These characteristics, according to Federici, differentiate the common from the public, which she conceives as owned, managed and regulated by and for the state (2018, pp. 95—96).

Gentle Reciprocity and Needs-Based Design

The commons operate under a logic of social provisioning for the necessary systems of subsistence such as food and shelter, health, education and culture (Pazaitis, 2021, p. 25), therefore increasing resilience and opening the way for a needs-based design if not directly supporting it. Importantly, as discussed in the previous chapter, gentle reciprocity, which can resolve the tension between a needs-based arrangement and the reciprocal expectations among equals, is already being explored and applied in the commons. When people practice gentle reciprocity, they do expect their contributions to be roughly balanced but without trying to calculate in precise terms their equality or coercing contributions. What is important is that there is no free-riding and that everyone helps in the common resources being reproduced and does not deplete the commonwealth (Bollier & Helfrich, 2019, pp. 108—109). On a similar note, Pazaitis observes:

Contribution may also be measured and quantified, but first and foremost comprises qualitative elements based on the sharing of resources, skills and capacities, time or knowledge, as well as norms and protocols of interaction. Being a contributor in a CBPP community marks a form of participation and belonging based on reciprocity towards the commons. Contributions enable and support the value of commoning in the same way that labour generates value in commodity exchange. It is a measure for meaningful social participation that encapsulates all the invisible aspects of economic and social life that are often left unaccounted for, including care work, cultural activity and social development.

(Pazaitis, 2021, pp. 24—25)

An important angle of shifting towards a needs-based design is the de-commodification of social life and, unsurprisingly, this is a big theme in the anti-capitalist commons theory and practice. De Angelis speaks about commonalization — shifting public or private organizations into commons — with the objective being to make more and more spheres of society resilient and sustainable. It is no accident, then, that he considers commons that are concerned with social reproduction of major strategic importance (De Angelis, 2017, pp. 340—341). In the above direction, Bollier and Helfrich (2019, pp. 238—241) describe the function of a coop in Brooklyn, NY (Park Slope Food Coop) as an example of de-commodification. Members of this coop enjoy the benefits — high-quality inexpensive local food, free childcare when doing their daily shopping or work in the coop, along with the privilege to decide on the present and future of the coop — by contributing exactly two hours and forty-five minutes of unpaid work every four weeks. Despite there being no direct monetary compensation, their work translates into savings of twenty to forty percent off the retail price of groceries and for products of high-quality standards, thus assisting in their livelihoods while also cultivating a spirit of community and autonomy.

Communities are gradually building and maintaining more and more initiatives of the commons which help them address their needs cooperatively and using local resources. Energy communities like CommonEn (Κοινέργεια) in Ioannina, Greece, produce clean and affordable energy, providing benefits to local households while managing local energy resources in a democratic and participatory manner (CommonEn — Limited Liability Cooperative, n.d.). Open labs and makerspaces like Tzoumakers in the nearby Kalentzi help and train people cooperatively design and manufacture tools for small-scale agricultural production, tailored to local needs (P2P Lab, n.d.-b). Also, collectives in the ecosystem of the commons, like P2P Lab (P2P Lab, n.d.-a) and Guerilla Media Collective (Guerilla Media Collective, n.d.) combine their livelihood work with social research and actively build and maintain common resources, usually in the knowledge work domain. As Rigi argues (2014, pp. 401—402), it would be very interesting to see these types of initiatives relate closer to the commons of land and form federation structures.

Care and Provisioning Culture

The commons have been connected with activities related to care and the reproduction and cultivation of life for centuries. Also, as evidenced by recent experience, in times of austerity or crisis, the commons have always been the supporting institutions of people in need. Silvia Federici, also drawing from the work of Raul Zibechi, describes many such cases in Latin America, where women pooled their resources to support their families and the rest of the community: Cooking and urban garden committees in Peru, popular kitchens in Chile, collectivization of reproductive work supported by women during the crisis of 2002 in Argentina, child support networks in Colombia during the 90s. Also, the formation of credit associations that function as money commons and provide cash to community members who have no access to banks, working purely on the basis of trust, has become a common practice across the Third World (e.g., the tontines in parts of Africa). Although the collectivization of reproductive work has not seen this expansion in the US and Europe, projects like urban gardens and community-supported agriculture have started to become established practices in many towns (Federici, 2018, pp. 107—108, 183—184).

