Bayānī Political Economy as Critique of Marxian LTV (The Labor Theory of Value)
Building on the former essay, The Four Elements and the End of Political Economy,[1] if the Bayān institutes a juridico-ontological prohibition on the buying and selling of the Four Elements—air, fire, water, and earth—then it does not merely modify or radicalize Marxism; it exposes a foundational limit internal to Marx’s own critique of political economy. Marx’s labor theory of value, as expounded in Capital Volume I,[2] is a formidable dismantling of bourgeois mystification. By locating value not in divine order, natural scarcity, or subjective preference but in socially necessary abstract labor, Marx decisively secularizes political economy. Yet this very achievement reveals its own boundary: Marx’s critique remains historical and social rather than ontological. He unmasks exploitation within a world whose most basic ontic permissions—what may be owned, alienated, and abstracted—are never themselves placed on trial. The Bayān does precisely that very thing.
Marx insists that labor alone creates value, while nature merely supplies use-values as a “free gift” to capital. This formulation is analytically powerful, but it silently presupposes the very metaphysical availability of nature that makes capitalism possible. Air, water, land, and energy appear as neutral substrates, awaiting labor’s impress. The Bayān shatters this neutrality. By rendering the elements inalienable, it declares them neither commodities, nor inputs, nor raw material, but sacred ontic commons. This is not an ecological ethic appended to political economy; it is a pre-economic veto that invalidates the conditions under which abstract labor can arise at all. Where Marx shows how surplus value is stolen from labor, the Bayān exposes a deeper expropriation that Marx leaves largely intact: the capture of the elements as legitimately ownable and therefore economically “free.”
Once this prohibition is taken seriously, the labor theory of value reveals its dependence on a prior ontological theft. Abstract labor presupposes land that can be enclosed, water that can be privatized, energy that can be monopolized, and air that can be treated as costless until it becomes a dumping ground. Marx brilliantly historicizes enclosure and primitive accumulation, but he does not fully theorize the ontological illegitimacy of these acts. The Bayān does. It denies, at the level of sacred law, the right of any regime to convert the conditions of manifestation into commodities. Labor does not found value; it participates in a prior order of being. Ontic rank precedes labor-time. The elements are not “worked upon” into value; they are the very horizons within which work appears. From this perspective, the commodity form itself becomes illicit. For Marx, the commodity is historically specific but internally coherent; it can be abolished only through a transformation of social relations. For the Bayān, the commodity form collapses at inception. If the elements cannot be bought or sold, then there can be no land market, no water market, no energy market, and no atmospheric sink. Without these, labor cannot become abstract, value cannot generalize, and capital cannot self-valorize. The world presupposed by Capital is rendered juridically impossible before exploitation even begins. Marx asks who appropriates surplus labor; the Bayān asks who authorized the appropriation of the elements in the first place.
This is where Karl Polanyi becomes an instructive bridge. In The Great Transformation (1944), Polanyi identifies land, labor, and money as “fictitious commodities”—things that are treated as commodities despite not being produced for sale. Polanyi’s insight edges toward Bayānī ground, but stops short of ontological prohibition. He diagnoses the social devastation caused by commodifying land and labor, yet frames the problem in terms of social disembedding rather than metaphysical illegitimacy. The Bayān goes further: it does not merely warn that treating the elements as commodities is destructive; it declares that such treatment is unlawful in principle. Where Polanyi sees a tragic error of modern society, the Bayān names a categorical violation of the order of being. Marx himself, especially in his late work, gestures toward this limit through the concept of the “metabolic rift.”[3] He recognizes that capitalism ruptures the metabolism between humanity and nature, exhausting soils, poisoning water, and destabilizing ecological cycles. Yet even here, the problem is framed as a contradiction within capitalism rather than as a transgression against an ontological boundary. Nature remains something whose metabolism can, in principle, be rationally managed under socialism. The Bayān refuses this managerial horizon altogether. It does not propose a better administration of nature; it withdraws nature from administration as such. The elements are not resources to be rationally planned, but sacrosanct conditions that no political economy may rightfully enclose.
