Toward a #Commonist Future: Redefining Value to Liberate Life (Insights from the Food System)This episode presents a summary of S. A. Hamed Hosseini's conference paper (presented at the 2025 New Economy Network Australia's Conference, 12 Oct 2025). He argues that the root cause of today's escalating socio-ecological crises, widening inequality, and global genocides is how "value" is fundamentally defined, coded into law, and normalized to serve capital.This presentation introduces the Commonist Value Theory, centering on the conflict between two essential concepts:• True Value: The indispensable qualities necessary for the survival, well-being, and flourishing of all life, both human and non-human, such as healthy ecosystems, collective knowledge, and strong community bonds.• Fetish Value: The worth recognized by capital because it can be captured and accumulated, often rising even as life is undermined (e.g., profits up while fish die).Dr Hosseini explains that True Value is created and regenerated through commoning, a living process based on reciprocity, renewal, and maintenance that mirrors how life sustains itself. Capital systematically twists the four fundamental sources of true value into sources of fetish value through decommonization. Using the food system as an accessible case study, he details how:• Creativity (Efficient Cause) is reduced to exploited, measurable "labor".• Livability (Material Cause—healthy soil, water) is mechanized and transformed into tradable financial assets.• Conviviality (Formal Cause—mutual care and interdependence) is replaced by the efficiency, competition, and the "consumer-producer rift".• The system's capacity for resistance (Alterity) is continuously threatened by co-option and greenwashing.The path forward is recommonization, requiring not small fixes but a full systemic transformation. This transformation involves a two-pronged strategy: building grassroots alternatives (co-ops, land trusts) and creating new political vehicles to translate this power into constitutional change. Transitional measures outlined include amending constitutions to prioritize ecological regeneration (Constitutional Mandate for Alterity), granting legal personhood to ecosystems (Rights of Nature), mandating worker ownership, and abolishing large corporate entities.The goal is to build counter-hegemony by transforming the state into a partner for the commons, culminating in a constitutional transformation that makes well-living and ecological regeneration the supreme law