Every Revolution is a Value Revolution

The Rebirth of an Integral Left. Video conversation and guest article by Franz Nahrada.

< “ For more than two centuries, much of the Left has shared with liberal modernity the same underlying ontology: nature as an external object, society as the privileged realm of history, and production as humanity’s defining activity. The struggle was over who should own and distribute the products of labour—not over the deeper question of how life itself is reproduced. A regenerative perspective changes the focus entirely. It recognizes that human labour is only one moment within much larger processes of regeneration: ecological, social, cultural and cognitive. Wealth is not created by labour alone. It emerges from living systems that continually reproduce the conditions under which labour, knowledge and society can exist at all. “ >

This contribution has three parts:

• an introduction where I summarize my recent travels to European commons projects

• a video conversation with Franz Nahrada that combines an introduction to the thematic of a need for a ‘integral left’, and a discussion of the ‘value revolution’

• a detailed text contribution by Franz Nahrada on the nature of value and how it is related to an ‘integral left’.

You may want to ‘absorb’ them in the reverse order, i.e. start with the text, watch the video, and then explore the links to the commons projects. Please note that I strongly recommend you click on my slide presentation, which is a review of the macro-historical context for the value revolution that we discuss here.

The Context: Visiting European Commons Projects

Dear friends,

I have been on a rare and intensive lecture tour, something I have not done since 2019, when Covid broke out. This trip is has brought me

• to Bochum, Germany, where I participated in a summer school by the Max Planck Institute on Security and Privacy, (see for the program here).

I would like to particularly invite you to check out my final presentation in slide form, an exercise I have not done for a few years, which summarizes the whole p2p/commons approach.

It adds two key slides illustrating the priorities of our current transition moment:

* from P2P (referring to the individual peer association logic) to P4P (referring to alliances of regenerative community projects)

* the shift from ‘Seed Form’ observation to the Reconstruction Paradigm. The latter refers to a wholesale reorganization of the P2P Foundation wiki content around the new paradigm of Reconstruction, check it out here: https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Category:Reconstruction

The two particular slides are copied from the recent article by Aline Frankfort, which reacted to our last article on the Valley of the Commons project, which I will attend on August 23 and after.

This is the summary of the places I visited, while giving lectures:

• To Belgium, to visit a collapse-aware community project, led by Anne Billen and Neil Davidson (And Now What). In my home country, I also visited l’Arbre qui Pousse, a ‘transition laboratory’, with many enthusiastic side projects.

• To France, to talk to an audience that consisted of three different movements, about the very topic of a ‘Value Revolution’.

  • i.e. ​Planetizen, which thinks about new forms of planetary citizenship,

  • Plurality, which thinks about new democratic tooling for the world as a Pluriverse, and

  • RadicalXchange, ​RxC , which looks at how market based mechanisms and incentives could be used for the common good

• To Styria, Austria, where I joined a local bioregional project organized by Franz Nahrada and associates, in Bad Radkersburg. The city is located near Slovenia but also in a five-nations region where bioregionalists aim to cooperate across borders to protect the ‘Amazon of Europe’, a confluence of rivers that join the Danube. I visited really interesting places like the Farm Lab , as well as the Pachamama Center, a ‘sustainable living’ project, in the nearby hills of Slovenia.

• As of tomorrow, August 6, I will continue my travels to Austria by moving to the CommonsHub, one hour south of Vienna, to attend

  • the Crypto Commons Alliance week, which starts on August 16, followed by my attendance at the

  • Valley of the Commons ‘pop-up village’ learning event, where I will teach Civilizational Transition dynamics.

The Video on the Value Revolution

Franz Nahrada is an old friend, active in the Global Villages movement, which invited me for a seminar on 5-nations bioregional cooperation in the context of the emergence of commons-based seed forms, a theoretical and historical background that was not yet well known in Styria, and was worth sharing with the local audience.