This reveals what may be Marx’s most tragic limitation: labor becomes the final idol. Having abolished the theological foundations of value, Marx installs labor as its secular substance, history as its providence, and communism as its eschaton. The Bayān refuses all such substitutions. It does not replace God with labor, nor salvation with history. It insists that no created thing—neither labor, nor land, nor time—may serve as an absolute measure. Value itself is dethroned. What emerges instead is not a higher form of value, but a political economy without value as such: a regime of use, stewardship, and ontic humility grounded in the inalienability of the elements. In this sense, Bayānī political economy does not complete Marxism; it passes beneath it. Marx remains indispensable for understanding exploitation within a commodified world. The Bayān explains why that world is already illegitimate. Marx unmasks the theft of surplus labor. The Bayān unmasks the prior seizure of the conditions of existence. Where Marx aims at emancipation through the reorganization of production, the Bayān institutes liberation by amputating the very possibility of commodifying the ground of being. This is why Bayānī law is not a reform, not a socialism in the ordinary sense, nor an ecological Marxism with metaphysical embellishments, but a rival nomos altogether—one that renders racial capitalism, extractivism, and administrative domination not merely unjust, but ontologically illegal.
A Bayānī Critique of the LTV (the Labor Theory of Value)
Marx’s Labor Theory of Value (LTV) in Capital I rests on a decisive but limited move: Value is socially necessary abstract labor congealed in commodities.[4] This is already a powerful demystification of political economy. Marx strips value of its theological aura and shows it to be a historical form arising under specific social relations—namely, generalized commodity production. However, Marx brackets the question of nature at precisely the wrong depth. For him, nature appears as i. use-value substrate, ii. raw material, and iii. free gift to capital. Here labor alone is the substance of value. This is where the Bayān strikes from below.
Now, the silent presupposition of Marx’s LTV is alienable nature. Marx explicitly insists that (1) only labor creates value and (2) nature contributes use-value but not value. This makes sense within capitalist accounting—but it smuggles in a presupposition: That nature is legitimately available as a non-valuing input to labor. In other words, Marx criticizes the exploitation of labor while tacitly accepting the metaphysical availability of the elements themselves. The Bayān refuses this at the root. By declaring air, fire, water, and earth inalienable, the Bayān unequivocally states:
- These are not inputs
- They are not substrates
- They are not neutral conditions
- They are sacred ontic commons
Thus, this is not just environmentalism. It is a pre-economic ontological veto.
That said, the labor theory of value depends on a prior ontological theft. Once one sees this, the weakness becomes sharp because where Marx exposes surplus value as stolen labor time, the Bayān reveals that labor itself already stands upon a deeper expropriation: the capture of the elements as “free”. Capital can only abstract labor because (a) land is enclosed, (b) water is privatized, (c) air is treated as costless until polluted, (c) fire/energy is rendered proprietary. Marx historicizes (a) brilliantly but he under-theorizes (b–c) at the level of ontological right. In contrast, the Bayān forbids the very condition that makes abstract labor measurable in the first place. So where in Capital I abstract labor is produced by the leveling of concrete labors and their reduction to homogeneous time, the Bayānī political economy introduces something Marx cannot accommodate: Ontic rank precedes labor-time. Air, water, fire, earth are not “worked upon” into value. They are conditions of manifestation, not commodities. Thus labor does not found value, labor participates in a pre-given ontological order. So where Marx abolishes bourgeois natural theology, the Bayān abolishes economic naturalization itself altogether.
