FW Card on subject formation/”value” in debate

Inquiries on value are relevant and essential for economic thought. As Heilbroner (1983) argues, questions on value are not elementary, but elemental, in the sense that they “powerfully influence the constitution of economic thought by identifying different elements within the social process as strategic for our understanding of it” (253). Digital commoning and commons-based innovation shed light on such elements essential in our understanding of a tentative social order based on the commons. They illustrate value perceptions conditioned on norms and prefigurative institutions that champion sharing and participation over acquisition; openness over control; and pre-distribution over redistribution (Pazaitis et al., 2017b; Bauwens et al., 2019). Digital commons cases illustrate much more than a form of optimizing human affairs over digital media. It is a unique mode of organization of human affairs, with a capacity to maintain “coherence in the face of vanishing transaction costs” (Benkler, 2017: 271). It is a primary form of “structured human living-together” (Drechsler, 2001: 105) that formulates a social whole within which “actions become meaningful to the actor” (Graeber, 2001: 254), i.e., a new definition of value for a new form of social organization. 3.1 CONCEPTUALIZING VALUE AS A COMMONS A conceptualization of value as a commons is a normative and politically connotated task. Based on an understanding of value as a means of establishing a particular social order endowed by certain principles, a normative approach to value aims to define the principles to which the empirical elements conform (Heilbroner, 1983). Hence, there is no objectively or otherwise determined standard defining this order other than a set of political principles. The strength of a normative approach is the realization that “the order manifested by an economic structure should be that which its ruling elements [...] desires it to be” (Heilbroner, 1983: 258). Let us begin this section with summarizing which these ruling elements for value as a commons are. By approaching value itself as a commons we adhere to the understanding of value as the importance of actions rather than things (Graeber, 2014). Value is an expression of a collective agreement, and action upon it, on what is important. It functions insofar people uphold the shared norms and rules that make the system work. Value as a commons defines the meaning of actions, processes, and relations amongst them as inherently collective and embedded in certain social and ecological conditions. All that is valued is predicated by collective action and is meant for collective associations between the agents concerned, human and non-human. With the commons seen as a distinct life form (Bollier and Helfrich, 2019), value as a commons is its special meaning of existence. Value as a commons is manifested in people’s capacities to arrange their life affairs and co-produce their livelihoods through sharing and participation in common doing. Value is created when these capacities are improved, and it is destroyed when they diminish. Value as a commons is also regionally and chronologically pervasive. The capacities for sharing and common doing are directly related to a specific space and time but convey aspects of the past and the future in a synthesis that simultaneously takes place locally and globally. Especially in the digital economy, limitations of time and space become less relevant from a technical point of view and gain significance from a reflective one: They no longer define what we can do, rather show us what we can do differently. They portray the commons as what Helfrich (in Bollier, 2016a: 24) describes as “an important form of transpersonal rationality and coordination – a new category that describes the individual-in-relation-with- others” (Pazaitis and Bauwens, 2019; see also Gadamer, 1960). The weakness of a normative approach is that the moral and political norms upon which it relies are arbitrary and, thus, prone to challenge from different points of view (Heilbroner, 1983). This limitation simultaneously recognizes that economic matters define the means rather than the ends of value practices. The definition of what is important in life remains a political subject. As Graeber (2014: 11) puts it: “Ultimately, a free society can only be one in which everyone has an equal power to determine for themselves what they believe to be important. The only legitimate economic question [...] is what sort of system for the distribution of material goods will best put people in a position to do so”. An approach on value through the commons allows the possibility for various perceptions and interpretations of value to co-exist and co-evolve as long as they remain pertinent to community-defined rules. Local biophysical conditions and community-defined values may function as boundary objects, creating interfaces across different people, places, social systems, and times. Acknowledging the dangers of a totalitarian approach to value, a theory of value as a commons aims at value sovereignty (Bollier, 2016b; Bauwens et al., 2019), i.e., the ability for people to determine and act upon shared definitions of value.