This video replaces my live participation in the Portapalooza philosophy festival, which takes (took) place on August 5 and 6, on the twin themes of the heritage of both Deleuze and the ‘Early Marx’. I had to cancel my own live contribution on the topic of ‘The Rebirth of the Integral Left’ due to transportation issues. In the first half of this video, I explain how the P2P Foundation, which I created in 2005, was explicitly framed in that context. Integrative refers to philosophical traditions that place matter and spirit on the same level, and see reality in an integrated fashion, why the left orientation refers to the need for a deepening of human emancipation.

Franz Nahrada continues in the second half by focusing on the need for a Value Revolution, which can only happen if we understand what ‘Value’ really is, especially in the current context of a capitalist society.”

This is the Youtube description of the video:

“The dialogue focus on the fundamental nature of “integral” multiperspectivity, allowing us to keep in mind the real and the imaginal at the same time, whilst focusing on the question whether after the decay and death of the industrial left and the obvious flaws of identity politics a new value system is possible that enables us to found cosmolocal politics on a cooperation of humans, nature and AI, while recognizing the spiritual dimension. “Every revolution is a revolution in value systems” is a perspective that does not replace, but enriches Marx’ theory of modes of production.

Franz Nahrada analyzes the contribution of the German “value-critique” to the deciphering of the extractive nature of the “value-form” which is at the core of capitalist society. Only if we understand it completely, will we be able to overcome it.”

The following article quoting Loren Goldner, will give you more historical background on the first part of the video, referring to the need for a ‘integral left’:

Loren Goldner on the Cosmobiological Tradition vs the Enlightenment

This is the gist of his historical argument, that a ‘mechanistic Enlightenment’ derailed the more integrative tradition of Renaissance thinking, and that the mainstream left became more statist due to this fork in the road. Thus the idea of an ‘integral left’ is to re-open that earlier historical thread:

“Stated briefly, the spirit of Marx’s underlying world view is more truly the direct heir, the “realization” of the sensuousness of figures such as Shakespeare, the Brueghels and Paracelsus, than of any subsequent phase of the Anglo-French Enlightenment and its aftermath. One might well ask what such a critique of the Enlightenment, from the vantage point of Renaissance-Reformation “cosmobiology” means today, in political terms. What it means is this. From the French Revolution until the 1970’s, the dominant currents of the Western left, and the movements it influenced in the colonial and post- colonial world, were indeed heirs of the Enlightenment. They did this because, in practice if not always in rhetoric, they inherited the tasks of completing the bourgeois revolution, tasks for which the Enlightenment, as the most advanced outlook of that revolution, was eminently suitable. First Social Democracy, from the 1860’s onward, and then Stalinism, from the 1920’s, took over a large part of the Enlightenment attitudes toward science, the state, technology, heavy industry, rationality, nature, a linear view of progress, philosophy and religion. That view was at bottom atomistic and mechanistic, even when dressed up as “dialectical materialism”. Their statist development ideology and strategy was most successful in countries where no liberal bourgeoisie was strong enough to fight in its own name for the Enlightenment program against pre-capitalist social relations. Social Democracy and later Stalinism took over the full weight of Enlightenment statism of the continental variety. This was not surprising, since they gained influence mainly in the same backward countries in which Enlightenment statism had been successful, for essentially the same reasons. With the virtually universal spread of state bureaucracy for the century up to ca. 1975, whether in liberal democracy, Social Democracy, Stalinism or Third World nationalism, this Enlightenment ideology was rooted practically in a vast global stratum of middle-class state civil servants, whatever else they may have disagreed about. Not accidentally, their theory of history, when they felt they needed one, was articulated by the state civil servants par excellence Kant, Fichte and Hegel. The crisis of the Enlightenment today is the world-wide crisis of that state civil service stratum, welfare-statist, Stalinist or Third Worldist, and its inability after the mid-1970’s to continue to develop the productive forces and to advance their Enlightenment program, something they had done rather successfully in the previous century, particularly from 1945 to 1975. The international left is in crisis because it uncritically took over the Enlightenment, and thereby confused the tasks of the bourgeois revolution with those of the socialist revolution; the left’s claims to fight for social emancipation got completely entwined with the state bureaucracy and civil service, which are irreducible obstacles to full social emancipation.”

