Reclaiming True Value in Food Production: A Commonist Approach to Prefiguring Post-Capitalist Practices in Australia

This paper critically engages with Commonist Value Theory, as articulated in Capital Redefined (Hosseini & Gills, 2024), applying it to the Australian food production sector. The paper explores the tensions and interactions between the production of true value—grounded in communal, ecological, and more-than-human flourishing, prioritizing life over profit—and fetish value, commodified and reified forms that serve capitalist accumulation and alienation. It examines how the four sources of true value in food production—more-than-human creative power, the liveability of agricultural environments, convivial bonds formed through shared food systems, and the transformative capacities of communal food sovereignty—are abstracted and perverted into fetish value through capitalism’s primary and secondary abstractions.

The study highlights how, within capitalist food production, primary abstraction transforms human and more-than-human creativity into commodified labor, generating fetish value for capitalist accumulation while simultaneously co-opting elements of true value. The infra-processes of decommonization—reification, fetishization, and appropriation—degrade the communal and ecological foundations of food systems, creating an antagonism between true value and fetish value, further entrenching capitalist dominance in the sector. Moreover, civilizing meta-mechanisms, such as the co-option of regenerative agricultural practices and sustainability discourses, work to stabilize capitalism by offering reformist solutions that mitigate crises without challenging systemic exploitation.

The paper argues that recommonization efforts—such as grassroots food sovereignty movements, agroecology, and Indigenous knowledge systems—are not merely defensive responses but prefigurative practices that seek to create alternative socio-ecological systems. However, to fully realize their transformative potential, these initiatives must align with a broader constellation of radical political projects—such as degrowth, ecofeminism, eco-anarchism, and eco-communism—within the framework of Commonist praxes of recommonization.