Value Is Sense-Less: Socialism, Kincentric Community, and the Gift of Philial Labor

Abstract

American Indian scholar, activist, and elder Vine Deloria, Jr. asked why Western peoples have such a negative view of the physical world. The instrumentalism of market relationality, from the emergence of coinage to the mature development of capital, suggests an answer. Looking beyond market relationality means understanding the social belonging of the individual as a premise of social life, a view Marx and Deloria appear to share. Socialists can look to indigenous thought for insight into refashioning community and labor in the perspective of communal belonging. The term “kincentric” extends our understanding of community in the spirit of the Lakota phrase, Mitakuye Oyasin, “we are all related”; “philial labor” is introduced to characterize labor animated by the principle of “from each according to ability, to each according to need.”