Federici, rightly so in my opinion, argues that the collectivization of the material means of reproduction is the primary mechanism by which mutual bonds are created, solidarity relations are constructed and collective interest is cultivated. An important part of it is the communalization of housework, of our everyday reproductive work, which is irreducible to mechanization (Federici, 2018, pp. 108—110). The commons of reproduction, those that have to do with the provision of food, housing, social care and education, are crucial strategically since they can increase the resilience of commoners and, by creating autonomous spaces, protect them from the precarity and insecurity imposed by capitalist markets (De Angelis, 2017, pp. 13—14).

Within the commons, one can also see active experimentation on how we can better capture the significance of care work when it plays a supporting or indirect role in the purpose of an initiative (as contrasted to cases where it’s the primary purpose or focus). As we will see in an upcoming chapter for DisCOs, there is within certain cooperatives a conscious effort to dedicate time and effort to improve coworkers’ well-being and support them emotionally, besides actively working towards the cooperative’s statutory purpose. This cultivates a culture of care and the development of meaningful relationships among people who spend much time working together, which is something that we deeply need if we reflect on how individualized and impersonal our relationships often become in contemporary societies.

Laying the Material Foundations of a Post-Scarcity Society

The commons, especially the digital ones, convey characteristics that Marx and Bookchin envisioned in their projected society of the future, where people cooperate freely within an environment of material abundance. Marx celebrates the revolutionary effects cooperation brings to the production process in the first volume of Capital (1992, pp. 439—454). Even without altering the system of production, the simultaneous employment of a large number of laborers dramatically changes the material conditions of the labor process and a productive power with qualitative difference appears when many people cooperate in a coordinated manner. This way, big chunks of work can be performed within critical time periods and work can be split into phases and executed in parallel. Historically, much of this cooperation was materially dependent on co-location, which Marx pointed out as the necessary condition for cooperation. Modern means of communication extend the sphere and benefits of cooperation beyond the limits of the industrial field or the office space and this is manifested best in the digital commons. Importantly, in Marx’s time technological innovations in the means of communication and transport followed and were made necessary by advancements in other sectors (Marx, 1992, pp. 505—507). Today, we largely see the opposite happening with regard to communication. Innovations in information and communication technology define instead of following the material conditions of production. In recent years, we have been experiencing a phenomenon similar to the one Marx describes in the transition from manufacture to industry, where radical changes in one sphere of the industry quickly propagated in connected ones until the material fabric of society became industrial. Today, one sphere of production after another is radically transformed by the application of software and algorithms.

Digital commons have been leading and defining the technical revolution described above. It is not in the scope of this thesis to enumerate the innovations and describe the exact mechanisms around this process, but it suffices to say here that reflecting on and analyzing how modern software is produced can reveal some important advancements. Modern version control systems like Git, developed and maintained as digital commons themselves, are the technical foundation for social cooperation at scale since they are able to support thousands of parallel branches of development and adhere to a fully distributed architecture. Furthermore, modern FLOSS projects are almost always built according to the principles of modularity and reuse, which allows the development of tools like package managers (e.g. npm or pip) that make reusing other people’s work easy. This, in itself, is a qualitative leap in the collectivization of work and one of the primary reasons that software is continuously evolving and transforming every aspect of our everyday lives. One cannot ignore services like GitHub, which enable reporting issues in a crowdsourced manner and offer a place to discuss potential solutions and a mechanism to review suggestions for code changes and make contextual discussions. The reality of these hosting services being capitalist enterprises brings its own dynamics and the ever-present danger of enclosures and co-optation.

