Revalorizing Value: Advancing Marx’s Legacy with Commonist Value Theory

This paper builds on Capital Redefined (Hosseini & Gills, 2024) by further articulating, critically reflecting, and enhancing the applicability of its Commonist Value Theory for transformative, praxis-oriented inquiry. While Capital Redefined rethought Marx’s labor theory of value (LTV), this paper further refines the theory to better address real-world transformative efforts. Commonist Value Theory expands the notion of value beyond human labor, incorporating more-than-human creative power, the liveability of the life-domain, the conviviality of more-than-human communities, and the alterity of prefigurative emancipatory praxes. It critiques how capital abstracts and perverts these broader, relational sources of value into fetish value for capital accumulation. The Commonist Value Theory both normatively and analytically examines how capitalism’s infra-processes of primary and secondary abstraction convert the ultimate sources of true value (‘decommonization’) into sources of fetish value, alienating them from their commoning origins and organic causal structures.

Additionally, the paper interrogates the role of civilizing meta-mechanisms—capitalism’s capacity to co-opt emancipatory and ecological practices, presenting them as reformist solutions that stabilize the system without addressing its deeper contradictions. These mechanisms intensify socio-ecological crises while presenting an illusion of sustainability and progress. The paper positions Commonist Value Theory as a vital expansion of Marxist thought, addressing the historical contradictions of capitalist value extraction, including the alienation of labor and nature, alongside the interrelated crises of the 21st century, such as climate breakdown, environmental collapse, and the resurgence of geopolitical hostilities fueled by competing value regimes. It argues that reclaiming true value and thus overcoming the current poly-crisis requires a process of recommonization, which restores communal stewardship, ecological reciprocity, and more-than-human flourishing.