This episode distills the first three weeks of SOCA3780: Leading Social Change into the core arguments of the Commonist Value Theory (CVT). The course frames today’s interconnected “perma-poly-crisis”—climate collapse, inequality, democratic erosion, care breakdowns—as not malfunctions, but defining features of capitalism, rooted in the “unholy trinity” of capitality, coloniality, and modernity. At the heart of the problem is capitalism as a value regime that inverts life-affirming “true value” into abstract, measurable, and profit-driven “fetish value,” shaping what counts as worthwhile in healthcare, education, climate policy, art, and justice.
CVT proposes an integrated normative-analytical approach: analytical theories diagnose capitalism’s systemic logics but risk normalizing them; normative visions inspire alternatives but risk vagueness or co-option. Together, they provide a transformative critique that links what is with what ought to be, exposing how capital de-commonizes life-generating processes and pointing to strategies for reclaiming them.
Drawing on a reworked Aristotelian framework, CVT identifies four “commoning causes” of true value—creativity (efficient cause), liveability (material cause), conviviality (formal cause), and alterity (final cause)—and examines how each is distorted under capitalism. Building “beyond Marx, with Marx,” CVT expands value theory to include ecological dynamics, more-than-human agency, non-productive creative work, and diverse forms of inequality.
Through examples such as the academic publishing industry, the course illustrates how capitalist appropriation erodes true value, how resistance movements emerge, and how they can be co-opted. The challenge is to evolve resistance into structural transformation, replacing fetish value with commons-based, cooperative, and life-affirming systems.