The commons — resources managed collectively by a community according to shared rules — has been theorised primarily in terms of its relationship to the market: as a pre-market form that markets have historically enclosed, or as a post-market form that might succeed them. Living Value Theory proposes a different framing: the commons as an alternative value form.
A value form is a way of organising the production, circulation, and distribution of value. The market is one value form; the state is another; the commons is a third. Each has its own logic, its own strengths and failure modes, its own characteristic pathologies. The commons is not simply a market with different ownership rules but a fundamentally different way of relating persons to resources and to each other.