A Plant-Labour Theory of Value

Thom Osborn prefers the following proposal for a new money system to Robert Swan's 'Berkshares', local money based on the value of wood, which featured in the Encyclopaedia of Social Inventions (ISI, 1990, page 66).

My proposal is for a theory of value based on plant labour.

There has been a crucial change in the world, as the limits to resources have become apparent. Natural resources are no longer the 'gifts of nature' which they were held to be by both capitalist and Marxist economists.

There is in fact a simple way of crediting nature with the introduction of a source of value. It is to adopt plant labour as a basic unit of value.

Plant labour can be quantified in terms of the work that a plant does in splitting a molecule of water with the absorption of energy from sunlight. The chemical energy of the hydrogen and oxygen molecules is greater than that of the corresponding water molecule. This difference is what brings the energy of the sun into our global system. Plants use it to build their own substance, and it is the ultimate process by which all low entropy, or organising energy, becomes available for human, and all other, animal use.

There exists, therefore, a unit of work in terms of the excess of chemical energy in hydrogen and oxygen molecules over that in water molecules. We could agree to a convention making this unit, or some multiple of it to give it a larger size, the basic unit of value.

This would solve a number of problems.

First, it would provide an answer to the long search for a standard unit of value. It would satisfy Ricardo's criteria for such a measure. These are: 'that it should itself have value, and that this value should itself be invariable'. What this implies is that it would be a definite entity with a measure of value intrinsic to itself, and not dependent on the price.

Second, it would similarly be a unit independent of speed of work, skill or productivity.

Third, it could be related to a number of other existing measures of energy, such as electrical energy, heat energy, and lifting and pushing energy; and therefore to many actual physical operations that are carried out in the course of work.

Fourth, because it could be related precisely to such existing measures of energy, it could therefore also be related to actual quantities of energy-storing substances, such as oil, gas, petrol and coal, as well as other substances which absorb energy in their synthesis or in their use.

In fact, it could form the basic of an entropy-based economics rather than a money-based economics. The value of capital would become related to entropy. Maintaining the state of organisation of our organism earth as a system, means maintaining its entropy balance. It is only when we have an entropy-based economics that we can calculate the real cost to our global eco-system.

(Swan's choice of wood, by contrast, for his Berkshares [Ed: see introduction, above] is in fact a very difficult one to give any kind of constant or universal value to at all, since different woods have very different energy-content and any decision other than a market decision as to what value to give to wood is purely arbitrary. My suggestion, however, takes a very fundamental energy quantity, ie the chemical energy that is released when a molecule is split into its constituent hydrogen and oxygen.)

Thom Osborn, 14 Chesterton Road, London E13 8BA (tel 081 470 9832). A fuller account of this proposal appears in the first edition of 'How To Save The World' edited by Nicholas Albery and Yvo Peeters, published by the Fourth World Trust (1982, ISBN 0 9508067 0 6).