Demonetize it!

Cuba in the late 1960s

In 1967, the youth seemed to be embracing wholeheartedly the idea that in the event of conflict between the goal of a higher standard of living in Cuba and the goal of aiding the world revolutionary struggle, the latter had priority. The idea, furthermore, had old roots, Fidel’s message that “Cuba cannot be Communist until the whole world is Communist” was essentially a modern version of José Martí’s words: “As long as there is one man who sleeps in the mud, there should not be another who sleeps in a bed of gold.”

… The young people were surely more selfless and community-oriented than any preceding generation. They were also fascinated by consumer goods. They had money and couldn’t spend it because nothing except necessities could be found in the stores. Also, Cuba was isolated from the world of teen-age goodies; few citizens could travel. When foreign visitors brought that world with them, even a cheap plastic notebook intrigued the kids because it symbolized outside contact. All this was truer of youth in Havana — where the visitors spent most of their time and where there were the most foreign movies and music — than in the rural areas. But still, where would it all lead? The pull of continued scarcity on new ideas had unpredictable force, and the pull of human habit must not be underestimated.

Yet it was possible and beautiful to feel how human consciousness might be changed. After two months in Cuba, where the only advertisements to be seen or heard were for the Revolution and its values … the sound of that Miami radio station with its long commercial for Jordan’s Furniture Sale seemed to be coming from a very distant and unappealing planet. People could kick the habit of compulsive consumption, you felt, especially if there was nothing to buy — but more important, if there were other things to do which made life seem creative and exciting. To make a call from a public telephone booth without paying anything, as became possible all over Cuba in 1967, shook up your idea that the exchange of money was basic to modern life, and thereby bought into question old ideas about human relations. To see public transport fares going consistently down instead of up — perhaps that’s just too much for an American city-dweller to absorb. For the Cuban citizen, money has come to mean less in a real sense; the visitor, no matter how rich or poor, comes to share this feeling.

A moneyless society was not yet around the corner but it was planned and much discussed. Life already had a quality not to be imagined in capitalist countries — except, perhaps, in the dreams of some of their youth. “Here, you feel like a roll of dollar bills,” said an eighteen year-old American high school student from a small town on his return after a month’s visit to Cuba. “What you are worth depends on how big the roll is. In Cuba, you feel like a human being.”

Life Without Money — in Korean

MILDA, money and land

On behalf of the Melanesian Indigenous Land Defence Alliance (MILDA), we are writing to provide a different view on recent editorials promoting land registration for the Pacific. We wonder who authored this letter and in whose interest it was written? Because for Pacific peoples land isn't just about making money, land is about ensuring Pacific families continue to maintain a high level of self-reliance and to control their own destiny. This includes feeding and housing their families well, as they have been doing for thousands of years, and this is already happening effectively through customary communal systems of land tenure. Land as it exists and functions now already provides for millions of people, so that we have a very low rate of absolute poverty — there’s almost no real hunger or homelessness. In the independent nations of Melanesia (PNG, Solomon Islands, and Vanuatu), customary community control of land is enshrined in our Constitutions and we maintain a special relationship with our land that is based on many generations living on and with the land as well as traditionally managing the natural resources.

MILDA is well aware of the history of how land registration has been used over the past few hundred years to alienate land from indigenous peoples around the world, and we are not going to let history repeat itself and fall into that same trap.

MILDA is also mindful of the historical context of how land registration came to Melanesia and the Pacific at different times following first contact with the outside world through to independence and continues to date. Land registration is ostensibly promoted for the same purpose; to free up land for ‘development’ and to parcel it out in the name of individuals, companies and those with hard-cash. But for us, land is held communally for the benefit of all, and remains a central part of our cultural heritage and identity.

