A Postcapitalist Manifesto 99 Theses on the Revaluation of Value Brian

99 Theses on the Revaluation of Value A Postcapitalist Manifesto Brian Massumi 99 Theses on the Revaluation of Value Other Books by Brian Massumi Published by the University of Minnesota Press Architectures of the Unforeseen: Essays in the Occurrent Arts Thought in the Act: Passages in the Ecology of Experience Erin Manning and Brian Massumi The Politics of Everyday Fear Brian Massumi, Editor 99 Theses on the Revaluation of Value A Postcapitalist Manifesto Brian Massumi University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis London Copyright 2018 by Brian Massumi All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or other- wise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290 Minneapolis, MN 55401- 2520 http://www.upress.umn.edu ISBN 978-1-5179-0588-0 (hc) ISBN 978-1-5179-0587-3 (pb) A Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Printed in the United States of America on acid- free paper The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer. 23 22 21 20 19 18 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Contents 1 99 Theses on the Revaluation of Value: A Postcapitalist Manifesto 137 Bibliography 99 Theses on the Revaluation of Value A Postcapitalist Manifesto T1 It is time to take back value. For many, value has long been dis- missed 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. T2 In the absence of a strong alternative conception of value, it is all too easy for normative gestures to slip back in. Priorities are still weighed, orientations favored, directions followed. Without a concept of value, by what standards are these choices made? Usually none that are enunciated. Standards of judgment are simply al- lowed to operate implicitly. Normativity is not avoided. It becomes a sneak. This can prove to be just as oppressive. T3 To take back value is not to reimpose standards of judgment pro- viding a normative yardstick. That would do little other than to make the oppressiveness explicit again. 99 THESES ON THE REVALUATION OF VALUE T4 To take back value is to revalue value, beyond normativity and standard judgment. More radically, it is to move beyond the reign of judgment itself. 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 insis- tently this- worldly. Appealing to transcendent values, styled as moral qualities, only raises the strictures of normativity to the absolute. Lemma a. The revaluation of value is ethical by definition. That is why it cannot be moral. Scholium. In an ethics, the transcendent moral opposition (Good/Evil) and its attenuated democratic offspring (normal/ pathological) are “supplanted by the qualitative difference of modes of existence” (Deleuze 1988, 23). Ethics bears on what, qualitatively, a process can do, and in what direction that ca- pacitation leads. It evaluates the singular how of “an immanent power’s” (25) mode of operation, as it consequentially unfolds. The project of a revaluation of values to give value its qualitative due takes the path of a processual ethics. Processual ethics is thoroughly relational. The immanently self-powering modes of existence it concerns come in multiples and mutually inflect. This qualifies it as an ecology, in the broadest sense. 5 Lemma b. The revaluation of values overspills the narrowly economic domain, into an ecology of powers (T49–T68). T7 To uncouple value from quantification in a way that affirms an ecology of qualitatively different powers means engaging head- on with the economic logic of the market. Value is too valuable to be left to capital. T8 The dominant notion of value in our epoch is economic. The domain of economic value is conceived of as the market. Market- based thinking deploys a consensus definition of money. That definition is threefold: unit of account, medium of exchange, and store of value. Scholium. This definition actually skirts the issue of value. Since the “store of value” is nothing other than a quantity of units of account held in reserve, poised to enter exchange, the definition is circular. The circularity spreads the quantitative notion of value across the three roles, equating value with the ability of money to phase between them. The result is an obfus- cation of value, both of how it actually functions in capitalism— which cannot be reduced to classical market mechanisms and the market’s central concept of exchange— and of what it might become in a revalued postcapitalist future. T9 The threefold market definition of money assumes that value is by nature quantifiable and positsmoney as the measure of value. These assumptions must be questioned in order to open the way to the revaluation of value. 99 THESES ON THE REVALUATION OF VALUE T10 The classical concept of the market assumes not only the quan- tifiability of value but themyth of equal exchange, as judged by the measure of money. This is the idea that one can get “value for money,” guaranteeing fair exchange. This fairness principle is seen to be the engine of the capitalist market. Scholium a. The ideas of equal exchange and getting value for money are supported by the notion of money as measure of value. Money can be treated as the measure of value because it is used as a general equivalent: a yardstick for comparison. With this yardstick, incommensurable things can be commensurated. A “fair” exchange is when the use- value of a commodity object is judged commensurate with its price. Price provides a standardized third term enabling qualitatively different commodity objects to be compared. This, in theory, enables “rational” consumer choice. The value of a present sum of money can also be compared to a sum in the future, enabling “rational” life choices. The myth of fair exchange is undermined, how- ever, by the concurrent market logic of getting a “good deal.” In consumer behavior, the allure of getting more value for your money is actually a stronger engine. This points to the fact that if you scratch the shiny surface of the market idea, the specter of unequal exchange immediately appears. Qualitative under- standings of value then return, to shake the foundation of the quantitative vision of value. It takes little reflection to realize that the “goodness” of the good deal is only partially reflected in the price. The “calculation” of what constitutes a good deal does not only involve “rational” considerations. The sense that more value for money is obtained is strongly inflected by the subjective factors of the buyer’s dispositions, desires, and idiosyncra- sies. “Use- value” (T91 Schol. b) is relative, and it is impossible to separate from more subjective values such as prestige- value. These subjective factors cannot be commensurated from one 7 consumer to another, or from one purchase to another. They are singularly qualitative “calculations.” They are also object lessons in the plasticity of value. Scholium b. The myth of the commensurability of a present sum of money and a future value is also undermined, this time by the tendency of the market itself to exemplify the plasticity of value. This is called volatility. Volatility is two- headed. It arises from factors endogenous to the market, such as cycles, and crises arising as complexity effects of the market’s very mode of operation (speculative bubbles). It also arises from externalities, which include such things as wars, natural disasters, and weather (or more radically, climate change). Externalities are qualitative changes in the market’s outside environment that are secondarily reflected in price changes in the market (Hardt and Negri 2009, 155). Also included are price movements linked to valuations that are not exactly outside the market but are not fundamentally “calculated” in money terms either. The classic example is the added value of location as reflected in real es- tate prices. Location is valued as an indicator of quality of life. Quality of life is not in itself measurable. Higher prices in a desirable neighborhood are a way of putting a number on the immeasurable. They numerically express an incommensurabil- ity. This suggests a connection between value and vitality that is reflected in pricing but is irreducible to that quantitative ex- pression because, in itself, it is directly qualitative. Lemma a. Actual market dynamics assume unequal exchange. The way the market operates in practice is predi- cated more on excess than on commensuration. More-than is more equal than equal- to. Lemma b. The more- than unbalancing exchange is due to qualitative factors. Although reflected in price, these qualitative factors are and remain externalities to the market. They are of another nature than their quantitative reflection, 99 THESES ON THE REVALUATION OF VALUE presenting a nonnumerical excess. They remain subjective, vital: equal to qualities of experience; pertaining to quality of life. Lemma c. A revaluation of value must contrive to develop this connection between value and vitality that is presup- posed by the market but disavowed by it. It must make qualitative excess a postcapitalist virtue— beyond the myth of equal exchange, the fairness of the market, and the rhetoric of commensuration.

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