Due to their prominent role in the ongoing technical revolution briefly described above, the digital commons are one of the most important foundations toward a society of material wealth, therefore developing the conditions for expanding the realm of freedom. The scale of cooperation they enable already makes possible the collectivization of work on an unprecedented scale and lowers the cost of self-organization (Bauwens et al., 2019, p. 34), and we are only in their initial stages of development. Let’s think about the impact of Wikipedia on knowledge-sharing and the implications of having repositories like PubMed Central for biomedical scholarship. And these can be only the beginning. Let’s reflect for a minute on what percentage of knowledge created is practically available as a commons today via the Internet; it’s definitely a very small subset, with the exception being revolutionary projects started and maintained by activists, like Sci-Hub (Wikipedia (Sci-Hub), n.d.-b). What if we could get to a point where the whole body of human literature and knowledge is digitally available, indexed and searchable in real time? Of course, today there are paywalls and copyrights, but this is exactly the kind of artificial scarcity that a communist society would eradicate. This is the promise of the open-access movement, already a theme in the digital commons literature (Hess & Ostrom, 2006).

The Redefinition of Work within the Digital Commons

As Bawuens, Kostakis and Pazaitis argue, although the motivations for contributing to digital commons can vary, the most important one is the desire to create something mutually useful; people contribute because they find it meaningful and not to produce exchange value. Value, in the realm of peer production, is related to contributions of a shared effort among peers and is reflected in the shared significance of those contributions as recognized by peers (Bauwens et al., 2019, pp. 11—12, 15). Furthermore, the conception of work itself is often transformed within the digital commons, incorporating elements of play, more natural rhythms and autonomy. Meretz uses the German term Selbstentfaltung to describe it in the culture of FLOSS software: an activity that starts from doing what you really want while also having a lot of fun and one that integrates the work of fellow developers to strive for the best solution possible (Meretz, n.d.). The literal translation of the word is “unfolding oneself” and denotes the ability to develop oneself in any way one desires. It is often related to voluntarily taking up a complex and self-imposed task and cooperating with peers to accomplish it (Meretz, 2012). And you can see this very often in the development of software these days: people start open-source projects just for fun, to play with a new piece of technology like the next interesting development framework, or to collaborate on an idea with friends. Working on these projects, they rarely start by disciplining themselves to rigid working hours, while an alteration between exploration and goal-oriented tasks is also present. It is no accident that this culture is part of the big appeal of the digital commons, as best manifested in the commons-based peer production pioneered in free and open-source software.

Reimagining Value in DisCOs

From the above discussion on the commons, it is evident that to construct our alternatives to neoliberalism, we must find new ways to work together, which are building and maintaining commons and which are closer to the principles of communism. And a really well-thought-out framework and set of tools to accomplish just that has been built by the team around DisCO (DisCO.Coop, n.d.; Troncoso et al., 2021; Troncoso & Utratel, 2019), standing for Distributed Cooperative Organization. The DisCO cultural and structural framework combines elements and principles from the tradition of cooperatives with the commons and is influenced by feminist economics. Its story goes back to Guerilla Media Collective and the work of activists combining voluntary translation services for activist causes (e.g. social justice, the environment, etc.) with paid translation services. At some point, the collective decided to reflect on its goals and values and make its governance model more explicit, which informed the theory behind the DisCO framework and Guerilla Media Collective becoming the first DisCO lab (Troncoso & Utratel, 2019, pp. 38—45).

We can think about DisCOs as distributed cooperatives, influenced by the original cooperative principles (International Cooperative Alliance, 1995), but augmenting them with some new guidelines and principles, also influenced by the movements of Platform and Open Cooperativism. DisCOs are:

1. Geared toward positive outcomes in key areas: production is guided not by profit but by social and environmental priorities.
2. Multi-constituent, as they extend decision-making to all workers and contributors in the DisCO but potentially also including neighboring communities, suppliers, clients, reproductive and affective labor, financial backers, etc.
3. Active creators of commons, digital or physical.
4. Transnational, following a “Design-Global, Manufacture Local” principle (Kostakis et al., 2023; Troncoso & Utratel, 2018) and oriented toward creating a political and cultural counterpower to the prevailing capitalist ecomony.
5. Centered on care work, both in the sense of caring for the collective itself and in the sense of supporting and maintaining relations of mutual trust with other members of the DisCO, so that everyone’s health and well-being is ensured.
6. Reimagining the origin and flows of value. The framework distinguishes between three types of value: productive/market value, pro-bono/commons-generating value, and care-work value. Those are all tracked in respective metrics and influence decision making, payments and priorities.
7. Primed for federation: Conceived as distributed and differentiated structures, they replicate themselves through a standard federation protocol. They focus on scaling in a way that allows each node to be based on small-group trust and mutual support while still achieving a larger impact through a federation that maintains shared commitments.

