IDEAS IN MOTION

A Guide on How to Answer the First Question of the Second Assignment in SOCA3780 This episode, "Unpacking Capital: A Student's Guide to the Modular Framework," is your essential companion for mastering the first question of the SOCA3780 Second Assignment. We delve deep into capital's complex and multi-layered architecture , breaking down how it operates not as a single, monolithi...

Following our last episode on Chris Rogers' "Alternatives to Capitalism," this session is dedicated entirely to Wendy Harcourt's journal article, "The Future of Capitalism: A Consideration of Alternatives." At its heart, Wendy Harcourt's article reviews three distinct but interconnected approaches to discussing alternatives to today's neoliberal capitalism . Her aim is to explore "alternative visi...

Chris Rogers and Wendy Harcourt's Writings (devised by S A Hamed Hosseini) for students in SOCA2400 UON (commentary writing assignment)

When approaching Chris Rogers' "Alternatives to Capitalism" for your SOCA2400 critical commentary, the most effective strategy is to focus on the core arguments and Rogers' main conclusions rather than getting bogged down in every detail. Rogers aims to provide a clear rationale for moving beyond or reforming capitalism and then evaluates three different paths. Let's break do...

This is an episode designed to help students in SOCA3780 (Leading Social Change) with their first assignment. The primary focus of the podcast is to guide students on how best to write Part C of Assignment 1, while also touching upon the foundational concepts of Part B

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 Valu...

This episode distills the first three weeks of SOCA3780: Leading Social Change into the core arguments of the Commonist Value Theory (CVT). The course frames today’s interconnected “perma-poly-crisis”—climate collapse, inequality, democratic erosion, care breakdowns—as not malfunctions, but defining features of capitalism, rooted in the “unholy trinity” of capitality, coloniality, and modernity. A...

This episode focuses on Part A of Assignment 1 in SOCA3780, which lays the foundation for the entire conceptual analysis. Part A examines why integrating analytical and normative theories of value is essential for a critical engagement with capitalism. Analytical theories excel at diagnosing systemic problems and showing how capitalism generates crises and inequalities; however, without a normativ...

Commonist Value Theory: An Overview

The Yugoslav self-management experiment, while an innovative attempt to democratize production and foster worker participation, likely remained within the operational logic of capital to a significant degree due to its market orientation and interaction with the state. From the Commonist Value Theory's perspective (developed by Hosseini (2022, 2023) and Hosseini and Gills (2024), especially th...

This episode presents a conversational overview of the first chapter of Mariana Mazzucato's book, The Value of Everything.

What capitalism is and how far it has changed: A conversational overview of Chapter 2 of Jim Stanford's Book, Economics for Everyone According to Stanford, while capitalism may change its "look" with technological and sectoral shifts, its "core features of capitalism are still very much visible." The fundamental tenets of profit-seeking private production and wage labour re...

This episode provides an overview of the short essay written by S.A. Hamed Hosseini for Global Dialogue, published by the International Sociological Association. The essay argues that  radical transformations  are essential to prevent civilizational collapse, particularly in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, which exposed the unsustainability of the "old normal." The author attributes t...

This episode introduces S. A. Hamed Hosseini's paper, "The Well-Living Paradigm."

This episode introduces S. A. Hamed Hosseini's paper, "The Well-Living Paradigm."

Developed by S. A. Hamed Hosseini and presented by Ms. Nicole Cooney for his course SOCA3780 at the University of Newcastle (UON), this episode utilizes a simple meditation exercise to teach and maintain mindfulness of the four Aristotelian causes of true value. It helps us understand how a natural commons functions. Enjoy!

This episode presents a longer overview of Chapter 6 of the Book Capital Redefined. Drawing upon the provided excerpts from Chapter 6 of "Capital Redefined" by Hosseini and Gills, this overview aims to provide a deep and thorough account of the arguments presented regarding the Marxian Labor Theory of Value (LTV) in the context of smart machines, affect, and climate change, remaining loy...

This episode presents a longer overview of Chapter 5 of the book Capital Redefined. This chapter revisits and reconstructs the Marxian labor theory of value by drawing on the commonist framework. The core argument is that 'labor' is an outcome of the decommonization of human (and by extension, more-than-human) creative power through the abstraction and appropriation of infra-processes. The...

This episode presents a longer overview of Chapter 4 of the book Capital Redefined. The chapter provides a sophisticated modular framework for understanding capital as a destructive, expansionist value regime that actively decommonizes fundamental sources of true value, converting them into reified and fetishized forms for appropriation. It highlights the interplay between these processes and the...

This episode presents a short overview of Chapter 4 of the book Capital Redefined. The chapter provides a sophisticated modular framework for understanding capital as a destructive, expansionist value regime that actively decommonizes fundamental sources of true value, converting them into reified and fetishized forms for appropriation. It highlights the interplay between these processes and the c...

This episode presents an overview of the third chapter of Hosseini and Gill's book Capital Redefined. This chapter introduces a "modular approach" for theorizing capital, aiming to move beyond traditional Marxist value theories and provide a more integrative social theory of capitalist socio-ecological relations. The authors argue for a redefinition of capital that acknowledges its c...

"The history of all hitherto existing societies... is the history of two separate yet overlapping ideal types of struggles: one is between the value makers and value takers within the dominant value regime over the distribution of value, and the other, a more decisive one, over ‘what ought to constitute value’ and the foundational structure of the value regime itself." This episode presents an ove...

This episode presents an overview of the first chapter of the book Capital Redefined by Hosseini and Gills. In this chapter, The authors propose that if we accept that  any quality necessary or advantageous for the survival and self-fulfillment of organized life (human and non-human) is of undeniable 'value,' and if capitalism is a socio-ecological formation where the ultimate sources of t...

This podcast episode explores the radical idea of moving beyond economic growth and capitalism to build a society based on  Well-Living . It introduces the  Well-Living Paradigm  as a framework that redefines quality of life around principles like living in harmony with the Earth ( liveability ), valuing relationships and care ( conviviality ), fostering imagination ( creativity ), and embracing d...

This podcast transcript argues against the common perception of "utopia" as a naive, unattainable fantasy. Instead, it posits that utopian thinking, when understood as a method, can be a powerful tool for critiquing existing systems and actively building better societies. The core arguments are structured around Ruth Levitas's three-step method for utopian thinking and the concept of...