Land, particularly in Melanesia, is not a commodity but is an inalienable part of our peoples’ very existence. It has spiritual and historical values and other attributes that economists do not consider in their equations. In almost every part of Melanesia, the fact remains that land is our source of kastom, mana, sustenance and economic empowerment. Even if it doesn’t necessarily pay you in hard cash at the end of every week, although it may, if that is what a family or clan wants from it. Land under traditional tenure in Melanesia remains the largest employer and has sustained us self-reliantly for thousands of years. Land under indigenous control also makes our communities resilient to the upheavals often felt by global markets, and ensures that our children will also have this security …

The Pacific region should object to any proposals to record land rights and eventually register titles. Such measures may seem innocuous but we know from experience that demarcation and registration propels land into a commercial realm where it can be leased or sold to non-indigenous people — and thereby lost to the community. The option for legitimate developments that will benefit local people to enter into joint ventures with land custodians to gain access to land is a more equitable and sustainable option for the Pacific, rather than the transfer of registered titles.

Holding on to and using our land and waters provides us with healthy diets, rich cultural and spiritual lives and lifestyles We don't want to exchange these for money now — and see our children in urban slums tomorrow. The region needs to take urgent measures to prevent its people from making the same mistakes that have deprived millions of their land and resources all over the world.

The global financial institutions and aid donors see our people in the region engaging in traditional farming, fishing and animal husbandry and think poverty — not self-sufficiency. They perceive our country's low gross domestic product as a 'problem' that must be solved. But there's much more to Melanesia than GDP. A few years ago, Vanuatu, one of the countries in the region with 80 percent of its land under traditional tenure, ranked at the top of the New Economics Foundation's Happy Planet Index, which focuses on life expectancy, experienced wellbeing, and ecological footprint. So truth be told, the rest of the world has much to learn concerning environmental sustainability, well-being and life fulfillment from Melanesia and the Pacific!

Small can work

Kurdistan freedom from money, patriarchy and unsustainability

The concept of money is internally redundant within the KCK system implemented in the mountains of Kurdistan. The economic needs of the inhabitants of the KCK system are internally supplied through a communal management of resources. Although money is utilised in economic dealings with external systems, internally the concept of money is inconceivable. No person or community within the KCK system feels the need to build a surplus of goods or resources. Surpluses are constantly redistributed, therefore, viably consumed. Reminiscent of pre-hierarchical and pre-exploitative societies, the KCK system adopts a culture of gifting, rather than a culture of exchange. The communal organisation of agriculture ensures a self-sufficient production and consumption of resources, therefore, deeming surplus, exchange value and the commodification of goods irrelevant.

Impossible

‘Coining’ alternatives to capitalism

With panel discussions on “the monetization of everything”, “dismantling global finance”, “beyond Bitcoin”, “a critique of crowdfunding” and “designing alternatives”, the organizers of the conference set the tone right: in a world dominated by finance, a thoroughly indebted world in which money has effectively assumed the function of a universal signifier under which all aspects of social and natural life are rapidly becoming subsumed, we desperately need to start exploring radical alternatives to the capitalist money-form — not because alternative currencies are somehow a panacea, but because the state and the banks clearly aren’t going to do it for us. Despite major technological advances made in recent years, right-libertarian innovations like Bitcoin just won’t cut it. And so there is an urgent need to dissect, discuss and discover new ways of valuing work, time, nature, community and the fruits of our collective labor.

Rebuttal to CNS review

while the book’s editors provide an eloquent essay on 'Use Value and Non-market Socialism' as a basis for overturning capitalism, the review sidelines this theoretical project with a claim that it is 'focused on small scale change'.

Far from 'integrating' the local into the global [as Barkin suggests is necessary], the argument is about severing the capitalist system at its irrational epistemic roots. To this end, constructs from 'sustainability science' and 'ecological economics' are analysed and exposed as incoherent.

Commons

commons are not only the means by which we share in an egalitarian manner the resources we produce, but a commitment to the creation of collective subjects, a commitment to fostering common interests in every aspect of our life. Anti-capitalist commons are not the end point of a struggle to construct a non-capitalist world, but its means. For no struggle will succeed in changing the world if we do not organize our reproduction in a communal way and not only share the space and time of meetings and demonstrations but put our lives in common, organizing on the basis of our different needs and possibilities, and the rejection of all principles of exclusion or hierarchization.

Electric Book quick dips