For Marx, the commodity form is historically specific but internally coherent. For the Bayān i. the commodity form is juridically broken at the root and so ii. one cannot even begin commodity production if the elements are non-alienable. This means no land market, no energy market, no water market, and no atmospheric sink. Without these labor cannot become abstract, value cannot become general, and capital cannot self-valorize. The LTV thus presupposes a world that Bayānī law renders impossible. Much of is this is due to the fact that Marx believed he had eliminated metaphysics from political economy altogether. But from a Bayānī perspective this tantamounts to (a) labor being elevated as the last sacred substance (thus made into a quasi-theological idol), (b) value becoming its secularized sacrament, and (c) material history substituting eschatology. The Bayān refuses all such substitutions. It does not replace “God” with “Labor,” “Providence” with “History” and “Salvation” with “Communism.” Instead, it says: No created thing—not labor, not land, not time—has the right to become an absolute measure.
So the weakness in Marx’s labor theory of value, exposed by the Bayān, is not a technical flaw but a foundational omission: Marx critiques exploitation within an ontologically compromised world while the Bayān renders that world unlawful before exploitation even begins. Marx asks: “Who steals the surplus?” The Bayān asks instead: “Who gave you the elements to steal with?” That is the deeper rupture.
Contra Eco-Marxism As It Is: Why the Bayān Exceeds Mere Ecological Critique
Contemporary eco-Marxism often presents itself as the point where Marx’s unfinished critique finally reaches nature. By foregrounding climate collapse, extractivism, and the metabolic rift, eco-Marxists argue that capitalism’s contradiction is no longer merely social but planetary. Yet despite its urgency, eco-Marxism remains trapped within the same ontological horizon as classical Marxism. It seeks to repair the rift, not to invalidate the regime that produced it. Nature, even here, remains an object of rational administration—something to be better planned, democratically managed, or sustainably optimized. The question eco-Marxism asks is not whether nature may be commodified, but how that commodification might be regulated or overcome through a different mode of production.
The Bayān renders this entire framework insufficient. It does not diagnose an ecological crisis within capitalism; it declares the commodification of the elements unlawful in principle. Eco-Marxism still presumes that land, water, energy, and atmosphere can be conceptually gathered under the sign of “resources,” even if they are to be held in common rather than privately owned. The Bayān refuses the category itself. Air is not a commons to be managed; it is a condition of manifestation. Water is not a public utility; it is a sacred medium of life. Earth is not land; it is ontic ground. Fire is not energy; it is transformative power. These are not political goods but metaphysical givens, and any political economy that treats them as administrable inputs—no matter how egalitarian—remains complicit in the original transgression. In other words, for the Bayān such are the original “theoretical” sins that invert metaphysical givens into political goods.
This is why Bayānī political economy cannot be reduced to ecological ethics, green socialism, or degrowth theory alone. All such projects presuppose the legitimacy of economic reason as such, merely redirecting it toward sustainability. The Bayān withdraws legitimacy from economic reason at the level of the elements themselves. It does not ask how humanity might live better with nature; it declares that humanity never possessed the right to subsume nature under value in the first place. Where eco-Marxism radicalizes Marx by extending exploitation to ecosystems, the Bayān radicalizes the problem by denying the ontological permission that makes exploitation intelligible at all.
Toward a Bayānī Theory of Use Without Value and Beyond Marx, Beneath Capital
The question may be asked, if value is dethroned, what takes its place? This is the question Marxists often pose to any critique that moves beyond value theory. The assumption is that without value, there can be no coordination, no production, no social order. The Bayān answers by dissolving the question itself. It does not replace value with another metric; it abolishes metricization at the ontological level. What emerges is not a new theory of value, but a regime of use governed by ontic rank and theo-juridical ontological prohibition.
In a Bayānī economy, use is not derivative of exchange. It is primary, situational, and bounded by sacred limits. One does not ask what something is “worth,” but whether its use violates the inalienability of the elements. Production becomes secondary to stewardship. Labor is no longer abstracted into homogeneous time, but remains concrete, local, and non-generalizable. There is no universal equivalent, because there is no permission to universalize. The prohibition on buying and selling the elements blocks the conversion of qualitative difference into quantitative equivalence—the very operation that makes value possible. Crucially, this does not entail primitivism or stagnation. The Bayān does not forbid making, building, cultivating, or transforming. It forbids ownership of conditions. One may use water, but not own it; inhabit land, but not alienate it; employ fire, but not monopolize it; breathe air, but not commodify it. Economic activity persists, but it is ontologically de-centered. It no longer expands through accumulation, but circulates within limits that cannot be crossed without venturing into metaphysical sacrilege. Growth gives way to sufficiency; accumulation gives way to maintenance; progress gives way to balance.