If you are interested in the full transcripts, here are links to two ‘improved’ versions:

• https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Rebirth_of_the_Integral_Left

• https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Value,_Labour,_Commons,_and_the_Regeneration_of_Life

A Written Contribution by Franz Nahrada

Michel Bauwens has argued that every major historical transformation is also a transformation of value systems. I would like to take this one step further, by asking a different question: What kind of value is capitalism actually producing?

The young Marx offers a surprisingly radical clue. In the James Mill Excerpts, long before Capital, he describes exchange not as a harmonious process of mutual benefit but as a form of reciprocal appropriation. He even uses the word „mutual plundering“. Behind the apparent equality of exchange lies a relation in which each party seeks to extract as much as possible from the other by economic means. Value appears from the outset as an essentially extractive social relation.

This is precisely why Robert Kurz and the German Wertkritik (Value Critique) insisted that the problem cannot be reduced to a moral opposition between “good” use value and “bad” exchange value. Use values under capitalism are themselves produced within the logic of value accumulation. The issue is not merely that exchange distorts otherwise innocent production; rather, the production of wealth itself becomes subordinated to the endless expansion of abstract value.

From this perspective, Michel’s distinction between extractive and regenerative forms of value acquires a deeper meaning. The ecological crisis is not simply the result of wrong technologies or wrong incentives. It reflects the historical limits of a form of value that can reproduce itself only through the continuous extraction of labour, energy and nature.

Robert Kurz pushes this insight even further. He argues that we should not contrast a “good” use value with a “bad” exchange value. Even use value is already an abstraction. It presents the commodity merely as something useful for an isolated buyer, while suppressing the dense web of ecological, social and historical relations from which every object emerges. The forests, the soils, the rivers, the knowledge accumulated over generations, the forms of cooperation, the unpaid care work, the metabolic exchanges with nature—all these disappear behind the seemingly innocent question: What is the quality that makes this object good for me?

The commodity thus abstracts twice.

* As exchange value, it reduces the richness of the world to quantities of abstract labour.

* As use value, it reduces the richness of the world to abstract utility for an isolated consumer.

In both cases, the living relationships that constitute real wealth disappear from view. A regenerative economy therefore cannot simply produce different commodities. It must begin with a different concept of wealth. Wealth is not the accumulation of objects, but the flourishing of relationships: between people, between communities, and between humanity and the living Earth. The value of a forest is not exhausted by its timber, nor the value of knowledge by its market price, nor the value of care by its wage. Their essential contribution lies in their capacity to sustain and regenerate the conditions of life itself.

This, I believe, is where Michel’s distinction between extractive and regenerative value reaches beyond economics. It points towards a civilizational shift: from valuing what can be extracted to valuing what enables life to reproduce and flourish. Only from that perspective can we begin to imagine a post-capitalist theory of value. Capitalism measures value by what can be extracted. A regenerative society would recognize value by what can be regenerated.

This may also point towards the rebirth of an integral Left.

For more than two centuries, much of the Left has shared with liberal modernity the same underlying ontology: nature as an external object, society as the privileged realm of history, and production as humanity’s defining activity. The struggle was over who should own and distribute the products of labour—not over the deeper question of how life itself is reproduced.

A regenerative perspective changes the focus entirely. It recognizes that human labour is only one moment within much larger processes of regeneration: ecological, social, cultural and cognitive. Wealth is not created by labour alone. It emerges from living systems that continually reproduce the conditions under which labour, knowledge and society can exist at all.

This does not abandon Marx. It radicalizes him. It extends the critique of exploitation to the critique of extraction itself—not only the extraction of surplus labour, but of soil fertility, biodiversity, care, knowledge, community and ultimately the Earth’s regenerative capacities.

An integral Left would therefore no longer define emancipation simply as the liberation of labour, but as the liberation of life’s capacity to regenerate itself.

The young Marx envisioned communism as the restoration of humanity’s conscious relationship with its own social nature. Today, in the age of ecological breakdown, this vision must be expanded once more: towards the conscious regeneration of the web of life of which humanity itself is a part.