The Way Out of This Mess

Why We Must Decommodify

From the left, I will be asked to read Marx, and see that communism is the only way to environmental sustainability, from the right I will be accused of being a communist, who doesn't understand human nature. Both are missing what I'm talking about I have not discussed a way to make sure this system is governed well all I am here to do in this book is lay out the means of production in this society.

To understand why this is the solution requires that we understand the problem. To understand why we must decommidfy, we must first understand the effects of commodification. To understand how we are going to automate, we have to look at why we aren't. To understand why we must switch to essentialism, we must understand the disastrous effects of consumerism both on society and the environment.

Commodification for our purposes is the process by which materials are transformed into consumer products. It involves branding, marketing, and a lot of other things. Now it doesn't necessarily mean manufacturing like most people would tell you. A foraged apple or gift are not products. Consumer products are things traded in a market. By this process of turning materials into products, products are given another type of value on top of their usefulness to the environment or humans, they're given exchange value. The concept of exchange value originates in Marxian economic theory. Exchange value is what we might be thought of as relative price, it's the value of whatever the product is worth relative to other products. It's the value that fluctuates on the market. This value is not dictated only by supply and demand as Adam Smith would have you believe; it's dictated by marketing, power, randomness, and supply, and demand. While supply and demand do fluctuate, they are no possible markets where there is zero or manipulation or zero statistical noise (randomness) ((because everyone is also trying to manipulate the market simultaneously this leads to the averaging out of everyone's desired effect into a statical noise effect or randomness)) about the current value of a given commodity. Because of this in every market, the exchange value can deviate from use-value widely.

To put this in mathematical terms we can think of exchange value as use-value*current supply or demand(one type of noise)*current manipulation(another type of noise). This means at any time the price of a commodity is affected by "market dynamics" causing the prices of things to have in essence little reality beyond speculation, and manipulation.

What this looks like mathematically is at first a graph of use-value which increases over time because the growing human population makes all resources more scarce and therefore more valuable as time goes on.

The price of any commodity can fluctuate however based on supply and demand. But it tracks with its inherent use-value.
To represent the fact that it fluctuates we can represent this with a sin function, to represent the fact that it's based on use-value which rises over time we can add it to the original use value function.

However, we don't know exactly what supply and demand are going to be at any particular moment to it's not the line we are interested in but the bounds of supply and demand.

Now we can see that due to pure supply and demand the exchange value of a product and its inherent use-value aren't strongly correlated. But supply and demand aren't the only things that contribute to price. There's also pure price manipulation, such as not accounting for certain externalities, shipping off labour to places with different rules, and then there's also just pure price manipulation. These effects create a different and more impactful form of noise. This noise is roughly proportional to the exchange value of a product.

Again just like with supply, we don't know the exact vector of manipulation at any given moment, we can however but the upper and lower bounds of possible manipulation at any given moment.

When you put all these things together you get this.

This graph shows that past a certain critical point, the exchange value becomes more dominated by manipulation than by anything else. And it's not like you can refuse to participate in manipulation, it's a prisoner's dilemma. If you don't someone else in the market will and then due to the competitive nature of capitalism you'll be muscled out of the industry.

On top of that, I minimized the extent of the manipulative behavior because supply and demand can also be manipulated in and of themselves. This means that in a market of commodities you have to overproduce so that you can also participate in the manipulation of supply and demand because it's the prisoner's dilemma again if you don't someone will.

This in turn causes waste on the side of producers who use exchange value as an input to determine the amount that needs to be produced. Because underproducing decreases your overall profit margin due to economies of scale, commodification encourages overproduction and waste.

Not to mention that this system can only be protected through violence. If people were to ignore the exchange value of commodities, then the whole system collapses. Therefore every transaction is made with the implicit threat of violence.

This is why we must decommodify