Value is Relational

Discussion

Benjamin Life:

"If extraction is the disease, what is the cure? It begins with a recognition so simple it’s almost embarrassing: value is relational.

Not value as Wall Street defines it: the price at which an asset can be liquidated. Value as in the genuine wealth that emerges when human beings coordinate, create, care, build, teach, feed, and tend. This kind of value doesn’t exist in isolation. It exists in the space between people, between a community and its watershed, between a worker and the meaning they find in their labor. Value, understood at the level of first principles, is a property of relationships.

There are ethical ways to create value and to share in the benefits of that value. Ways that don’t require someone to lose for someone else to win. Ways that don’t treat the biosphere as a balance sheet to be drawn down. The entire field of regenerative economics has spent decades articulating these principles. What this essay aims to add to that discourse is the synthesis of regenerative economics and bioregional economic re-localization, advocating for the networked cooperative as the primary structural mechanism capable of operationalizing relational value at the scale required to compete with extraction.

The networked cooperative is a series of cooperatives federated into solidarity economies that generate recursive, self-reinforcing dynamics through network effects. Whereas capitalism reinforces accumulation, networked cooperativism reinforces mutual benefit."

(https://omniharmonic.substack.com/p/upward-spiral-economics)