T1 — It is time to take back value. For many, value has long been dismissed as a concept so thoroughly compromised, so soaked in normative strictures and stained by complicity with capitalist power, as to be unredeemable.This has only abandoned value to purveyors of normativity and apologists of economic oppression.Value is too valuable to be left in those hands.
(…)
T5 — The first task of the revaluation of value is to uncouple value from quantification. Value must be recognized for what it is: irreducibly qualitative.
T6 — The revaluation of value as irreducibly qualitative must be insistently this-worldly. Appealing to transcendent values, styled as moral qualities, only raises the strictures of normativity to the absolute.
T7 — The revaluation of value is ethical by definition. That is why it cannot be moral.
T8 — To uncouple value from quantification means engaging head-on with the economic logic of the market. Value is too valuable to be left to capital.
(…)
T14 — Excess is written into the very definition of capital, in its difference from money as unit of measure, medium of exchange, and store of value, and related to its role as investment money.
Scholium.
Capital is defined as the potential to derive from a present quantity of money a greater quantity of money in the future. Capital is not profit. Profit is the greater quantity of money derived. Capital is the potential to derive that quantity. That potential is the effective engine of the economic system. It emergently stirs in the system’s immanent processual outside.
T15 — The capitalist economy is more fundamentally concerned with potential than it is with actual quantities.
Scholium.
Potential is a qualitative concept, in that it connotes transformation. Capital, as movement of potential, is the quality of money as transformational force, or the force driving the system’s becoming. The transformation counts economically only as registered in the statistics. The numbers are quantitative signs of qualitative changes (changes in productivity, the changes in labor and management practices associated with increasing productivity, the life changes associated with the changes in labor and management practices, the increasing accumulation of wealth but also growing social inequality, the disruptions and opportunities of innovation, the accompanying cultural transformations, the appearance of new desires accompanying those transformations, new dispositions gelling those desires, the contingent of idiosyncrasies, sometimes going viral…). What the economic indexes index are life changes. They are disguised vital signs. Marx speaks of capital in terms of “social metabolism” and “metamorphosis.” The changes that the vital signs index overspill the properly economic sphere. The potential of the economy is ultimately life potential. The question of value is a vital question. Capital has its invisible hand on the pulse of life.
T16 — The issue of excess returns, in relation to the definition of capital and its connection to potential, in the question of surplus-value.
Scholium.
Surplus-value is another name for capital as quality of money. “Surplus”-value names capital as the ongoing potential for deriving in the future an excess-over a present quantity.This – and not equal exchange or fair value for money – is the engine of the economy.
T17 — Surplus-value is primary in relation to value, as understood in terms of the market definition of money and as involving measurable quantities.
Scholium a.
Surplus-value is a form of turnover. It is the left-over of potential that drives the economic process forward. Profit is a punctual numerical harvest deducted from the process of surplus-value driving the economy continuously forward, across points of profit-taking. When profit is taken and used for investment, it is plowed back into the economy’s driving by surplus-value. Surplus-value and profit turn over on each other, always leaving a left-over: an excess of unabsorbed surplus-value for the future generation of still greater profit. Surplus-value is the ever-more-than-and-again of profit.
Lemma a.
Surplus-value is immeasurable.
Scholium b.
In and of itself, surplus-value cannot be measured. 1This is because, being always by nature in excess over any sum of profit, it is supernumerary (not in the sense in the sense of extra in number, but in the sense of being beyond number).
Scholium c.
The capitalist system is characterized by its relentless drive for growth. Growth is capitalism’s processual desire: its constitutive tendency (what Nietzsche would call its will to power). The surplus-value drive to excess-over gives the capitalist economy its dynamic quality of ever-moreness, for once and for all-over-again, in perpetual turn-over.The engine of surplus-value lies at the beating heart of the capitalist system and dilates its veins. It is the expansive diastole for profit’s systolic contraction. More than the quality of money – that is it how appears when considered from inside the system – surplus-value is the processual quality of the capitalist system. It is what gives its quantifications their dynamic quality. It is the processual subjectivity of the capitalist system, self-absorbed in the generation of the numerical objectifications that feed its formal operations. It is how capitalism dips into the expanded field of its immanent outside (diastole), no sooner to contract the movements of potential found there into its profit-making system flow (systole).
Lemma b.
More properly speaking, capitalism’s driving force is the differential between surplus-value and profit: their systemic/ processual, systolic/ diastolic asymmetry.
T18 —The future-looking definition of capital (the potential to generate a greater quantity of money in the future) means that capitalism is fundamentally speculative.
T19 — The manner in which capital is speculative makes it a power formation in its own right.
Scholium.
