Demonetize it!

Democratic community management achievements

The global REDD+ (Reduction of Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation) program was designed to enhance the sustainability of forests and reduce global carbon emissions. The aim of this mechanism was to conserve stores of carbon in forests by establishing a carbon market. The creation of a price for carbon in environmentally rich forests was expected save them from exploitation for timber.

So far REDD+ has proved a clumsy mechanism with few successes. Instead, as a recent article in Solutions (Vol. 4 Issue 3) points out,

There exists an alternative to market-based efforts, or an essential prelude to them: community forest management. Mexico presents a global model for devolving rights over forests, creating community forest enterprises, and meeting the goals of REDD+.

The article, 'From Mexico, Global Lessons for Forest Governance' by David Bray outlines the model, which relies on devolving to local communities 'a nearly full bundle of rights over forests, supportive government policy, and efforts to generate income for local communities'. Bray writes that:

Formally, the Mexican model is based on common property governance over forested territories by legally recognized rights holders organized in long-standing communities tied together by kinship and mutual knowledge. These common property forests represent a third way of economic development, beyond just public property and markets.

Indeed researchers, such as David Barkin a Professor of Economics at the Universidad Autonoma Metroolitana-Xochimilco in Mexico, are studying non-monetary and non-market production and exchange in such communities for their real and potential capacity to better satisfy basic needs and wants within a more genuinely democratic framework than exists within capitalism today. Examples of Barkin's work include an article written with Lemus (2011) 'La Economía Ecológica y Solidaria: Una propuesta frente a nuestra crisis' in Sustentabilidades No. 5 and Considering Alternatives: Local Justice for Environmental Governance Analytical Framework Report

Proud Not Primitive

The Proud Not Primitive movement makes some strong comments v. monetary/market economies.

Is development possible by destroying the environment that provides us food, water and dignity? You have to pay to take a bath, for food, and even to drink water. In our land, we don’t have to buy water like you, and we can eat anywhere for free.

This is what Lodu Sikaka, a representative of the Dongria Kondh asks. Her people grow more than 100 crops, harvest up to 200 wild foods and have an understanding of more than 150 plant and 350 animal species. Another representative Malari Pusaka says:

We don’t want to go to the city and we don’t want to buy food. We get it free here.

The movement offers other examples —although referred to as ‘primitive’ and ‘poor’, a study of the hunter-gatherer tribe Jarawa found self-sufficiency delivered ‘optimum nutritional status’ while neighbouring Great Andamanese lost their land and suffered deaths through disease in colonisation by the British. Today they rely on state welfare, suffer alcoholism and TB.

Check out the the Proud Not Primitive movement.

Larry Lohmann, climate activism, commodities and money

The central theme of a recent issue of the journal Mute (3:4) centres on what I call 'the algebra of capitalism', the quasi-mathematical framework of monetary exchange, on which the so-called efficiencies of production for markets and exchanges using money are based. It includes a great article, 'Performative equations and neoliberal commodification: The case of climate' by Larry Lohmann an activist associated with The Corner House.

Here Lohmann shows how the standardisation and commensuration attempted by monetary exchange and production for money and markets frames climate policy. He concludes that:

The strenuous commodifying processes of simplification, abstraction, quantification, propertisation and so forth reflected in performative equations constitute the deep structure of the attempted ʻinternalisation of environmental and social externalitiesʼ that is the public face of the market environmentalism characteristic of the neoliberal era. These processes continually reinterpret and transform the challenges they confront; their goals are never exogenous but are incessantly reshaped by the very process of addressing them. Internalising externalities through commodity formation gives rise to fresh externalities that continually undermine the internalisation project from an environmental perspective.

Breaking commodification processes down into bite-sized chunks using performative equations helps give substance to the intuition that commodification has many forms, dynamics and degrees ... Should regulation try to revise, elaborate and extend the contradictory performative equations that underpin the new ecosystem commodities, as is implied by most critical writings on climate markets? Or should it aim at progressively ʻdeactivatingʼ some set of these equations? This article ... has tried, in short, to unfold some elements in the core of strategic sense behind many a recent anti-commodification slogan, whether ʻour Earth is not for saleʼ, ʻI am not your ATMʼ, or ʻtu no puedes comprar el solʼ.

