Keith Hart 1

Building the human economy: a question of value? 2

Introduction: value theory in anthropology
I have resisted value theory throughout my life and in general I
resist starting from big ideas. In fact, most of my work has been a
critique of this practice; thus for example the concept of the
informal economy (Hart 1973) is critical of the idea, which was
normal around 1970, that the state is the only appropriate vehicle
for development. I argued that this left out a lot of what people
were doing and I now have a project called the human economy. 3
This lecture is going to be rather dense, since building bridges
between top and bottom or perhaps a Jacobs ladder between
heaven and earth, with the angels coming down and going up, is
quite a complicated exercise.

Co-director, the Human Economy Group, University of Pretoria;

Honorary Professor of Development Studies, University of
Kwazulu-Natal, Durban; Founder, Open Anthropology
Cooperative. Email: johnkeithhart@gmail.com.

Transcript of a recording of a keynote lecture given to the Finnish

Anthropology Conference, Ideas of Value: Inquiries in
Anthropology held in Helsinki, 11-12th May, 2010.
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At the time of the lecture, I was referring to the book in press. But
since then a Human Economy Group has been formed at the
University of Pretoria, South Africa to bring together young postdoctoral fellows, mainly from the South, to research questions
relevant to building a human economy.
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The Human Economy: A Citizens Guide (Hart, Laville and

Cattani 2010) is a set of over thirty conceptual essays, none of them
explicitly on value. So I posed myself the question whether this
project would have benefitted from being inserted more selfconsciously into a discourse on the theory of value. You are
familiar with David Graebers Toward an Anthropological Theory
of Value (2001). I respect him and this book enormously. He has
another book in press which is quite unlike anything written
before, Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), and it was about
250,000 words the last time I saw it. The earlier book is an
indispensible starting point for any anthropology of value. Its really
a set of essays reviewing a very wide range of literature and the
attempt to develop his own approach to value is secondary to
providing his readers with a means of entry to a broad range of
questions. Graeber looks at value as something social, aesthetic,
economic and linguistic.
Value theory can be rigorous and very narrow, as in Jakobsons
(1941) notion of marked difference which is then applied to
phonology and semantics. Or a Saussurian approach can be very
general by being extended to a theory of meaning in language,
which anthropologists tend to prefer. Equally in economics,
marginal utility theory is extremely narrow in its formulation , but,
as Graeber points out, anthropologists have tried to expand its use
to take in much broader theories of exchange or at least vaguer
theories of exchange. I conclude that anthropologists on the whole
opt for diffuse, less intellectually rigorous theories of value. For
after all one of our great problems is that anthropology is a holding
company for people to do what they like and call it anthropology.
So we need categories that help to assemble our findings. This is
one reason why we are really bad at linking with people from other
disciplines, since we know we cant get away with loose methods
outside our own circle.
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Graeber (2001) relies very heavily on Marx and Mauss and he tries
to bring them together in various ways without forcing the issue on
several occasions. And this is also my project, to bring Marx and
Mauss together. You will hear a lot more about Marx today,
however. The chapters in which he comes closest to a Graeberian
theory of value are Chapter 3 where he deals with his teacher,
Terence Turner, and inserts a lot of Marx. His basic plan there is
to make Turner intelligible to the world, much of his writing being
unpublished. Chapter 6 is the only treatment of Mauss in English
that actually deals with him as a politician as well as an
anthropologist/sociologist. It is extremely informative and Graeber
is well-regarded in France for that. Chapter 7 is mainly about the
idea of fetish, but also about magic which is clearly related. I will be
drawing quite heavily on the idea of commodity fetishism in my
approach. But first let me tell you something about the human
economy project.

The human economy project

I am coordinating with Brazilian and French colleagues a project
that is now, in May 2010, a book in press (Hart, Laville and Cattani
2010). It is the first English version of an international
collaboration going back to the first World Social Forum held at
Porto Alegre in 2001. It is basically about building economic
democracy by looking at a series of concepts like fair trade,
informal economy, citizenship, welfare or whatever social capital,
globalization, there are any number of these -- and introducing
readers to the history of discourse in these areas. The idea is not
just to define these individual conceptual discourses, but by
juxtaposing them, since they overlap so much, to begin to identify a
language made up by a set of terms that might allow us to talk
about human economic emancipation. All of this has as its context
the struggle against neoliberalism, which has been wounded but not
defeated by the financial crisis. Our attitude is that this is an
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opportunity for us to develop alternative approaches to the

