Good morning, beloved -
Today I want to think about value a little bit — what it is, how we ground it.
I'm the furthest thing in the world from a specialist in the field of economics, of course, and claim nothing other than the kind of beginner's-mind insight someone considering a field from outside can often enough bring to bear on it. Equipped with just that kind of insight, though, it has seemed to me for awhile that we are collectively missing a trick in the way we account for value, pretty fundamentally, and that it's imposing an unbearable distortion on all the structures and arrangements we build atop that accounting.
There is, of course, a dominant frame, in which value arises not from production but from exchange. This is the familiar, if generally tacit, understanding of the world we inherit from 19th century capitalism, and which is still taught in Econ 101: people are modeled as rational, utility-optimizing agents, and the markets mediating exchanges between those agents naturalize value, by allocating resources both efficiently and "neutrally."
There is the frame of financialized, algorithmic "late" capitalism, in which value is figured as a kind of derivative abstraction: a claim on a potential future, constructed through computation, leverage, capture and control, that accumulates preferentially in the hands of those who are able to enclose flow and extract rent from it somehow. Though ultimately still parasitic on land, life and labor — for how could it not be, however many layers of abstraction down you must dig to find it? — here the question of value becomes untethered from any index recognizable to or encompassable by the human mind. For late capitalism, "value" is a flux of bits surging imperceptibly in the dark, changing the course of lives and empires without ever once coming to ground.
There is also a primary counterframe to these accounts of value, very nearly as old as the conceptions it aims to contest, but still of such towering intellectual clarity that it remains both relevant and analytically powerful. This is Marx’s theory of surplus value, which rests on the claim that labor is the sole source of new value, and that profits arise in the appropriation — the theft — of uncompensated labor time. The insight here is that value is neither intrinsic nor arbitrary, but reflects the average amount of human life that must be expended, under given conditions, to bring something into being. And there's a genuine poetry to this: a haunting, melancholic quality that wreathes the Marxian conception of commodified value as crystallized, captured life time, or "dead labor."
This isn't the only reason we're still talking about Marx, though. Whatever you think of it as a propositional or proscriptive theory, Marxian materialism differs from both classical and late capitalism in grounding value in something real, recognizable and tangible: the fugitive hours of our one and only life on Earth. That, in itself, is an epochal contribution.
But all of these formulations, Marx's as much as the others, occlude a deeper, thermodynamic asymmetry. All labor – indeed, all productive activity and all life – is dependent on solar input: the uninterrupted flow of low-entropy energy that powers photosynthesis, maintains climatic stability, enables biological reproduction, and ultimately sustains the metabolic base of any possible economic order.
The conception of a surplus value extracted from labor is therefore nested within a more fundamental surplus: the continuous, unpaid energetic contribution of the sun. This solar surplus isn't merely something that happens in the background. It's the unacknowledged condition of possibility for the generation of any value whatsoever. So far as I am able to determine, anyway — and I'm certain one of you will point me at a source if I should happen to be mistaken in this — this accounting appears nowhere within either classical Marxist value theory or contemporary capitalist economics, nor even in the so-called "post-autistic" approaches that endeavor to anchor value in empirical and social reality. And it seems to me this helps explain capital’s utter incapacity to register ecological limits not as externalities, but as the submerged substrate of its own logic. To bring the solar surplus into view is to reconceptualize value itself as thermodynamically parasitic, and to open a path toward a political economy that is more completely grounded in the real.
Developing such a political economy, in fact, would mean fully accounting for all of the sources of real value, as I understand them: in addition to the bounty of solar impingement, the contributions of the Earth system, the domain of life, and human physical, intellectual and affective labor. (We might wish to stipulate, too, an emergent fifth source of value, computational labor, distinguished for its qualities of velocity, depth of application and capacity for large-scale pattern recognition, but fundamentally understood to be derivative of and indeed entirely parasitic on the first four.)
Consider, for example, how our conceptions of value tend to erase the ongoing contributions of the Earth system itself: its geological deep time, its hydrodynamic cycles, its metabolic consistency. Accounting for these contributions would mean acknowledging that value is generated in the abyssal, literally tectonic patience of lithospheric formation, in the overfolding processes of erosion and deposition that yield soil, in the circulation of water through aquifers, root systems and the atmosphere itself. These geophysical and hydrological processes make life possible and labor intelligible. They scaffold the conditions under which any social formation can arise, reproduce itself and project its frames and assumptions into the future. To treat them as externalities, as classical, neoclassical and Marxist approaches largely do, is not just analytically incoherent but ecologically catastrophic.
