So I wrote the second book. This is a rough draft. There is at least one typo I will correct during my next upload but I'm busy writing and want to check over it again for clarity.
http://eugeneseffortposts.royalwebhosting.net/xR3iUgFdAMp5/Book 2: Mechanisms of Economic Actors in Nature and Society
The subject of the book is to establish some concepts that allow us to pose what the "economic question" is as mechanisms. Mathematically, "value" doesn't really exist as a proposition that economics can make, because the values - utilities of technology or the technology itself - are discrete and not interchangeable. For every utility, there is a definite sequence of events which we would have to arrest if we are to speak of it as something that can be managed.
Maybe this will help explain my thinking when I bring up economic theories of what "value" is, dispute Marx. (I really don't think Marx had a "theory of value" as such - he's elaborating on liberal political economy and showing how it contains perverse incentives which are nonetheless true in that situation, and nothing about this suggested a trans-historical concept.) Money, ultimately, is valuable because we agree, for various reasons, that it is worth anything at all, and these reasons always return to politics and society rather than anything "in nature". In nature, nothing has any economic value whatsoever, because "we" really don't matter to nature. In society, and in realistic situations, this value ultimately follows from political concerns, temporal authority, and spiritual authority. I get into that in the middle chapters of the book, but I avoid too much discussion of politics which is the subject of the next book. I have the first few chapters of Book 3 written and I'm rewriting them for web, and have the structure of Book 3 planned out. I want to plan Book 4 as well and I'll probably write both of them concurrently, so I know what Book 3 has to lead into and can make them work together.
I don't know if I can rewrite Book 2 to say what I want it to say, without escaping the limited purview I assigned to it. Basically, I need to make it clear that technology and contests for it are the proper understanding of economic value, but I don't believe I can do that without getting into politics and a theory of history (which is what Book 4 is, a theory of history given what was set out in the first three books, and how we can ask questions about a "mode of production" in the first place).