economy, but we cant assume that the enemy is going to roll over
and die, far from it.
Neoliberalism is itself a counter-revolution against the global
revolution that took place after the Second World War when the
industrial societies committed themselves to expanding public
services and the welfare and purchasing power of ordinary citizens,
while the European empires were displaced by a series of linked
anti-colonial revolutions. The result was what the French call les
trente glorieuses, the years from 1945 to 1975. This was just about
the only time in history when economic policy was devoted to the
interests of working people and was governed by a philosophy of
social democracy which has since been replaced in many western
countries, especially the English-speaking ones, but not quite so
much in Scandinavia. This makes Scandinavia an interesting case,
since obviously for us the struggle against neoliberalism means
partly reinstating the values of social democracy, even though we
cant go back to the same place we were before.
The human economy places emphasis on what people do for
themselves, while conceiving of the larger whole as all of humanity.
So it is both about what people do and the species planetary
project of assuming responsibility for life on earth. The idea of a
human economy is not a dream or utopia. It exists practically and
theoretically all around us, but often it has been obscured,
marginalized or repressed by models of economy that dominate in
the universities and the media. The difference between our
position and that of the revolutionary left, who lack a concrete
program for where they want to go, is that we believe we can
identify a new direction for society based on what people are doing
already, but with a new combination, direction and emphasis.

So why are we calling the economy human? In order to be

human an economy must be four things: it must first be conceived
of as being made and remade by people in their everyday lives, so
that any economics derived from studying it must be of practical
daily use. Second, a human economy addresses a great variety of
particular situations in all their institutional complexity, so ours is
essentially an institutional approach. Third, it is based on a more
holistic conception of peoples needs and interests than is found in
free market economics. Finally, as I have already said, it must
address humanity as a whole and the world society we are making.
The human economy is already everywhere, so it doesnt have to
be made from scratch. All the forms of human economy that have
existed and to some extent will exist can already be found side by
side in various combinations.
We are quite used to a Marxist stages theory of history in which
feudalism is replaced by capitalism which is replaced by socialism
and perhaps by communism. The approach we take can be found
in Hegels The Philosophy of Right (1821) where he examines
natural forms of society linked to the family and the land alongside
urban civil society (the market or capitalism) and the state. But he
conceives of these three spheres not as succeeding each other, but
as co-existing and being coordinated through the state. We too feel
it is important to open up our vision of what human beings are
already doing, have done and might do. Ideas like capitalism and
socialism, especially when they are applied to whole countries or
even to the world, in fact refer only to a part of an economy, even
if it may well be for analytical and political purposes the
strategically dominant part. So we cant allow the sense of
belonging to capitalist societies to lead us to overlook all the other
things that are going on. And when you look at these, you will find
that economies are much more like each other than these ideal
typical contrasts might suggest. This is mainly a product of a
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revolutionary tradition which conceives of progress as scrapping

what we have in some idealized form and replacing it with its
negation.
The object of economy was always to reproduce human life and
whatever sustains it. That is to say that the object of economy was
the human being. This is a conventional abstraction. Under
capitalism, as we know, human life has become a secondary means
of making money. One aspect of Marxism is that they like to think
that their idea of progress is reinforced by a scientific
understanding of history as we live it. I also try to discover the
social forces that make our world, linked to such processes as
globalization, the internet and so on, that might be said to be
pushing the possibilities for economy towards a new emphasis on
producing the human being rather than producing things through
human beings.
The idea of a human economy is many social recipes articulated by
a unifying vision with the aim of generating a common language for
progress. It combines what each of us does in our daily lives with
what we might become as a species. In other words, we need an
economics that can operate at both levels as well as in between. My
work on money, especially since I published The Memory Bank
(Hart 2000), has been aimed at trying to understand money as the
means of mediating between these extremes. Indeed I would claim
that Simmel (1900) saw this potential of money to make universal
society at the same time as bringing it down to the level of everyday
life.
We must seek new institutional forms anchored in social practice
with a view to inserting democratic norms into economic life; and
democracy means learning how to reconcile freedom and equality.
We have just been through a century when, in the name of
individual freedom, market society generated the most extreme
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forms of inequality, while in the name of equality non-market

