Introduction

Most of our problems are the result of an economy focused on extracting value. We can divide that into three categories: extracting ecological value (over-use of a source like forests and fishing grounds, or over-use of a sink like carbon); extracting labor value (dull office work and assembly lines); and extracting social value (colonization of our social networks and physical communities). Capitalism extracts value for corporations, and communism extracts value for the state, but both are equally harmful. When value is alienated from the regenerative loops that created it, the damage can be devastating. A better model can be found in the Indigenous traditions: rather than value alienation, they practiced value circulation. These "bottom-up" systems for returning value in unalienated forms can be applied to our contemporary societies using technologies such as platform cooperatives, AI services for community-based economies, and agroecology. We refer to these as technologies for generative justice.

For all three categories (labor value, ecological value, and social value) we can define generative justice as follows:

The universal right to generate unalienated value and directly participate in its benefits; the rights of value generators to create their own conditions of production; and the rights of communities of value generation to nurture self-sustaining paths for its circulation.