 | Money-Free Communities by Anitra Nelsonposted by Susan Meeker-Lowry, Exclusive AccessWednesday, September 30th 2009 @ 7:56 PM (not yet rated) |
When I was six years old my grandfather showed me a ‘florin’ — a two-shilling piece. Then he said to me, ‘This florin is worth four sixpences, but only because people agree that it is worth four sixpences.’
This was the late 1950s in Australia where we had an imperial currency. My Welsh grandfather had lived through the Great Depression and credit squeezes. Thus, as a mining engineer and mathematician, it was a curiosity as well as a reality for him that commerce and economics only took an arithmetic and algebraic form. At the end of the day business worked on social principles, which meant it was as malleable as ordinary relationships and as subject to mistakes and accidents as all kinds of human activities.
I do not think that I can blame my grandfather for my having become a heretic when it comes to the realm of ‘economics’. However, I do think that having this conditional aspect of money pointed out to me at such a young age meant that I had a head start in interpreting economics as a social system. Thus, while some talked in awe of economics as if it was a natural and superior organization for society and others were self-deprecating for ‘not understanding’ economics, I decided long ago that it had hidden stings and was unfathomable in ways which did not reflect anyone’s logical capacities.
The Contradictions of Capitalism
By the time I was a teenager — and we had moved to a decimal currency in Australia — I was well aware of inappropriate economic developments, which instigated strong debates in our local semi-rural coastal town and the rest of the peninsula. Most people who had settled there had done so specifically to enjoy the superior natural environment and sense of local community. They considered that commercial developments, which involved environmental damage and risks, were a threat to living standards while others regarded them as essential to advance living standards.
At the same time I learned about immense and unfair inequality between people within our society — especially between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians — and between nations. These inequalities were often described and addressed in economic terms. However, there were clear contradictions in the system: it was competitive so some people always had to lose; freedom and democracy meant little more than being able to voice an opinion while powerful and influential people almost always had money or property. In other words the economic system was hierarchical and inequitable by its very nature and the political structures were compatible with capitalist economics.
I was artistic and learned very early that many of the greatest creative and intelligent people did not fit comfortably in this society. They existed despite capitalism rather than because of it. Australia was a small country, in international terms, translating into a small market. ‘The system’ as we came to refer to it in the late 1960s was brutal. It was a paradox that the very entrepreneurs who paid such little respect to human qualities and skills would also point to artistic people and their works as exemplary civilised aspects of our monetary society. Meanwhile, to this day, our cultural production has been perpetually challenged by the economics of supply and demand in larger English-speaking countries. Thus our film, publishing, visual and performing arts sectors, as well as creative individuals, all still struggle to survive.
Latin American Studies
In the 1970s I concentrated on Latin American studies at university. At that time this study was seen as exotic, depressing, and somewhat irrelevant to Australia. In fact I had been attracted to Latin American studies precisely because I saw synergies between economic and political developments on both continents. Like many Third World countries Australia’s traditional economy involved agricultural and mining exports.
The rise to power of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam and the experience of his Australian Labor Party government in Australia had parallels with Prime Minister Michael Manley’s People’s National Party government in Jamaica: tighter regulation, even nationalisation, of significant economic sectors; welfare reforms; and an independent and confident foreign policy.
The more I studied the history of Latin American countries the more their experiences seemed to be dictated by economic powers and concerns. I became particularly interested in the burgeoning Third World debt and the way First World politicians, business people and scholars framed a capitalistic approach to poverty and economic development.
A close study of Mexico’s foreign public debt revealed that only by providing Mexico aid or credit did countries like the USA maintain the demand for goods and services on which their own national growth depended. Indeed one could mount a plausible argument that both the sheer amount of trade and the level of prices commanded for the goods and services provided by foreign countries were all dependent on the foreign debt. At the same time Mexico became progressively less self-sufficient economically throughout the twentieth century. More contradictions!
Marx’s Concept of Money
Questions about currency and money intrigued me most about the foreign debt of the Third World in the 1980s. I quickly learned that ‘money’ is one of the least studied aspects of economics. Ultimately my PhD became a study of Marx’s concept of money because it was radical, interdisciplinary, and had attracted little interest even from Marxian scholars and activists. This gave me the excuse to read widely on all kinds of concepts of money and contemplate at length on its role in capitalism and its management in a transition to socialism.
One Marxian who had challenged Marx’s way of integrating money into his analysis was Rosa Luxemburg (1870–1919), a woman of strong mind and will who had focused her interest on trade as well as production for trade. Partly because Marx had stressed the peculiar nature of production for trade, capitalism, and castigated bourgeois and socialist writers who suggested monetary reforms, many Marxians have failed to study money, believing it a secondary problem.