society installed the most coercive bureaucracies known to human
history. So we must reconcile freedom and equality in ways that go
beyond their separate failure in the twentieth century. The market
is legitimate in our view. We subscribe to a tradition that includes
Marcel Mauss (1925; see Hart 2007) and Karl Polanyi (1944; see
Hann and Hart 2009) who thought that markets are a good thing
they get us out of our traditional insularity; they extend society to
become more inclusive; they provide a measure of freedom for
individuals and minorities. But markets without limits, of the sort
that we have witnessed in the last three decades, threaten
democracy itself. So we need to find ways of incorporating markets
into economy without giving them the kind of free hand they have
had.
At the core of this human economy project lies the need to
combine theoretical and practical work. They must always be
closely articulated. The last World Social Forum in 2009 at Belm
in Brazil brought together activists and researchers around the idea
of combining democracy and science in some practical way; and
certainly I hope that this book might offer a guide to how theory
and practice might be combined in many different areas. We also
believe that there is an important role for the state in guaranteeing
the social rights of citizens and as a redistributive mechanism that
cannot be achieved by self-help organizations. But reliance on state
guarantees of that sort must go with voluntary self-organization
based on different forms of solidarity which tend to be the areas
that we investigate most closely. So freedom and equality dont just
come from market contracts and citizenship, but also from the
mutuality and egalitarianism of people living together. This is a
steal for anthropologists, of course. What else do we do than try to
see how people make things work themselves?
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In conclusion, this project comes from a dialogue between

successful social experiments in many parts of the world and an
ongoing theoretical reflection on these in several languages, but
now in English for the first time. So we are excited to find out what
happens when all these speakers of Latin languages hit the Englishspeaking world. Well, I have managed to throw a few Anglophones
in too, even some Scandinavians! Actually we have four authors
from Scandinavia in the book.

A note on free market economics

Before moving on, I should say something about liberal
economics. Neoliberal policies withdrew political controls from
markets at the same time as sanctioning the invasion of public and
domestic life by markets. This process is unevenly spread across
societies. The financial crisis and the economic depression that is
building on its back holed free market economics below the water.
I dont think it is possible any more to argue that the economy is
best-served by leaving markets to be self-organized without political
interference. Whatever else, that has gone and with it we have our
opening. It is convenient to beat up on the economists, but I
wouldnt be an economic anthropologist if I didnt believe in the
historical project of economics which has been debased by the
economists, especially in the last half-century. We should not allow
our disgust with the blatantly ideological uses of neoclassical
economics in producing undemocratic outcomes in our societies to
lead us to discount the marginalist revolution (Hutchinson 1978)
which launched modern economics in its present form. We should
remember that economics was the first social discipline to
introduce a subjective theory of value. There are all kinds of
problems with this particular theory, especially its reliance on
prices as a proxy for value. Nevertheless, it provoked and
encouraged some of the most progressive social thought that we
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still rely on today, such as Max Weber, Georg Simmel, Talcott

Parsons and others.
Alfred Marshall synthesized three separate discoveries of the
marginal utility principle from the 1870s. He was Maynard Keynes
teacher at Cambridge and he wrote a book called Principles of
Economics in 1890, the same year that the LSE was founded. It is
important to recognize that Marshall, who was listed by Parsons
(1937) as one of the founders of modern sociology, along with
Durkheim, Weber and Pareto, combined liberal individualism
with cooperative socialism of the sort embraced by Mauss and a
Hegelian historical theory of the state as a redistributive agency. He
was a member of a Labour think tank, The Fabian Society, set up
by the Webbs. He believed that marginal utility in a society would
be maximized when all incomes were equal. So it is not
coincidental that Keynes was his pupil.
At the same time as this theory was being developed by Marshall,
corporations won the right to be treated in law the same way as
individual citizens, first of all in the United States and then more
widely. I argue (Hart 2005) that the collapse of the difference
between real and artificial persons in law, which was granted to
businesses, but not to other artificial persons, such as churches and
political parties, lies at the heart of our problems of understanding
our political difficulties. Organizations with the longevity, wealth
and power of corporations should not have the same human rights
as individual citizens. The US Supreme Court has recently ruled
against restricting corporations ability to finance political
campaigns on the grounds that it would infringe their human right
to do so. If Walmart is barred from putting a huge hypermarket in
the middle of a small town in upper New York state, it can take
that town to court for discrimination by a public body. They can
afford to keep going back to the courts until they win and in many
cases they dont have to go to court, because people know it is
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hopeless. What interests me is the possibility of returning to the

original vision of marginalist economics that Marshall articulated
a combination of cooperative socialism, which was what the
Labour Party represented at that time, and liberal individualism,
but not for corporations, and a historical theory of the rise of the
welfare state.

