value is infinite and unknowable
abolish profit, abolish exchange, abolish value designations for goods and services
photo by Brooke Lark on Unsplash
A few months ago, I was having dinner with a couple of old friends. I told them that I had gotten an offer of publication for an anarchist systematic theology that I had written, and I confessed to them that I had two mutually exclusive desires for the book.
On one hand, I dreamt of having the book end up on the Anarchist Library, an online database of anarchist texts that have been scanned and uploaded as PDFs to be downloaded for free. It would be such an affirmation to find my work there alongside that of Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin, Murray Bookchin, Emma Goldman, and many other aces of the tradition. I wouldn’t be as far along in my journey if I hadn’t been able to access their work there.
Finding my book there would be especially rad given that it’s a christian work, and understandably anarchists have not traditionally had a great relationship with christianity. It would also mean that my work had been well-received and therefore made more accessible to anarchist folks and communities.
On the other hand, I mentioned, it would be nice to make a litttttttle bit of money on the book, which would be harder if it were available for free online. I said this tongue-in-cheek, recognizing the tension between this desire and my anti-capitalist—anti-profit, more specifically—worldview.
One of the friends eating with me lightly roasted me for this—all in good fun. I laughed and accepted the razzing.
But I’ve kept coming back to this moment over the last few months. I’ve asked myself:
Am I trying to “make a profit” or am I trying to “break even?”
If the latter, is it really a capitalist motivation to want to get back what I put into something?
Is it wrong to want to receive some means of living in return for the life—the energy, the time, the effort, the training, etc.—that I put into this project?
Do I really want a “return” on this book, or do I just want my needs to be met? Do those have to be connected? Have I bought into the idea that the meeting of my needs has to be made possible by the work I put out into the world?
These internal dialogues—both the questions and the halting answers—were deeply unsatisfactory. It took me quite a while to realize why.
It’s because the very idea of assigning value to things is a fool’s errand.
What is the value of a book? What is the value of a brain surgery? What is the value of a gallon of milk? These are all fundamentally impossible to determine. Are they not infinitely valuable insofar as they are arise out of human creativity and involve all aspects of the being of persons who are themselves infinitely valuable?
We’ve convinced ourselves that aside from exchange there’s no way for us to create and provide and receive the things we need to live. And so we’ve legitimized systems that arbitrarily assign costs and prices to things, goods, and services. This system extends so far through time and space that we have forgotten that, at its foundation, it’s really all vibes. And of course, when we add to this the conviction that profit is a necessary motive for the creation and provision of the things we need, those vibes become antagonistic and therefore destructive and dehumanizing.
But capitalism is not the fundamental problem. Even if we were all to come to reject the profit motive, we’d still run into problems trying to come up with methods of “fair and equal exchange.” There is no such thing because there is no way to measure or determine the value of things, let alone human actions and creations.
Alexander Berkman puts it this way in What Is Communist Anarchism:
...labor is social. No person can create anything all by themself, by their own efforts. Now, then, if labor is social, it stands to reason that the results of it, the wealth produced, must also be social, belong to the collectivity. No person can therefore justly lay claim to the exclusive ownership of the social wealth. It is to be enjoyed by all alike.
“But why not give each according to the value of their work?” you ask.
Because there is no way by which value can be measured. That is the difference between value and price. Value is what a thing is worth, while price is what it can be sold or bought for in the market. What a thing is worth no one really can tell…
The exchange of commodities by means of prices leads to profit making, to taking advantage and exploitation; in short, to some form of capitalism. If you do away with profits, you cannot have any price system, nor any system of wages or payment. That means that exchange must be according to value. But as value is uncertain or not ascertainable, exchange must consequently be free, without “equal” value, since such does not exist. In other words, labor and its products must be exchanged without price, without profit, freely, according to necessity (emphasis mine). This logically leads to ownership in common and to joint use. Which is a sensible, just, and equitable system, and is known as Communism.
