Abstract
Marx proposed that capitalism’s destructive force is caused, at root, by the alienation of labor value from its generators. Environmentalists have added the concept of unalienated ecological value, and rights activists added the unalienated expressive value of free speech, sexuality, spirituality, etc. Marx’s vision for restoring an unalienated world by top-down economic governance was never fulfilled. But in the last 30 years, new forms of social justice have emerged that operate as “bottom-up”. Peer-to-peer production such as open source software or wikipedia has challenged the corporate grip on IP in a “gift exchange” of labor value; community based agroecology establishes a kind of gift exchange with our nonhuman allies in nature. DIY citizenship from feminist makerspaces to queer biohacking has profound implications for a new materialism of the “knowledge commons”; and restorative approaches to civil rights can challenge the prison-industrial complex. In contrast to top-down “distributive justice,” all of the above are cases of bottom-up or “generative justice”
Highlights
Marx proposed that capitalism’s destructive force is caused, at root, by the alienation of labor value from its generators
Generating unalienated value In Marx’s original formulation of “alienated labor value”, he contrasted the meaningful work of traditional skilled artisans, taking pleasure in their craft and earning respect from their community, with the dull repetition, low pay and enervating conditions of factory labor under capitalism
While abstracted categories are always suspect for academics (Latour, 1993; Barad, 2012), those three phenomena are a good way to define what we look for in a generative system: unalienated labor value instead of poverty; unalienated ecological value instead of pollution, and unalienated expressive value instead of human rights violations
Summary
In Marx’s original formulation of “alienated labor value”, he contrasted the meaningful work of traditional skilled artisans, taking pleasure in their craft and earning respect from their community, with the dull repetition, low pay and enervating conditions of factory labor under capitalism. The stress on artisanal production often overlooks the gender, race and ecological dimensions of economies of care and histories of colonialism To address these problems, we need a deeper look at what the concept of “generating unalienated value” could mean if liberated from some of this unwelcomed baggage. About the egalitarian nature of the Iroquois They could not adapt these insights to their vision: instead of generative justice—of circulating value in unalienated form—they developed a theory of distributive justice, that is, for how value should continue to be extracted and alienated, but afterwards centralized and redistributed. Adopting the language of human rights activists, but keeping in mind nonhumans as well, we can defined generative justice as follows: The universal right to generate unalienated value and directly participate in its benefits; the rights of value generators to create their own conditions of production; and the rights of communities of value generation to nurture self-sustaining paths for its circulation
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