Marx on the commodity as value-form 4

Now I would like to get to the heart of my treatment of the value
question, which is Marx on the commodity as value-form. Marx
believed that what counts in this world is people, machines and
money, in that order. But capitalism has inverted that order, so that
money buys machines that make people work. Our political task is
to turn it the other way round. So a great deal of his theoretical
work concerns how to reverse the subordination of people to
things. His value theory takes off from that premise. Marx himself
thought that his theory of surplus value as the engine of capitalist
development was his single most important contribution. What did
he mean by this? That capitalism was feudalism in drag. Under
feudalism people are compelled to work for a landowner and pay
rent in various forms. They are coerced by political power and
what is extracted from their work is surplus labour. They do the
work and some part of it is diverted to the use of someone who
doesnt do the work. He took that notion and said that basically
capitalism is the same in that people are forced to work for capital
I am indebted to Desmond McNeills (2011 [1988]) Fetishism
and the Value-Form: Towards a general theory of value. I
recommend the book as a systematic and accessible introduction
which links Marxs economic theories to a broader conception of
value, including that found in structural linguistics.
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10

 they have no other way of getting a living and they must work
under conditions that guarantee exploitation of a significant part of
their labour. So, surplus labour is extracted in a similar way and
with similar ends.
The difference between capitalism and feudalism, however, is that
surplus labour takes the form of exchange value under capitalism:
the product consists of commodities sold for money of which the
capitalist retains a share. For that reason Capital (Marx 1867) has
as its starting point the idea of the commodity. A commodity is a
useful product of labour whose exchange value arises through a
social process of abstraction. The important point is that labour
becomes social by being drawn into a market where the products
of labour, whatever use they may have soap for washing yourself
or whatever becomes social by entering into relations with all
other commodities by being bought and sold for money in the
market. This is both the means of reproducing capitalist
exploitation and the answer to it. By bringing people together out
of their rural isolation into industrial cities, capitalists are actually
creating the means for working people to combine more effectively
and in a less exploitative form of economic organization. For this
reason, Marx starts out by saying that commodities are both a
quality and a quantity. They are things that have value in use -- use
value or utility as the marginalists would say -- but they also have
abstract exchange value which allows them to become social in
interaction with each other through the means of money.
The issue is to explain how labour is made social. Marx
approaches this in another way through the concept of socially
necessary labour time. How is it that Manchester can destroy the
weaving industry in Bengal? How can people working in factories,
making textiles by using machines, drive out a centuries-old
weaving industry simply by providing cloth of a similar quality at a
lower price? To take a more contemporary example, I know a
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North African Jewish entrepreneur in France who runs a string of

contact lens stores. He sells them for 200 a pair. These contact
lenses are now sold in China for 14. He offered to distribute them
for the Chinese, but they had other ideas about that. So now he is
looking for a sucker to buy the chain before its too late. A good
deal of Marxs value theory is aiming to address these huge shifts in
the relative value of commodities produced in some places as
opposed to others. His interest is less in explaining why an apple is
worth so much in relation to a pear than in why the Bengal weavers
were wiped out. The answer is that the socially necessary labour
time for producing Manchester textiles has been radically reduced
by machine industry.
I have already mentioned that Marx takes the idea of the
commodity and turns it into what is possibly the most difficult and
important aspect of his theory, with which he concludes the first
chapter of Capital volume 1, the fetishism of commodities. The
central idea is that economy (or production) is relations between
people, but through the priority given to the circulation of
commodities bought and sold for their exchange value, we appear
to be living in a world where the dominant relations are between
things rather than people. For him, this is at one level the same as
religious fetishism, the idea that some spiritual agent is responsible
for our actions. The difference between commodity fetishism and
religious fetishism is that people visibly make commodities and it is
easier to demonstrate that fact against the common experience of
us all dancing to the price fluctuations of commodities over which
we have no say and even less chance of control.
Finally, Marx and Engels held that private property which had
been one of Marxs main concerns from the beginning -- cannot
organize this increasingly interdependent capitalist economy. It is
therefore an urgent imperative for people in general, the workers,
to generate an alternative to it that is more effectively social. The
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task of value theory for Marx then is to reveal our collective agency
in society. This is why he thought that surplus value was his most
important theoretical contribution. I am sure you are already
familiar with most of this, but I had to spell out what I consider to
be central to Marxs thought.