Capital is a time-function. The time element is fundamentally non-chronological, revolving around potential, which is nothing other than futurity in the present. It only secondarily concerns the measure of time. Primarily, it concerns time as the qualitative interval priming the actualization of potential. Speculation is not a perversion of the capitalist economy. It is of its essence. It is its power function. Capital is the economic lever of the time of potential. As such, it captures the future of vitality: life’s qualitatively-in-the-making. It captures potential. In this capacity, capital operates directly as a mechanism of power. Its economic functioning cannot be separated from its power function. To say that capitalism is a power over life is an understatement. It is a capture of life’s in-the-making, its very becoming (it is an “ontopower”). Capitalism economizes life, and it is this economization that directly constitutes a formation of power.
Lemma.
Power formations are apparatuses of capture.
T20 — The fact that the engine of capitalism is excess belies the commonplace notion that price reflects scarcity.
Scholium.
The financial markets are where money functions most intensely as capital in the surplus-value sense. It is self-evident that in the financial markets excess is operative in a way that presupposes not scarcity but processual abundance: the ability to endlessly proliferate and multiply (most particularly, through abstract financial instruments such as derivatives). The operative idea is not “how to do with less” but how to make “always more” from less. The surplus-value drive is most directly expressed in the speculative machinations of the financial markets, where the continued surfing of the flow of surplus-value is valued more (excessively so) than any particular landfall in profit. Profits are swept in the tide of perpetual speculative motion: data points on the cyclic beach of wealth, no sooner deposited than swept away to rejoin the flow.
T21 — The financial markets offer a better point of departure for postcapitalist alter-economic thinking than money in its traditional market role as currency.
Scholium.
As already pointed out, the functioning of the capitalist economy cannot be explained solely with reference to the classical market functioning of money defined in terms of equal exchange. It is in the speculative sphere of the financial markets that the processual engine of the capitalist economy shows its true processual quality (its ultimately unsustainable running after surplus-value fuelling endless growth). Aspirationally postcapitalist alternatives must transcend the standard definition of money and the market-exchange concepts it underpins, or risk being outfoxed by capital from the get-go. They must generate notions more akin to surplus-value than to money in its three-fold definition. In a sense, they have to be more faithful to how the capitalist process actually runs than market ideology is – the better to turn its dynamic (in the way it is said in zombie movies that dead bodies “turn,” except in this case it is the inverse – a revivification). The turning of the turnover of capitalist surplus-value requires the alter-valuing of self-driving process. It requires the affirmation of an analogous dynamic quality of process, but one that does not lend itself to the quantification of the irreducibly qualitative that operates the economization of life.
Lemma.
Occupy surplus-value.
T22 — A word for the alter-value that could drive a post-capitalist process is creativity.
Scholium.
The choice of “creativity” is made in full cognizance of the fact that neoliberal capitalism has appropriated the term. “Innovation” and “creative capital” are buzzwords signposting this appropriation. Surplus-value is the engine of creative advance of the capitalist system. But the quality of capital’s creativity is best captured in a related phrase, which expresses the inherent violence of capitalism’s economizaton of life’s qualitatively in-the-making: “creative destruction.” But what of life’s in-the-making proper, considered as such, vitally instead of economically? What of the creative advance of life as it complexly plies its field of emergence, that immanent outside of the capitalist system whose qualitative differentials capitalism data-mines for conversion to its own ends? Vital process too is self-driving. It too self-iterates, turning over on itself across its punctual expressions to continue apace. It too runs on excess, serially fed-forward.
Lemma a.
In other words, there is a qualitative surplus-value of life that provides the fuel for capitalism’s quantifications.
Lemma b.
Economization is the conversion of one kind of surplus-value (sur-plus-value of life) into another (capitalist surplus-value).
Lemma c.
Qualitative surplus-value of life is the processual given of the capitalist system. If it can be given to the system, perhaps it can be taken away from it. Even aside from this question of its withdrawal from quantification, it may be that it can be rejoined, upstream of its capitalist conversion. Even before capitalism is overcome, it may be possible to have one foot in both streams, in ways that prefigure its beyond.
(…)
T85 — It is conceivable that power of becoming (onto-power) can be mobilized in a way that makes possible an alter-economization that does not subsume surplus-value of life/ surplus-value of flow under capitalist surplus-value.
Scholium a.
Were this to be achieved, economization would be in the service of life-driving powers of becoming, rather than life-driving powers of becoming being in the service of accumulation.
Lemma.
This would qualify the alter-economization as a counter-ontopower. (…)
T86 — In a counter-powerful alter-economy, surplus-value of life would retain its value for itself. Value would be revalued by the counter-subsumption of systems of quantification under life-qualities, the latter affirmed for their pure experiential quality and for the in-formative role it plays in the self-driving of life’s creative advance.
Scholium.
This would capitalize on the primacy of the qualitative over the quantitative, taking it back from its systematic captures: unchanneling it from them. This the very meaning of the revaluation of values.