(Troncoso et al., 2021, pp. 34—47; Troncoso & Utratel, 2019, pp. 33—34)

In DisCOs we find the much-needed link between cooperatives and the Commons. Cooperatives operating within the capitalist marketplace often adopt competitive mentality and practices or only serve their members, without meaningful impact on the rest of society and its relations. To challenge this, we need new cooperatives that challenge prevailing property relations, actively create commons and aim at creating a counter-hegemonic movement to capitalism (Pazaitis et al., 2017). Crucially, we find in DisCOs the focus on the statutory needs-based direction of production and of the cooperative’s activity:

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

(Troncoso et al., 2021, p. 35)

Furthermore, as can be seen from the fifth principle, care work is put at the very core of the activity in a DisCO. Care is the fundamental concept in feminist economics, which factors in activities currently falling out of the mainstream economic sphere, but without which the economy simply would not be able to run. Challenging notions of work and production based on manufacturing and the paradigm of the factory, feminist economics puts activities like unpaid domestic work and providing for dependents like children, the elderly, or the sick at the center of economic life (Women’s Budget Group, 2018). The DisCO framework distinguishes between two types of care work: The first has to do with caring for fellow members of the collective; being mindful of their circumstances and emotions and practicing peer mentoring and mutual support, which of course helps with the members forming real and holding relationships. The second has to do with work towards maintaining the cooperative itself; administrative, maintenance and sustainability activities and tasks that would otherwise remain unacknowledged and invisible (Troncoso et al., 2021, pp. 69—83).

One area where I believe criticism of DisCOs is fair is the belief of the team in the distributed ledger, especially blockchain technology. The whole project was kicked off in a period where there was great hype around cryptocurrency projects and their related organizations — Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) (Wikipedia (DAO wiki), n.d.-a), which cover a wide spectrum of organizations but more often than not aim at substituting social relations and processes with algorithms, code transactions and “smart contracts”. And rightly so, it was critical of that culture (Troncoso et al., 2021, pp. 19—22) and offered an alternative to people who want to work for the commons. Still, though, the DisCO team acknowledges that technology is never neutral. And, as discussed in a previous chapter, artificial scarcity and instrumental rationality are at the core of the techno-social artifact called blockchain, and it is no accident that the majority of use cases, including DAOs, involve commodification and the formalization of reason in organizing social life. Therefore, I am personally not optimistic about the potential emancipatory use of the aforementioned technology and would look toward other directions.

Finally, I should also mention the playful, fun and humorous character of DisCOs and apparently the people who developed the framework. The aesthetics of the published material and the website are very pleasing and fresh, which helps with the message but is also something that appears in the values endorsed by the team (Troncoso et al., 2021, p. 48). Overall, I believe that the DisCO framework is really close to the principles I have in mind for a communist theory of value and a great source of inspiration and influence.

The Commons and the Political

Initiatives oriented toward the Commons can indeed become the social fabric with which communism is weaved and the vehicles to reduce the (re)productive dependency on systems controlled by the capital and the state. When successfully implemented, they can support people’s livelihoods while at the same time projecting and implementing alternative, radical value practices. But, as already hinted, a major challenge they face is that they operate within a capitalist system that tries to co-opt them and enforce its competitive value practices. Also, especially regarding initiatives around the digital commons, it is not uncommon to leave unanswered (even unchallenged) questions about their material foundations and the underlying social relations for their production, often based on the exploitation and appropriation of people living in poor countries.