What anarchy involves, and what I believe abundant life requires, is not only the abolition of profit, but the abolition of exchange and even the abolition of value designation. Because to truly replace a profit motive with a solidarity motive requires trust—a trust in others to do what we ourselves have determined to do, which is to make beautiful, needed things out of our own creativity and passion, and to provide those things to others as a gift. Such trust obsolesces any need for exchange based on value designation.
A few years back I lived with a roommate who, in one shining moment of our year together, venmo requested me for thirty two (32) cents. I had let him borrow my car to run a few errands while his was in the shop, and he used a standard (government, I think?) mileage reimbursement rate to calculate the value I’d provided him and subtract that from my portion of the cost of the communal groceries he’d picked up.
You might imagine that I could not believe what I was seeing. I tried my best to think compassionately about the way he was wired and how he had been trained to reason, but I also knew I needed to speak with him about the incompatibility between this part of our respective frameworks for intentional community.
This actually illustrates a key point, which is that many of us will naturally operate in solidarity with our nuclear families, but we often fail to extend this way of living with other people. Would my roommate have requested 32 cents from a hypothetical spouse? Would one family member assign a value to their washing of the dishes and chart out how to get exactly that value back?
Why is it that an exchange motive and value designation is so obviously ridiculous in this social context, but ostensibly inevitable in other settings?
It’s about trust, right? With our family members—people that we’ve built (or inherited) strong bonds with, people we’ve taken vows to—we find it fairly easy and conventional to do what we do as a gift, out of solidarity, knowing that our needs (in that context) will be met out of the same motivation in our loved ones.
Many of us find it not too difficult to extend this framework outward from the nuclear family into our church communities, our girl scout troops, our youth basketball teams, etc.
But when it comes to people that aren’t part of some network in which we’ve decided to invest our trust, our whole philosophy (often subconsciously) shifts and we suddenly operate out of scarcity and competition rather than abundance and generosity.
And it’s understandable. There have been times when people have betrayed our trust, and we’ve naturally shrunken the scope of our solidarity as a result. We also live in a depersonalized society where it’s hard to meet our neighbors, let alone build trust with them.
So what’s the way forward?
When Jesus says stuff like “my mother and my brothers are those who hear the word of God and do it” (Luke 8:21), I believe he’s telling us that anarchy—that is, the transformation of strangers into kin, the transformation of neighborhoods into communities—begins by finding those who are already about that mutual aid life and trusting them on a deep, fundamental level.
As I mentioned, many of us already do this when it comes to mutual aid around recreation, spirituality, and community development.
Can we go lower on maslow’s pyramid with this, though? Can we do it around food, housing, and clothing? Not just one-way food pantries (where middle class folks donate food and poor folks receive) but food cooperatives that actually cultivate food, teach agriculture and husbandry, distribute food, and involve all members of a community? Not just shelters for the unhoused but communes and building takeovers by tenant unions? How about turning second-hand stores and buy-nothing groups into free clothing and essentials cooperatives?
With food in our bellies and roofs over our heads, we’ll have a base from which to work creatively and generously without feeling like what we eat or where we sleep depends on it. This will free us up to do the kind of work that enriches and enlivens us, and the more fulfilled we are, the more vibrant and abundant our communities will be.
These kinds of small, localized revolutions can build anarchy from the narrowest scale to the broadest. To seek first the kingdom of God is to replace worry about our lives, our food and drink, our bodies, and our clothes with trust in a God who has given us everything we need for life and godliness—most importantly, each other.
It’s comparatively easier to enter into mutual aid relationships around basketball and girl scouts. It’s a little scarier to rely entirely on mutual aid for our most basic needs. But there are surely people in our communities who are already doing it. And there are many others who are ready to take our hand and make that leap of faith together.
As we take this plunge and build communities which operate this way, the idea of assigning value to things and seeking equal exchange of those things will become as ridiculous as one spouse venmo requesting another for cleaning the shower or washing the dishes.
Ho, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and you that have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price. (Isaiah 55:1-2)