Commoditization
I now want to turn to a concept that I first wrote about three
decades ago, commoditization (Hart 1982, 1987). Many people,
when they write about commodities, have a preferred definition
whether one anchored in an objective classical or Marxist theory of
social value or one that is subjective and individual linked to utility
and consumption. Rather than tossing up to decide which kind of
definition we find attractive, I thought it would be good to put
some of them together in a process that was quasi-historical and I
called it commoditization. Following Marx, I argued that the
commodity is a means through which we work for other people.
We do a lot of things for ourselves, but if we want to enter into
society in a more expanded sense, we have to work for others. And
in order to do that, our work has to be detached from us in a form
that can be shared or transferred or circulated. There are many
ways for this to occur, not just through money.
So I defined commoditization as the progressive abstraction of
social labour and I focused on the labour services that produce
commodities. My starting point was that, although early
industrialism put an enormous emphasis on the essence of
economy as manufacturing things -- and even now in the
newspapers commodities refers to things ripped out of the
ground and transported internationally, like tin and zinc, cocoa and
coffee the future of the human economy lies in what we do with
and for each other. Personal services used to be strongly anchored
in place: in order to get your hair cut, somebody had to cut it on
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the spot; for someone to wash your clothes, they had to come
round to your house or you took your washing to them. Over the
last twenty years or so, the possibility of providing services at
distance has been massively expanded by the digital revolution in
communications. As a result, the fastest-growing sector of the world
economy is services, cultural commodities like entertainment,
sport, media, education etc. I could ask you a Trivial Pursuit
question: what is it that Manchester and Philadelphia have in
common? They were both industrial cities whose largest employer
is now their main university. This is not to mention information
services, software and the rest of it. The United States three
principal exports these days are movies, music and software. They
have always exported their way of life as a commercial asset. We
are coming up to the World Cup which will generate television
audiences of three billion people, the total size of the human race
in 1960. Just imagine a unified global audience of that size, at least
for the final. And what is bringing all these people together? Sport.
In the end there is infinite scope for us to tell each other stories or
sing songs, but not for the number of washing machines or
computers we can sell each other.
Its a less utopian version of Keynes idea. He wrote an essay,
Economic possibilities for our grandchildren (Keynes 1930)
where he said that in a century there wont be a need for
economics any more. Its such a boring, miserable preoccupation.
We can solve all our economic problems and then get onto the
interesting stuff which expands rather than diminishes us, art and
the like. We might end up with an economy as intellectually and
artistically enriching as that of the Australian Aborigines.
What interests me -- and interested Mauss and Polanyi -- is the
extension of society beyond its local base by means of markets and
money. How do we get drawn into social fields of increasing scope
and interdependence, especially though exchanges involving
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money, and with what consequences? I approach the definition of