Here the Bayān introduces something neither Marx nor Polanyi fully conceptualized: juridical asymmetry between what may circulate and what must remain fixed. Capitalism dissolves all fixities; socialism merely redistributes them. The Bayān sanctifies certain fixities absolutely. This is why Bayānī political economy cannot be captured by the language of redistribution. Nothing is being redistributed when the elements are removed from circulation altogether. What is instituted instead is a law of non-appropriation that precedes all questions of class, ownership, and production. In this sense, Bayānī use without value is neither utopian nor managerial. It does not rely on the moral enlightenment of subjects, nor on technocratic oversight. It relies on prohibition—clear, categorical, and non-negotiable. The modern world recoils from such limits because it has made limitlessness its theology and supreme idol—its ṭāghūt. The Bayān reintroduces limit as sacred form. By doing so, it achieves something Marxism never could: it blocks the recurrence of exploitation at the level where exploitation is born, rather than endlessly chasing its social manifestations from one to the next. In other words, it breaks the wheel itself. And because the wheel is broken rather than merely slowed, domination can no longer reconstitute itself under new names. There is no return here in the guise of planning, welfare, sustainability, or “ethical” management, because the metaphysical permission that would allow such substitutions has already been revoked. What remains is not an improved economy, but a reordered field of existence in which power is denied its most basic maneuver: the conversion of what is into what may be owned. In that sense, the Bayān does not promise liberation as an outcome—it institutes it as a condition, by foreclosing in advance the very grammar through which unfreedom reproduces itself.
What thus finally distinguishes the Bayān from Marxism—classical or ecological—is not that it is more radical in its critique of capitalism, but that it is radical in a different dimension altogether. Marx exposes the injustice of surplus extraction; eco-Marxists expose the devastation of planetary metabolism. The Bayān renders the entire civilizational schema that makes both possible ontologically void. It does not promise a future reconciliation between humanity and nature through history. It institutes a present prohibition that amputates the legitimacy of value itself. In doing so, the Bayān offers not a politics of emancipation, but a law of impossibility. Certain things simply may not be done. Certain relations may not be instituted. Certain conversions—of air into rent, water into asset, land into commodity, fire into monopoly—are forbidden not because they are inefficient or unjust, but because they violate the order of being. This is why Bayānī political economy is not post-Marxist, but extra-Marxist: it operates on a plane Marx could glimpse but never enter. Capital asks how value grows. Marx asks who pays the cost. The Bayān asks why value was ever allowed to rule in the first place.
The Wretched of the Corporate State: Bayānī Prohibition and the Racialised Subject
The figure that finally emerges from a Bayānī political economy without value is not the emancipated worker of Marxist eschatology, but the wretched subject of the corporate state[5]—the one whose existence itself becomes illegible once value is dethroned. The corporate state is not merely capitalism administered by bureaucracy; it is capitalism metabolized into law, procedure, risk management, and reputational governance. It is the regime that no longer needs overt exploitation because it governs by pre-emptive classification, anticipatory containment, and administrative suspicion. Its primary antagonists are not only workers but those whose being cannot be rendered legible in value-terms at all. This is where the Bayān intersects decisively with Fanon, but also moves beyond him. Fanon diagnosed colonialism as a system that epidermalizes value, inscribing hierarchy directly onto the body of the racialised subject.[6] The corporate state perfects this logic by abstracting it: race, belief, dissent, and nonconformity are no longer marked explicitly, but encoded through “risk,” “concern,” “safeguarding,” “extremism,” or “wellbeing.” What is targeted is not labor-power but ontological surplus—that excess of being which cannot be reconciled with administrative norms. The wretched of the corporate state are not merely exploited; they are ontologically misfitting.
