Introduction

Pollution, wealth inequality and social domination–the key issues of our time–can be understood as problems in value extraction. The extraction of ecological value happens in the over-use of a source (like over-fishing a lake) or over-use of a sink (like the forest as a pollution and carbon sink).  The extraction of labor value happens with underpaid, dull work (service industry, office work, assembly line, etc.). The extraction of social value occurs when our communities and social networks are “colonized” (by land developers, or by social media profiting from misinformation and hate mongers). Top-down solutions often fail. Communism often extracts value for the state, destroying communities in the name of the people’s revolution. Capitalism often extracts value for the corporation, destroying communities in the name of free enterprise. A better model can be found in the bottom-up approach of Indigenous traditions: rather than value extraction, they practiced value circulation. Similar systems for cycling value back to where it is generated–regenerative agriculture, worker-owned business,  community-based platforms–can be applied to our contemporary societies. 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.