Andy,
I have worked rather extensively and in a practical way on the question of
MONEY while attempting to establish a community currency system in the area
where I live. As you well might be aware, there are numerous LETS type
community currency systems in Australia, some quite large. New Zealand's
are so successful that the government formally recognizes and supports their
activities. In England the government has recognized them negatively
insofar as it counts income earned in local/community currencies against
welfare payments. Everywhere earning in community currencies are supposed
to be taxed but in all cases, as everyone involved recognizes, these
systems at best make up a tiny fraction of the total "money" requirements of
individuals in modern societies. Stores don't use them, producers don't
accept them, etc. Why? Not because as many New England
advocates the Berkshire Share scheme believe (ie, money must be backed by
something that has exchange value itself such as community forests) but
rather because the total network of social relations that the community
currencies reflect is very, very limited. In this sense, the advocates of
LETS type systems (money is just an agreement between people) is formally
correct--or abstractly correct. The failure of the LETS concept lies in the
fact that it construes this agreement to be something that people can
voluntaristically propose, rather than being something that already exists,
a set of relationships within which people are already involved. The most
successful LETS type systems are the extensive, billion dollar barter
networks that all industries participate in and that have grown enormously
in the last two decades.
It should be very clear from Marx that money reflects social
relations. Advanced levels of division of labor presuppose something like
money to represent the relations between the different productive branches
of the society. Money in capitalist society reflects the division between
capital (the accumulated dead labor of previous generations) and living
labor that structures the relations, at one level, of the concrete
production of use values. The ability to accumulate some incredible sum of
money (say Bill Gates' fortune) simply reflects the level to which the
social relations of the world are intertwined; that value has no meaning
outside of that system of social relations. Insofar as these social
relations of labor are dependent on the key institutions of the capitalist
system the money that reflects their interdependency they can only function
to
reinforce those relations. No good intentions can overcome this necessity.
This is the flip side of the LETS notion that money is a social agreement
that can be voluntaristically established.
Look at Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream, these "enlightened capitalists" with their
social network for green, socially conscious capitalism who were just sold
out to what, were bought out, leveraged out to whom? Coca Cola? Monsanto?
ADM?
Is there the possibility that some areas, areas in which already existing
systems of production, distribution, exchange, and consumption are somewhat
regionally autonomous, where producers whose products cycle internally
within the system could agree to separate some part of the value of the
products that circulate and use a local currency to reflect it. Centrally
controlled capitalist money interests target these in particular. Note
that the World Bank and the IMF (the institutions of the Breton Woods
agreement that were established at the same time as and precisely to counter
the United Nations, parallel yet divergent representations of the
recognition of global interdependency) as well as other key institutions of
global
capitalism always attempt to control a country's monetary system
(devaluation of currency) as a
precondition of participation in the cornucopia (of poisoned fruit?) of
international financing.
And of course this involves the suppression of local money systems as in the
case of Argentina recently where entire provinces had begun to circulate
their own currency since they could use it regulate intra-regional flows,
stimulate exchange and in effect expand the division of labor, precisely
what money allows and what it is an expression of. Look at desperate
Ecuador that recently was on the point of simply throwing in the towel and
adopting the US dollar as its currency!!!
The problem of money is certainly quite complex -- the flexibile advantages
of money-mediated distribution systems over centrally planned ones in many
respects was recognized and adapted by the most successful socialist
economies (Yugoslavia). The fundamental democracy of the market place (not
the market economy) was the fount of diversity that Bakhtin extolled in his
book on Rabelais. Today, as many might know, our farmer's markets where
producers directly interact with consumers are cultural event spaces in
their own right.
So there is a real conundrum here: the extensive social division of labor,
of which you spoke very clearly in your last message to dianne, is only
conceivable, at the present time with some form of money--at least as a unit
of account, if not a store or measure of value, this is the symbol system,
the language by which the processes of advanced division of labor are
brought into some kind of discourse (although as Bob Dylan said, "money
doesn't talk, it swears"). Yet the very nature of money (once interest is
socially acceptable -- thanks Martin Luther!) is such that it allows that
division of labor to be turned to the benefit of a few at the expense of the
many. But it is political power--through networks of political elites as
well as the forces of the culture industry itself that insists on the
domination of one system of money that is governed by the same system of
rules, the same grammar -- the grammar that was laid down at Breton Woods in
the form of the IMF and the World Bank, and now assumes a parallel political
form representing a higher stage of development; ie, the WTO.
I tend to believe that the proliferation of many monies, a diversity of
monies by which people articulate divisions of labor and the circulation of
real goods (use values) at the community , the regional , and the
international levels could provide a way out of the conundrum but it is
precisely here (as one sees from the practice of the community currency
movement) that the fetishism of money presents itself. People believe that
money is backed by something and they can't see that it is simply the social
relations of production, already existing that back it. Ample room for
practical deconstruction here!!!
Just some rambling thoughts.
Paul H. Dillon
----- Original Message -----
From: Andy Blunden <ablunden@unimelb.edu.au>
To: <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Sent: Monday, December 18, 2000 4:02 PM
Subject: Re: MCA Fall 1995
> Judy, I counted to ten and no-one spoke so ... I agree with your
assessment
> of the possible ways forward, with this big qualification:
>
> Is it possible to live in this global world without *sharing an ideal*?
> Currently, we eschew all attempts to share ideals (outside of a small
> circle of friends/family if at all), because of the very real fear that
any
> such attempt will only divide us. Instead we allow MONEY to function as
> that shared, objective ideal which mediates all our collaborative
activity.
>
> It seems to me that shared collaborative activity is the genuine, material
> basis for a new world and new people, but I don't see how it can be done
> without resolving the problem of the ideal. Hence, my questions.
>
> Andy
>
>
> At 11:37 AM 12/17/00 -0500, you wrote:
> >Andy wrote:
> >If I understand you correctly Judy, of
> >>course we all value the capacity for abstract reasoning, just as no-one
> >>wants to go back to animism and witch-hunting, but equally we all know
that
> >>the roller-coaster we are on is taking us somewhere we really don't want
to
> >>be, don't we?
> >
> >It's safe to say that we on this list don't want to go where we've been
> >catapulted -- (less fatalistically: are being?...). One hypothesis is
that,
> >over time, diverse values (control, rationality, dominance) get so
tightly
> >interwoven in the network of what's become exploitive activity systems of
> >production & distribution, within which WE are produced -- & thus out of
> >the control of individuals -- that change can happen only
catastrophically
> >from "outside" or from collapse from within OR
> >
> >through the agency that individuals direct toward their performance as
> >ethical, relational beings -- re-visioning and hopefully changing within
> >critically reflexive social relations and thereby making it possible to
> >imagine & produce the sort of changes in local systems of activity that
> >would unfix their internal structures, moving toward dynamic institutions
> >that are self adjusting toward ethical goals....
> >
> >well, I am eager to get help in thinking more carefully about possibly
> >designing better futures so I look forward to seeing the holes that some
of
> >you will thoughtfully point out in the above and the directions others
> >might take this
> >judy
> >
> **************************************************
> * Andy Blunden, Teaching Space Support Team Leader
> * Email ablunden@unimelb.edu.au or andy@mira.net
> * http://home.mira.net/~andy/ - Personal Home Page
> * http://www.ists.unimelb.edu.au - Work Home Page
> * University of Melbourne 9344 0312 (W) 9380 9435 (H)
> **************************************************
>
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Tue Jan 27 2004 - 11:29:00 PST