This is not to romanticize nature as a passive backdrop, but to uphold Eugene Thacker's conception of "Earth" as the world-in-itself, asserting its co-generative agency in the unfolding of value, or the "complicity with anonymous materials" Reza Negarestani identifies. Geological substrates concentrate metals and minerals across epochs; rivers carve corridors of fertility and power; water vapor cools the body and drives the turbine. These are not incidental inputs to value, but its very coauthors. A truly postcapitalist theory of value must, then, be hydrological and lithic as well as solar and social, able to account for how extraction, exhaustion and enclosure have systematically severed human economy from the vitality of the Earth that grounds us. In this sense, value is not simply folded-in life time: it is folded-in planetary time, soaked in groundwater, breathed through sediment, and carried forward into the deep future only insofar as something like a comradely reciprocity with the Earth remains possible.
And atop (or beneath) the contributions of the sun and the Earth system are those multiplex offerings endowed to us by the domain of life, which are similarly effaced from conventional accounts of value. These start with its production of a metabolic substrate, through processes like photosynthesis, nitrogen fixation, mycorrhizal exchange and microbial decomposition that convert raw planetary matter into legible, accessible and manipulable form. These processes cycle nutrients, regulate temperature and more generally make Earthly environments livable, whether or not you subscribe to the theory of a fully self-regulating and homeostatic Gaia. In this sense, life is not a consumer of value, but among its first producers, long before human labor arrives on the scene.
We know, too, that the domain of life performs deep reproductive and infrastructural labor. Bees pollinate, roots aerate soil, wetlands purify water. Just as the old Zen expression has it: spring comes, the grass grows by itself. We blunder, badly, if we identify these as "services" in the economic sense. Capitalism recognizes these only retroactively and grudgingly, usually in the context of their failure-for-us, but — to paraphrase Vandana Shiva — these forms of infolded energy maintain the interfertility of systems, as the fundamental condition of their productivity in any sense.
We see that life remakes life. The biosphere is not modular; as Donna Haraway and Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing taught us, it is always already entangled with itself, in a three-billion-year spiral of co-generation. It follows from this that every act of human labor is, from long before its beginnings, ontologically enmeshed with the activity of other beings. Any accounting of value that fails to register the foundationally interspecies aspect of its generation is, quite simply, structurally incomplete, fatally bearing a hollow where its very heart should be.
And, of course, life resists. It refuses full subsumption. Whether in weeds growing through concrete, the adaptation over time of microbes to the chemicals we devise to kill them, or the rewilding of the spaces sacrificed by capital, life continuously asserts itself against and outside of the price mechanism. This resilience is not just symbolic, but is, again, ontological — an excess that no system of accounting can or should attempt to fully tame, but which neither capitalism nor Marxian economics even acknowledge.
And only now do we finally arrive at the threshold of human labor, and the possibility of accounting for its transformative effects on all of the above, in its physical, intellectual or affective registers. Enough has been thought and written about this question over the past two hundred years that I don't think I have anything at all meaningful to add, to be sure. But however arrogant or unwelcome or clumsily amateurish it might seem, I do think it's absolutely vital that we acknowledge those sources of value (and meaning and possibility) that strike me as being almost entirely absent from conventional economic accounts, in the places between the gifts given to us by the sun and the fruits of human endeavor. Maybe someday we'll be able to build an economic order on top of these recognitions, that founds its justice in the first instance on our profound situation inside a material universe that long preceded our appearance, and will survive our final disappearance (whenever that should happen to take place) for many times again as long.
§ Just a heads up that I'll be appearing in two sessions at the Hay Literary Festival week after next, and that it'd be lovely to see you if you should happen to be there too. I'm not reading, listening or watching anything new at the moment, because in the hours lately that I haven't been thinking about value and how we measure it, I'm concentrating on getting my PhD dissertation out the door. That ought to happen tomorrow or the next day...and you'll know about it because I imagine you'll be able to feel the massive net reduction in the world's anxiety, from wherever you should happen to be. : . )
That's it for now. As always, I hope that you are well, that you have your feet planted solidly on the good Earth, and that you are taking care of those who need you, taking care of yourself, and letting others take care of you. You have
all my faith,
ag
ldn
This is Dispatch from London No. 142 of Sunday, 18 May 2025, offered to you under the terms of a Peer Production License. You are free to reuse this content, but must acknowledge Adam Greenfield as its author. ◊