My own interest in money developed from the hypothesis that interrupting, and ultimately breaking from, monetary values would be the easiest and quickest way to bring down capitalism and replace it with a system that was both fairer and more environmentally sustainable. I gradually became more sure that only by breaking with monetary relationships can we have equality, justice, and fairness between us as social beings and, in parallel, only by perceiving and interacting with nature in terms of qualities and quantities can we establish and maintain environmental balance and sustainability. This is an important point because many of the communist experiments of the twentieth century — in China, the Soviet Union, and Cuba — maintained money and have (inevitably from my way of thinking) swung back to capitalism to a greater or lesser extent.
Environmental Sustainability
By the 1990s it was clear that environmental sustainability, i.e. lack of it, was the key problem for our species. My research turned to the social aspects of ecologically sustainable forests, namely community forest management. I found psychological solace in the knowledge that the trees I was studying would outlive us even if we shat in our own nest, Earth.
Again I was struck by the fact that to develop ecological balance and general environmental health, we needed to perceive and respond to ‘non-human nature’ on its own terms and with even-handed respect for all species, landscapes, and ecological processes. What this implies is that ‘triple bottom-line’ approaches, taking into account the economic as well as social and environmental, are flawed specifically because the economic system is just social behaviour. To live in harmony with the Earth we need to adjust and even radically change our behaviour accordingly.
The techniques and technologies necessary to manage our lives and natural resources sustainably are known. However, we cannot implement them without reversing capitalist growth and replacing market systems and monetary values. Thus, I believe that the incapacity of our species to even contemplate breaking with the monetary system and manage ourselves sustainably in terms of the environment will be responsible for our collective suicide.
That is a bleak prognosis and I have not been content to sit with it. Instead I have spent decades seeking out experiences that would inform a vision and strategies for replacing capitalism. By capitalism I mean any use of monetary values and relationships in reproducing ourselves both socially and materially.
Instead, globally and locally, we need more adequate social and environmental principles and processes to live by. I have lived communally and participated in many cooperatives and other groups dedicated to substantial and appropriate change. From these experiences, and reading and discussion, I have developed some key concepts for creating such a future:
- substituting extensive production for trade with intensive local production for use
- establishing ‘compacts’ for contracts.
Compact
Self-sufficiency in homes and neighbourhoods, where gardens produce most of the food and other basic needs, is a well-established concept and practice, especially reliant on permaculture principles. However, we cannot be self-sufficient at an individual level. Collective sufficiency — where the collective is a relatively small group — is the most ecologically rational way forward. But it requires forward planning by everyone, which is easier now we are connected by the Internet and are used to discussing and organising ourselves through e-mails and websites.
Collective sufficiency requires exchange, and rules of exchange related to adequate and flexible distribution. Such regulation needs to be locally logical in environmental and social terms, just and sustainable. Organisational integration of permaculture activities have been hampered in trying to accommodate the narrow rules of mainstream trade, even through non-profit cooperatives and local markets, or has remained stunted in ad hoc, marginal and precarious non-mainstream techniques such as belonging to LETS, sharing one another’s surpluses and ‘freecycle’.
Private property and production for trade, trade itself, as well as taxation and social arrangements such as marriage, are based on contracts, which are formally created and legally enforceable and are a fundamental building block of monetary economies. Compacts — tight, purpose-built, community-regulated, formal but flexible agreements — could facilitate non-monetary agreements between people, expressing all the personal commitment and social force that is associated with contracts currently.
For example, if one region is able to grow surplus grain that is required by an adjacent community, they will have in place an ongoing compact to exchange the grain for another good or other goods and/or services. Multilateral trade can be conducted without money. Continuous e-contact associated with compacts enables producers to warn those dependent on the receipt of certain products or services if the promised products are at risk of natural or artificial influences and other sources need to be found, etc.
In the Blue Mountains, Australia, we once had one of the largest LETS in the world and our food co-operative remains one of the largest and most active organizations of its kind internationally. Here, among other forms of alternatives, we are already experimenting with non-monetary forms of exchange so that ultimately what we produce, how we produce it and why we produce it is directly linked with local human and environmental requirements, and free from external power involving trade-based risks, waste and destruction.
For more, check out: www.moneyfreezone.info. I would love to hear from other people who are experimenting with non-monetary ways of producing and exchanging so I can expand that aspect of the website and create more links.
From Volume 6, No. 3 & 4