T87 — Such a contrivance would constitute a creative process engine theoretically capable of sustaining itself economically.
T88 — In order to fully avail itself of the potentials afield in today’s digital world, this creative process engine would have to involve a new kind of digital platform.
Lemma.
New systems evolving out of the blockchain, beyond Bitcoin and Ethereum, could provide a propitious digital environment.
T89 — The design of the platform would have to counteract certain regressive tendencies, of an anarcho-libertarian cast, designed into the original blockchain concept.
Scholium.
Designed into the blockchain is a libertarian market fundamentalism. Not only is the conventional three-fold definition of money uncritically assumed, underplaying the speculative side of cryptocurrencies, it is further assumed that economic activity comes in discrete units of action. Each such unit is a transaction between two individuals. The transaction is entered into according to each individual’s calculus of their own self-interest. The freeing of the market from the control of the banks and national governments is thus little more than a liberation of self-interest. The blockchain is a technical distillation of the ideology of individual self-interest that is one of the major tendencies in-forming capitalism. It takes capitalism’s basic market ideology and tries to purify it, and objectify that purification in a technical system. It radically reinforces the concept of the market that is at the heart of capitalism, along with the transactional exchange model that is central to the concept of the market.
Lemma.
Anarcho-libertarianism is anarcho-capitalism.
T90 — Next generation blockchain-inspired platforms use smart contracts to expand the notion of what a transaction can be in ways that can begin to counteract the libertarianism built into blockchain.
Scholium a.
An example is the conjoint “Gravity” and “Space” cryptocurrency platforms under development by the Economic Space Agency 2. The idea is that instead of blockchaining simple exchange transactions, transactions can be made programmable and thus infinitely customizable, extending to anything that could be conceived of as a contract. “Contract” is taken in its broadest and most basic definition, as a conditional engagement where one action (or set of actions) calls for a return action, either immediately or within a designated time interval. This need not involve an exchange per se, i.e., the use of a currency as medium of exchange and general equivalent. Any proposition for an if-then call-and-response between actions could be programmed. The actions also need not be individual. For example, a smart contract could specify a set of actions needed to prepare a collective project for taking a step forward in its process, and what will happen when those conditions come together. (…) Smart contracts could be use to decentralize decision-making. Logistics, creative collaboration, and governance would then be intertwined through a single platform whose running would be autonomous and distributed, dispensing with the need for an executive hierarchy overhanging the process and lording over its participants. In this way, a certain commons of productive activity would be created, with an ethos of collective collaboration and a certain instantiation of direct democracy. The overall system is designed to be customizable down to the lowest level, so that unlike Bitcoin or Ethereum, projects can program a dedicated domain of operations embodying their particular orientations and priorities while at the same time remaining interoperable with the general cryptocurrency environment. (…)
T95 — The crucial question is: How can a creative process engine that stays true to its mission of producing sur-plus-value of life for its own sake at the same time style itself an economization process capable of interfacing with the dominant economy in self-sustaining ways? That kind of complicity will be necessary transitionally, as the postcapitalist pores of the current society take the time they need to dilate and merge into an alter-world of their own. The only way this might be possible, if the present analysis holds, would be by exploiting the two-sidedness of intensive magnitude. (…)
Scholium.
The term intensive magnitude highlights the way each event comprises a quantitative aspect (expressing itself in the extensive dimension of space) and a qualitative dimension (expressing itself in the aesthetic dimension of a purely qualitative difference of degree). The affective intensity of this qualitative dimension is one with potential, and that this connection is key to the revaluation of values. For there is always a qualitative excess-over any capture: a surplus of affect that is fed forward as surplus-value of life, moving the life-process forward. It is on this surplus-value that a postcapitalist alter-economy must run. (…)
T97— The madness of basing an actual economy on affective intensities is not entirely without precedent (and may not be so mad as that).
Scholium.
The derivative financial markets, which have taken over the pilot function of the capitalist economy, run more on affect than on underlying economic “fundamentals.” In a sense, the alter-economic strategies advocated here are taking the most advanced sectors of the neoliberal capitalist economy, not at their word (which is ambiguated by lip-service to outmoded classical-liberal economic rhetoric), but at what they do: their own propaganda of the deed. If they can use affective intensities as the engine of their process, why couldn’t another kind of economy? One that does not just run on affective intensities, but affirms them purely for the surplus-value of life they yield. One that refrains from brutally subsuming them under the profit-hungry quantification mechanisms driving capitalist accumulation. One that economizes alter-wise.
- Antonio Negri, “TwentyTheses on Marx” in Saree Makdisi, Cesare Casarino, and Rebecca E. Karl, eds., Marxism beyond Marxism, Routledge, London, 1996, pp. 151-154.→
- See : https://economicspace.agency/→