a commodity in a series of stages: as a useful thing that is made
available for others and transferred in any of a number of ways. I
also consider, as Lvi-Strauss (1949) does, that the earliest
commodities could be persons circulating between groups. I then
go on to division of labour, that is, increasing specialization that can
have various sources linked to personal transfers such as gifts,
barter or rents paid to known individuals. The next level is
exchange at negotiated prices or markets, then money as a medium
of exchange. The important thing about money, as it extends its
reach beyond people who know each other, is that its value has to
be impersonal, at least at this stage of development, because it
brings people together who dont know each other, so it cant be
based on personal values. Then money becomes a unit of account,
store of wealth and means of payment. Eventually it becomes
capital. According to Marx, after its use for purposes of usury and
trade, capital employs productive labour which takes us more or
less to where Victorian capitalism was.
What would we have to add in order to bring Marx up to date?
Services could soon outweigh goods in the world market. The new
dominance of cultural commodities provides some evidence of the
economys object reverting to production of human beings rather
than things. The most important commodities are ideas
(intellectual property) rather than things; and money is seen to be
information to an increasing degree. Finally, to speak of the world
market that lies in ruins at the moment, commodities are
secondary contracts which have nothing to do with the transfer of
things or even services between people, but are just bets on the
future value of these secondary contracts or derivatives as they are
usually known.
This is a just-so story, a bourgeois myth about the teleology of
exchange and money, which Marx uses to construct his argument
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in Capital. I dont claim much more for it than that. But every stage
in this quasi-historical account of the progress of social exchange is
still with us. We still do a lot for ourselves; we cook for our
families, we make gifts, we use cash and so on. Whatever might be
the leading edge of the abstraction of social labour at any given
time, it does not replace the others, but perhaps reorganizes their
relative priority. In the article, I show at greater length how Marxs
theory of the commodity and Mausss (1925) theory of the gift are
not alternatives (Gregory 1982), but mutually compatible, as long
as we understand that society in a given place and time is always
constituted by a plurality of economic forms.
We now confront the apotheosis of capital ways of making
money with money that are detached from people really do (Hart
2000). So our problem today is what to do now that politics and
people have been removed from the circuit of value. Even so, this
new economy is also a dialectical process that allows new forms
of concrete social interaction to emerge through the medium of the
abstract social forms that are being created. To give an example, I
once serviced my website in Bangalore. The guy wants to show me
a new idea for the design. We get onto Skype, him with his
computer, me with mine. He puts stuff in that I can see
immediately. I make modifications that he can see immediately.
Its more or less what we can do with each other in the same room,
but amplified by the fact that there are two computers, not just one.
So, rather than one of us looking over the shoulder at what the
other is doing, each of us is using the resources of our own
computer to develop a conversation about what this website should
look like. We are doing this in real time, I cant smell him, but it is
getting pretty close. The hot trend these days is for digital
intimacy. Work it out.
The digital revolution in communications, which has only just
begun, has significance in human history comparable to the
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invention of agriculture, except that we are the primitive digging

stick operators who are scratching around in the earth without a
clue that it all ends up as Chinese civilization. But what we do has
enormous consequences for those who come later. We could
screw everything up right now. Future generations are going to be
interested in us because of the consequences of what we do for
what they can do. We should realise that we are stumbling into this
moment of history, bringing with us a whole baggage of ancient and
confused attitudes, without any clear notion of where it is going to
go. Somehow we have to come to terms with that.

Bridges between commoditization and the human economy

There are at least four points where the preceding discourse could
be applied to the human economy project.
The first and most obvious point is that the economy is not just
one thing or, as Margaret Thatcher used to say, There is no
alternative (abbreviated as TINA). One of neoliberal orthodoxys
absolutisms is that there is only one way to go and anyone who
doesnt do that is condemned to the dustbin of history. The
commoditization discourse shows that economy is always many
things. One of our aims in the human economy project is to
promote the idea of the plural economy and we rely heavily on
Marcel Mauss and Karl Polanyi in that respect. Certainly the best
interpretation of The Gift is that Mauss was trying to show that
there are still many economic forms living side by side in our
society (Hart 2007). So we dont need a stages theory of history or
a revolutionary leap into the dark. Our task is to give whatever
forms we encounter a new direction, emphasis and combination.
The second conclusion refers to my earlier point that we should
understand neoliberalism as a counter-revolution against the only
time in history when the object of economic policy was to improve
the lives of most citizens, the social democracy created after the
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Second World War. Everything makes sense if we think of

neoliberalism as a class revolution against that (Harvey 2005). One
less satisfactory aspect of Marxs value theory was his relegation of
quality into the background in order to place emphasis on
quantitative social abstraction. I can best make my point through
the example of higher education in Britain and more recently
France. In both places, but not only there, there has been a
pseudo-marketization of evaluation of performance, a shift towards
quantity against what was still, when I entered the profession, what
Max Weber would have called a status honour that we had of
supplying a public service based on qualitative values that lent
themselves to our notion of our own integrity as a class and even
our human integrity more generally.
I know that one of the functions of this market bureaucracy is
simply to proletarianize academics to get us on the back foot,
intimidated and subordinate to a more centralized administration.
But it is also more deeply a rejection of the qualities of social
democracy which actually engineered the full expansion of the
universities up to the 1970s. Those qualities expressed what public
service was supposed to be for. Lots of academics dont
understand why the value of what they produce is so readily
overridden by these absurd calculations. But maybe the point of it
all is to destroy the modern project of education, to undermine the
qualities of public service that it represents. I cant imagine any
other reason why President Sarkozy should say, when visiting a
school, The only person I want to talk to here is the janitor. The
issue of quality and quantity needs to be opened up again and that
is a very obvious case where quantification has been used to
undermine the status honour of a group of people who might have
had something to offer society, but no longer can.
My third point is about the digital revolution as a stage in the
machine revolution. Marx was the first economist to recognize that
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machines were an important part of the modern economy. Just as