To overcome these limitations, we need a proper articulation between the social aspects of material reproduction and the political aspects of organization and struggle. Although it is fair to reject a Leninist, top-down logic in creating emancipatory conditions, the project of organization and a broad social alliance of emancipatory agents must be renewed, something that can happen by coordinating and politically organizing initiatives around the commons in a counter-hegemonic bloc against neoliberalism and its hierarchic practices (Kioupkiolis, 2020, p. 75), by connecting with social movements and their struggles (De Angelis, 2017, pp. 357—387). We need initiatives and projects whose thought is on the one hand utopian and prefigurative, able to project and implement communist practices here and now, and on the other hand strategic, trained to read and understand the conditions it operates in and willing to organize, struggle, educate and lead when needed (also see (Rigi, 2014)). Especially regarding initiatives around the digital commons, the key seems to be in switching their mindset from one that maintains a public good for a number of reasons (which often include personal branding and profit motivations) to one that is more oriented towards care and cooperation with co-workers building a Commons with statutory political character. It would also probably mean organizing around smaller units that are federated to maintain larger projects, instead of having big corporations steer digital commons like big open-source projects. It is equally important for initiatives around the commons to participate in revolutionary struggles that (among other characteristics):

1. Subvert class hierarchies — between worker class and capitalist class; between women and men; between immigrants and citizens; between diverse cultures.
2. Increase unity, going beyond single issues and connecting them, expanding the boundaries of revolutionary social alliances (here, the Midnight Notes collective, from whom I borrow these characteristics, refers to the working class, while I have in mind the hegemonic blocs that Laclau and Mouffe described (Kioupkiolis, 2020; Laclau & Mouffe, 2013), which go beyond the working class as the revolutionary subject).
3. Build dignified inclusion in the community, based on the commonness with the Other and the empathy of their cause, including immigrants, the LGBTQ+ community and oppressed races and peoples.
4. Expand de-commodified relationships and spaces while engaging in bottom-up organization and participatory control.
5. Enhance local and participatory control, meaning that decisions are taken as close to those involved as possible.
6. Lead toward more time outside capitalist control (e.g. a shorter work week, the recognition of care work as productive) while maintaining an egalitarian mindset.
7. Protect and restore ecological health, adopting a more holistic and ecologic approach toward the planet.

(Midnight Notes and Friends, 2010)

Conclusion

Value is an essentially contested concept, one that is an important point of struggle in the political, sociological and economic discourse. As such, this thesis does not claim any universal truth in defining the concept but rather accepts the normative character of the task itself and the certainty that it will be contested by opposing political programs. This also means that it is my absolute intention to open up the discussion on the important subjects discussed in defining value among theorists with political programs connected to the communist one I have in mind when writing these lines.

In contemporary societies where neoliberalism is hegemonic, value is theorized as politically neutral, and at the same time, the “catallaxy” we get from the operation of markets and individuals chasing their private interests is promoted as the best possible outcome for social coordination (Hayek, 1945). The instrumental aspect of rationality dominates the domain of practical rationality and this is manifested in the economization of social life, the expansion of money in regulating more and more aspects of our activity. Drawing from Marx’s critique of capitalism, I argued that the logic of quantified equivalence of contribution according to social standards for labor, as reflected in his concept of value, is the main principle upon which commodification rests. Combined with the regime of private property, its dynamics include the creation and expansion of capital and the development of economic and power relations that make exploitation the dominant social relation of production and result in an immense accumulation of resources and power in the hands of the few. Following Graeber (2001), Pazaitis (2021) and other theorists of the Commons (Bollier et al., 2016), I argued that the project of redefining value can help reverse this trend, de-commodify social life and be creatively used to construct emancipatory alternatives.

