“René Girard’s hypothesis is crucial for understanding the nature of human institutions and the logic of their functioning. According to this hypothesis, institutions arise from the violence of human desire and their normalizing effect on it arises from their external relationship to the clash of conflicting desires” (Aglietta and Orléan 2002, p. 15).

Utility and use value are two complementary processes: utility is the process of individual calculation that creates culture-society, and use value is the process of social choice that creates the active power of the individual.

“…An order arising from the separate decisions of many individuals on the basis of different information cannot be determined by a common scale of the relative importance of different ends. … Order is desirable not for keeping everything in place but for generating new powers that would otherwise not exist” (Hayek 1988-2022, vol. 1, p. 79).

Use value is not a sum of occasional utilities; it is the socially necessary set of existence values. The history of production and exchange has consisted of the normalization or averaging of utilities, their transformation into socially necessary use values. In order for grain, cattle, precious metals, etc. to be transformed into use values, they had to become abstractions of utility. The end point of this process of social abstraction is commodities, exchange values, and money.

In Marx’s analysis of commodity production, commodities resulting from productive activities are opposed to immediate producers. Commodities, or dead labor, dominate living labor, or the workers themselves. To analyze human history in a broader perspective than commodity production, a generalization of concepts is necessary. We generalize the concept of labor to the concept of activity (action), the concept of commodity to the result of an activity (result of an action), thus eliminating the opposition between labor and commodity and uniting them in the concept of meaning.

Marx also distinguished between the activity that creates use values, or concrete labor, and the activity that creates exchange values, or abstract labor, in which the characteristics of specific types of labor disappear:

“If then we leave out of consideration the use value of commodities, they have only one common property left, that of being products of labor. But even the product of labor itself has undergone a change in our hands. If we make abstraction from its use value, we make abstraction at the same time from the material elements and shapes that make the product a use value; we see in it no longer a table, a house, yarn, or any other useful thing. Its existence as a material thing is put out of sight. Neither can it any longer be regarded as the product of the labor of the joiner, the mason, the spinner, or of any other definite kind of productive labor. Along with the useful qualities of the products themselves, we put out of sight both the useful character of the various kinds of labor embodied in them, and the concrete forms of that labor; there is nothing left but what is common to them all; all are reduced to one and the same sort of labor, human labor in the abstract” (Marx and Engels 1975-2004, vol. 35, p. 48).

By abstracting from specific kinds of labor, we do not create a new kind of labor. Abstract labor and its products do not exist in themselves; they are found in concrete labor processes and their products. But if concrete labor creates use values and commodities, then abstract labor creates exchange values and money. As we have shown, use value is not an individual utility but a socially necessary set of existence values. Use value is, so to speak, a prologue to a commodity in demand on the market and its exchange value. For a commodity to have an exchange value it should have a use value, that is, satisfy socially necessary needs. Commodities are wealth because they accumulate both use and exchange values.

We will distinguish between the multiplicity and the mass of meanings. The multiplicity of meanings consists of a set of meanings. In terms of commodities, these could be: two rolls of cloth, three bulls, ten tons of steel, etc. The mass of meanings is the set of cultural bits contained in a given multiplicity of meanings. Concrete labor creates commodities, abstract labor defines their mass. As Marx said, the abstract labor that forms the substance of value is homogeneous labor. However, since at the time of Marx there was neither information theory nor the concept of the bit, he had to measure abstract labor in terms of labor time:

“A use value, or useful article, therefore, has value only because human labor in the abstract has been embodied or materialized in it. How, then, is the magnitude of this value to be measured? Plainly, by the quantity of the value-creating substance, the labor, contained in the article. The quantity of labor, however, is measured by its duration, and labor time in its turn finds its standard in weeks, days, and hours” (Marx and Engels 1975-2004, vol. 35, pp. 48-9).

Marx measured the exchange value of a product by the amount of labor that was socially necessary to produce it, and he measured the amount of labor by its duration: “The labor time socially necessary is that required to produce an article under the normal conditions of production, and with the average degree of skill and intensity prevalent at the time” (Marx and Engels 1975-2004, vol. 35, p. 49). Since it is obvious that more complex labor creates more value than simpler labor of the same duration, he reduced complex labor to simple labor by applying a multiplier:

“Skilled labor counts only as simple labor intensified, or rather, as multiplied simple labor, a given quantity of skilled being considered equal to a greater quantity of simple labor. Experience shows that this reduction is constantly being made. A commodity may be the product of the most skilled labor, but its value, by equating it to the product of simple unskilled labor, represents a definite quantity of the latter labor alone” (Marx and Engels 1975-2004, vol. 35, p. 54).

Marx did not know, and could not have known, that there is no multiplier that can reduce a more complex meaning to a simpler one. Only later in the 20th century was it shown by information theorists that there is no such algorithm that could eliminate “redundant” figurae and compress the meaning s to the minimal action s* to find out the complexity of s:

“The difference between the length of a string L(s) and its algorithmic entropy K(s) can be thought of as a kind of “algorithmic redundancy.” It’s a measure of how many extra bits we use to write s rather than s*, its shortest description. When we go from s down to s*, we squeeze out all that redundancy, leaving none in s*. That’s what makes it algorithmically random. … A program that could do perfect data compression—that could convert any string s into its minimal description s*—would be a very useful thing. But as we will see, such a program is impossible. … The problem here is that there is no program k that can compute algorithmic entropy. K(s) is an uncomputable function” (Schumacher 2015, pp. 241-7).

Since there is no algorithm that would reduce complex labor to simple labor, time cannot be a measure of abstract labor. However, different activities and their results can be reduced to a common equivalent, if not through the concept of time, then through the concept of cultural bits. Exchange value is measured not by the duration of time but by the amount of cultural bits contained in a set of use values. Use values are socially necessary existence values; exchange values is the socially necessary amount of cultural bits embodied in these values. Hereinafter, by value we mean exchange value in the context of use values, unless otherwise specified. Meanings became value as episodic exchange has turned into regular one, as small communities cohered into larger societies, as social necessity evolved.