This episode helps students in SOCA3780 to prepare their answers to Part B of Assignment 1.

Here is a description for the episode to go with it on Spotify:

Leading Social Change Unpacked: Mastering Assignment 1, Part B – True Value vs. Fetish Value

Welcome to 'Leading Social Change Unpacked', your essential guide for SOCA3780! In this episode, we tackle Assignment 1, Part B: 'True Value vs. Fetish Value: Theoretical Foundations and Implications'. We'll help you build a strong conceptual base by unravelling the core questions for this crucial section.

Why is value a central concept in this framework? We explain how value is not fixed but is historically shaped, socially contested, and politically important. It's essential for linking critique with transformation.

Next, we delve into why it's vital to differentiate between true value and fetish value. This dual structure allows for a deeper social analysis, distinguishing between what sustains life and what serves capital. We define true value as that which is advantageous for the survival, self-fulfilment, and liberation of more-than-human organised life, rooted in commoning, achieved through consensual and collaborative means. This contrasts sharply with fetish value, which is an alienated, perverted, and distorted version of true value that capital captures through decommonisation, even without market transactions like unpaid reproductive labour or ecological appropriation.

We then explore the four distinct sources, or causes, of value, drawing on the Aristotelian framework:

• Creativity (Efficient Cause): The collective, life-affirming driving force.
• Liveability (Material Cause): The real conditions and resources that support life.
• Conviviality (Formal Cause): The cooperative and relational way things are organised.
• Alterity (Final Cause): The ultimate purpose of liberation and a better life, constantly adapting.We also touch upon how these sources are systematically perverted under capitalism to generate fetish value.

Understand why the theory adopts a broad conception of the commons as the fundamental basis for true value, highlighting how commoning regenerates true value against capital's extractive logic.

Finally, we discuss how true value and fetish value are dialectically intertwined in practice, necessitating their theorisation together within a single integrated framework to account for both domination and emancipation. Tune in to refine your understanding and confidently approach Part B!