I do not normally respond to people I have respect for, and consider, on most counts, a genuine activist, but I have to take issue with Mr. Rancourt’s recent article about the validity of Jordan Peterson’s notion of dominance hierarchy.
Western high-tech civilization can never fully enter the post-modern era without eradicating civilization of bourgeois-state-capitalism, namely, the meta-narrative of bourgeois-capitalism, that encrusted jewel, dead center, within the crown of the Enlightenment, which continues to infect and poison high-tech society with a most horrible sickness, insatiable avarice, an avarice for unlimited power and money.
One of the primary economic paradoxes that has always perked the curiosity of both bourgeois and Marxist political economists alike can be neatly encapsulated in a notorious quip uttered by the famous New York Yankee’s catcher and manager, Yogi Berra, who, once upon a time, famously pronounced: “a nickel isn’t worth a dime, anymore”.
According to Friedrich Engels, Anti-Duhring, “the only value known in economics is the value of commodities”.1 Commodities are products produced, not for individual consumption by their producers, but products produced for general public consumption.
The theory of conceptual-commodity-value-management is a theory, which descends right down to the depths and to the core of post-industrial post-modern bourgeois-state-capitalism; i.e., its bourgeois economy and its bourgeois financial institutions. So much so that today, the theory of conceptual-commodity-value-management is foundational, to such a radical extent, that it is the logic by which the central banks of the world’s global financial superpowers function and operate.
The theory of conceptual-commodity-value-management is the theory that prices, values and wages are based on what an individual, an entity and/or an enterprising alliance can get away with. That is, the arbitrary price, value and wage that these controlling individuals, entities and/or enterprising alliances are able to command and realize on the open market through various network exclusionary and collusionary practices.
Within post-industrial post-modern bourgeois-state-capitalism, value is no longer based on labor and/or on labor theories of value such as Marx’s theory. In fact, all post-industrial post-modern societies to various degrees have shed their modern labor theories of value and surplus-value; i.e., theories where labor-time and cost of production are the basis of price and value determinations.