Communist value is a communicative-rationally constituted qualitative assessment of social action according to what the community needs. It consists of principles and norms around social action that are developed through the community’s continuous political and philosophic activity, therefore it is constantly open and resistant to becoming a dogma. It promotes social action that makes citizens autonomous and educates them on self-governing themselves through participating on an equal basis in the common affairs (Castoriadis, 1995, pp. 219—220). In terms of the orientation of social action, it aims to synthesize ethical aspects with instrumentally rational and aesthetic ones, asserting the primacy of the former in generalizing the capacity for sharing and participation in our common doing (Pazaitis, 2021, p. 22). “From each according to his abilities to each according to his needs” is a core guiding principle and it aims at compensating for the inequality of physical and mental skills within the community, establishing a culture of solidarity. This is why a communist theory of value is intimately connected with a renewed and continuous reflection on the community’s needs, establishing among its citizens a post-scarcity mindset that emphasizes ecological sensitivity, selectivity of needs and self-limitation within an environment of material abundance supported by science and advanced technology that can take over the mundane and brutalizing tasks of production. This needs-based arrangement must be properly balanced with an expected degree of reciprocity that is developed among equals, and this must happen without resorting to quantified equivalence, the strict and formal type of reciprocity we observe in capitalist societies. Gentle reciprocity, which is based on the estimation of contribution and rough equivalence, can resolve the tension in domains of life where reciprocity is expected. A communist theory of value must also recognize that a major domain of human activity is not about producing things but rather about nurturing and developing life, the domain of care work. This really demanding in-nature work cannot (or at least should not) be automated or mechanized, while often blurring the lines between necessity and leisure (with a primary example being childcare). Following this recognition, activities related to care work are highly valued and placed at the center of social and economic life, where they belong. Finally, an important factor in guiding social action should be the balance between work as a goal-oriented activity and play as an activity for the sake of fun and exploration. A new synthesis can then be established between modes of activity related to instrumental reasoning and technics and those related to affects and aesthetics. This will lead to a re-imagination of the concept of work itself as an activity that includes alteration and variety while training people to be able both to concentrate and undertake mentally and physically difficult tasks but also to create, feel, imagine, care and have fun.

Having developed these thoughts about how value could be theorized in a communist society, I then argued that the Commons and the initiatives and movements around them are promising fields of experimentation with these new value practices and exploration of new ones. As evidenced by the various schools of thought and the relevant literature (Bauwens et al., 2019; De Angelis, 2017; Federici, 2018; Kioupkiolis, 2020; Ostrom, 2015), a diverse set of initiatives and social institutions are studied under the concept of the commons, so it is important to reflect on which parts of them are the most promising and prefigure a communist society. Commons are defined by the existence of shared property, material or immaterial, over which a community claims ownership and which it collectively (re)produces. In them, we often see collective decision-making processes and power from the ground up and especially in the anti-capitalist school we see a deliberate orientation toward direct democracy. These are very important characteristics as they train participants to self-govern themselves and develop communicative rationality as theorized by Habermas. As Bollier and Helfrich (2019, p. 81) and Pazaitis (2021, pp. 24—25) have argued, gentle reciprocity is already a principle applied in the commons, while these initiatives often operate according to a logic of social provisioning for the needs of local communities (Troncoso et al., 2021, p. 35). There is admittedly a long way to cover in this direction and one of the main open questions and challenges this thesis aims to leave is how to create these structures and foundational initiatives that can put this needs-based aspect at their core and operate according to the principle, while still in a capitalist environment. Along the same lines, creating spheres of decommodification, where people relate differently is one of the main promises of the commons but also one of the main open questions regarding systematic application, especially since power relations and social division of labor impose their dependency on capital and the state. Crucially, many initiatives of the Commons recognize the importance of care work and adopt feminist economics concepts, challenging the hegemony of cost-benefit analyses and neoclassical economics in their value practices. Furthermore, especially manifested in commons-based peer production and the development of FLOSS software, we encounter seeds of the transformation of work into an activity that includes mixing goal-oriented tasks with playfulness and building just for fun and experimentation, while frequently cooperating with peers and creating meaningful social relations in the process. Finally, we shouldn’t forget that, to overcome the limitations Commons initiatives often meet and end up getting co-opted, a proper political organization and struggle with the aim of building a counter-hegemonic power to capital is an important strategic initiative, while of course not losing the grassroots organizing and communist principles along the way. Participating in revolutionary struggles and seeking alliances with emancipatory forces like radical social movements is one key aspect of this. However, a richer and expanded strategy toward this end remains another key question for future studies.

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