machine production of textiles generated a radical cheapening of
socially necessary labour time, so too the Edison phase of the late
nineteenth century electricity, electrical machines, electric grids
led to a radical cheapening of a wide range of goods. The moment
we are living through should be understood as a radical cheapening
of the cost of information transfers. Its main social consequence is
the war over intellectual property. For example, you may think that
Sony makes machines, that they make their money from selling flat
screen TVs, PlayStation, Walkman and the like; but 75% of their
revenues come from DVDs. These are not goods produced for
profit through sales, they are rents from making films like SpiderMan. Making a film and showing it in cinemas is classical capitalist
production for profit; but now the real money comes from rents
based on holding the exclusive right to distribute copies of this
stuff. And of course the copies may be reproduced without cost by
anyone.
So we are in a huge global war over piracy (Johns 2009). It wont go
away because capital is becoming increasingly dependent on this
source of revenue. The question of rent vs. profit is crucial. There
was a moment in history when the best way to make real money
was to sell something you made that cost less than your
competitors products, whether it was clothes, cars or whatever.
Throughout history, wealth was most reliably acquired through
mechanisms of distribution, which means using political power to
gain rents or simply to steal from people. In world history the basic
recipe was: You want to get ahead, get a gun. And that is still the
case in many places. So the industrial revolution that Marx was
writing about was one where people like Josiah Wedgewood made
their pile by producing nice pots cheaper than anyone else in the
world. Now we have reverted to a form of capitalism where the
chief source of revenue is to use political force to secure monopoly
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revenues from rents on things like CDs and DVDs. As we know,

information wants to be free; so there is a massive value revolution
going on as a result of the development of the digital media. One
of the reasons why the focus of the next stage of the digital
revolution will be mobile phones is that they have a built-in means
of payment and the internet doesnt. In this context, we also
encounter advocates of the gift economy, who push the idea that
we should just give things away, that we are now moving into a
regime of abundance, not scarcity. This is one more area where the
dispute over value and its forms now takes place. I still think that
reconciling Marx and Mauss is central to any project of building a
human economy out of all that.
Finally, of course, there is the issue of globalization and the critique
of its current forms, now known as alter-globalization (Pleyers
2010). This takes us back to the World Social Forum and the idea
of seeking to globalize by different means than those of
neoliberalism. A great deal has already been achieved. David
Graeber, in another of his hats as a direct action ethnographer
(Graeber 2009), claims that the alter-globalization movement
confronted and defeated the International Monetary Fund at some
point. The movement does in any case open up another level of
our plural economy, namely that we have to find ways of
combining local and national organizations, regional structures like
the EU and global networks if we aspire to a human economy.

Conclusion
So what can we say about the value of a theory of value? Value
theory lends the appearance of unity to disparate inquiries; and it
adds significance at the expense of specificity. There are many
value theories, so you have to pick and choose. Their value is
relative to your question. So, rather than oppose Marx to Marshall
or to anyone else who you think has a rival value theory, perhaps
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the best strategy which I have rather imperfectly tried to outline

to you today is to find out what each of these theories is
particularly good for. This is likely to be less than their protagonists
claim for them, but a selection could still be useful for your project.

The Human Economy was compiled without explicit reference to

value theory as such. So too was the text book I wrote on economic
anthropology with Chris Hann (Hann and Hart 2011). Perhaps
value theory may be a way of linking issues that would otherwise be
just a series of empirical generalizations. No doubt this conference
on ideas of value will allow a bunch of anthropologists to generate a
rich collection of papers which apparently have more to do with
each other than would otherwise seem to be the case.
The two indispensable values of our civilization, which I hope have
come through in my descriptions of the human economy project,
are democracy and science, that is, the aspiration to achieve selfgovernment by the people using knowledge of how the world really
works, which requires a scientific outlook. So the highest value for
me is to allow open up public debate about value. In that respect, I
find a measure of convergence with Amartya Sen (1999).

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