Bayānī prohibition clarifies why this misfitting provokes such violent response. A subject who implicitly denies the legitimacy of value—by refusing commodification of belief, speech, land, body, or lineage—poses a threat more profound than economic dissent. Such a subject calls into question the silent metaphysics of the corporate state: that everything, including human interiority, may ultimately be administered, priced, managed, optimized, or classified. The corporate state does not persecute belief as belief; it persecutes non-alienability wherever it appears. This also explains one of the reasons for the recent public attacks against us.
In this scheme, the prohibition on the buying and selling of the Four Elements reveals its political force. Air, fire, water, and earth are not merely physical referents; they are metaphors of governance. Air is speech, circulation, reputation. Water is life, care, kinship. Earth is dwelling, belonging, place. Fire is power, transformation, intensity. The corporate state seeks to regulate each of these through valuation: speech through platform metrics and reputational scores, care through institutional workflows, land through property regimes, power through licensure and monopoly. The Bayān’s refusal of elemental commodification therefore names the corporate state itself as ontologically illegitimate and so the enemy of Being. Thus, the wretched of the corporate state are those who encounter this illegitimacy directly, not as theory but as lived condition. They are the ones whose speech is flagged, whose care is bureaucratically seized, whose dwelling is rendered precarious, whose power is reframed as threat and pathologized. Unlike the proletariat of classical Marxism, they cannot be integrated through redistribution or recognition, because what they resist is not exclusion from value but subsumption by value. They do not demand inclusion; they stand as living evidence that inclusion itself is the problem.
This is why Marxism, even in its most radical forms, cannot fully account for the violence directed at such subjects. Marxist critique presumes that exploitation remains the central contradiction. But the corporate state increasingly operates beyond exploitation, through pre-emptive governance of existence itself. The Bayān reveals that this shift is not accidental: once value becomes total, it must eliminate anything that cannot be rendered commensurable. The subject who embodies non-alienability—of conscience, of kinship, of metaphysical orientation—becomes intolerable. Conversely, a Bayānī political economy reframes Fanon’s insight for the present epoch. The struggle is no longer primarily between labor and capital, but between ontological illegibility and administrative totality.
The wretched of the corporate state are not simply the poor, the unemployed, or the marginalized; they are those whose very mode of being exposes the metaphysical fraud of a system that claims universal legitimacy while depending on the commodification of everything it touches. In this sense, the Bayān does not offer redemption through revolution, nor reconciliation through policy. It offers something far more dangerous: a law of refusal that precedes politics. By sanctifying the inalienability of the elements, it sanctifies the inalienability of the subject who lives in fidelity to and with them. Such a subject cannot be governed without contradiction. The corporate state senses this instinctively, and responds with suspicion, surveillance, (mis)classification and procedural violence. The wretched of the corporate state thus stand where Marx’s proletariat never fully stood: not at the point of production, but at the fault line of being. Their struggle is not for a fairer distribution of value, but for the right to exist outside value’s jurisdiction altogether. And it is precisely here—beneath capital, beyond Marx—that the Bayān speaks with absolute clarity: not everything may be owned, not everything may be measured, not everything may be governed, and no material substance may occupy a monocausal pedestal even theoretically.
And the Light be upon those who follow the illuminations of the Guidance unto the Truth!
[2] See Capital, volume I, online, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Capital-Volume-I.pdf, esp. Chapter 1 (retrieved 25 December 2025).
[3] See Kohei Saito Capital, Nature, and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy: Karl Marx’s Eco-Socialism (Monthly Review Press: New York, 2017).
[4] Capital, volume I, ibid.
[5] See our The Wretched of the Corporate State, online https://catalogue.nla.gov.au/catalog/10197702 (retrieved 25 December 2025).
[6] For the typology, see Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth, online, https://monoskop.org/images/a/a5/Fanon_Frantz_Black_Skin_White_Masks_1986.pdf (retrieved 25 December 2025).
