Vote negative to reconfigure value as a commons.

2.3 VALUE AS A COLLECTIVE AGREEMENT To perceive value differently, we need to break away from the limitations of a theory of value, inquiring about a general substance or the essential nature of value to explain economic phenomena. Instead, we can reach two significant breakthroughs by understanding value as a means or process that conveys certain principles and orderly configurations to economic phenomena. First, we can demystify the underlying mechanisms that drive this process in capitalism, such as accounting practices and market dynamics. Second, understanding value as a conveyor or specific orderly configurations can allow us to imagine different configurations being conveyed. To enunciate such an approach, we need to look further from political economy and into anthropology. Graeber (2001) describes value as the way actions become meaningful to those who act by being incorporated within a larger social whole, real or imaginary. It is a definition in line with the task of a theory of value as described above: as a way people represent the importance of their actions to themselves, value becomes the mechanism that defines and reproduces orderly configurations guiding social phenomena. De Angelis (2007), building on McMurtry (2002), describes such orderly configurations as value systems, i.e., conceptual grids through which people see the world and classify good from bad and normal from abnormal. Most importantly, classify what they have to accept and what they can or should change. Value systems are articulated as value practices, defined as “actions, processes, and webs of relations, predicated on a value system while reproducing it” (De Angelis, 2007: 29). Value practices are expressed in individuals selecting between “goods” and “bads” within a value system and acting upon this selection, thus articulating a social whole constituting those selections anew. Value is then understood through the systematic patterns of individual actions articulating a coherent social system that defines how people live and co-produce their livelihoods. Α value system is the product of people reaching a collective agreement on how their way of living with others becomes meaningful and act upon this agreement. Prone as it may be to power and influence under capitalism, this type of agreement remains a collective consensus. The capitalist value system is based on appropriation, commodification, and exploitation. Yet, the system itself is inherently self-managed: it works insofar as people uphold the implicitly practiced rules and norms necessary for the system to function. Much like our collective memory, heritage, and traditions, the reproduction of a value system is maintained by collective action. In the capitalist value system, value is a means for extraction and capture to drive exchange. But value is itself a commons, albeit an enclosed one under capitalist value practices. As a matter of collective agreement, value is also contested. Though the capitalist value system is what defines capitalism, it is not the only value system in capitalist society (Harvie and Millburn, 2010). People, being people, “may value many other actions: passing time with one’s children and friends, lolling around in bed, praying to one god or another or celebrating a saint, treating fellow humans with respect and dignity, and so on and so on” (Harvie and Millburn, 2010: 635). The contest occurs when it is through a specific value system that people’s livelihoods and security are being reproduced. Therefore, the only way to recognize and possibly transcend a value system that pervades all aspects of our lives, is to step outside it (De Angelis, 2007). The broad disruption brought about by the capabilities and shared imaginaries around the digital commons arguably provides a window of opportunity for this step, as we explain below.