The whole article is well worth a read.

Life Without Money over the air

A couple of months ago I was interviewed by Shirley, the 'living as sustainably as possible' 'Baglady' of Katoomba in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales (Australia) where I used to live. You can find the podcast on a life without money here:

http://www.bagladyproductions.org/episode-three/

The podcast is of the whole one hour program. The interview on a life without money is at -(minus)21.15mins to -17mins along the track.

Portugal and gift economies

Voter Après-Monnaie

Adam Buick has sent the following summary of a 13 May post of his on the Socialist Party forum:

Just discovered that in last June's French general election there was a candidate in Lyon standing on an "abolish money" platform, Marc Chinal. His party name was "Voter Après-Monnaie" (Vote After-Money). His election blog can be found here. It makes interesting reading (for those who can read French) as it shows that he did get some media publicity for the ideas as well as distributing 40,000 leaflets door-to-door. He got 81 votes or 0.21%. Par for the course at the moment but a sign that the idea of a world without money is spreading spontaneously.

Also for those who understand French here's his 20-minute vidéo on "What Would An After-Money Civilisation Look Like?"

It's mainly devoted to such questions as "what will be the incentive to work?", "who will do the dirty work" and "won't people take too much?" He seems to have come from the ecology movement...

Kellia’s Korner

We recommend that you take a look at, and bookmark for safekeeping and continual reference, Kellia's blog: kelliaskorner.blogspot.com

Kelia's bog is about a moneyfree world:

Over the course of the rest of 2013 at least, I will be devoting much of this blog to writing about what an economy should do, why the money-jobs system cannot be fixed, no matter whether liberals or conservatives, capitalists or socialists are in charge, how the gift economy works in our lives now, what values humans need to develop in order to have a successful global gift economy, and some historical and current day examples of how such an economy can really work

 If art is your 'thing', take a look as this site too: http://moneyandart.tumblr.com/

An impossible marriage

The United Nations Research Institute for Social Development has just published a think piece challenging the strength, depth and maintenance of a solidarity economy unless its values, relationships, production and exchange break from monetary values, relationships, production and exchange.

An impossible marriage: Solidarity economy and monetary economy is just one of the contributions solicited from a range of scholars and practitioners in the lead up to The Potential and Limits of the Social and Solidarity Economy conference 6–8 May 2013 in Geneva, Switzerland.

In print again: The Alternative to Capitalism

Theory and Practice have reprinted work originally published in State Capitalism: The Wages System Under New Management (1986) and Non-Market Socialism in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (1987, edited by Rubel and Crump) in a cheap print edition  The Alternative to Capitalism by Adam Buick and John Crump. It combines a brief critique of state capitalism/'socialism' with a clear exposition of the principles of non-market socialism.

One theme of the book is to make a radical distinction between capitalism and socialism, which implies the impossibility of a reformist approach to creating socialism. This reminds me of part of the conversation between 'George' and the 'Professor' in Philoren's 1943 work Money Must Go! ('And in its place the production of goods for use and free distribution, a World Commonwealth of all mankind, and a real civilisation), where (p. 13) the Professor reminds George that:

You can patch an old pair of trousers till there are more patches than trousers. But that won't make a new pair. It is, in fact, likely to fall to pieces, which, you will agree, would be rather awkward.

The Alternative to Capitalism also explains what a world without money might look, just as in Philoren's work (p. 16) the Professor explains to George:

I am not proposing the abolition of money alone, nor a return to barter. In fact, the abolition of money alone, would solve no problems and would no doubt create many difficulties. But what I do propose is, that THE WHOLE SYSTEM OF MONEY AND EXCHANGE, BUYING AN SELLING, PROFIT-MAKING AND WAGE-EARNING SHOULD BE ENTIRELY ABOLISHED AND THAT INSTEAD, THE COMMUNITY AS A WHOLE SHOULD ORGANISE AND ADMINISTER THE PRODUCTION OF GOODS FOR USE ONLY, AND THE FREE DISTRIBUTION OF THESE GOODS TO ALL THE MEMBERS OF THE COMMUNITY ACCORDING TO EACH MEMBER'S NEEDS. (Capitalisation follows the original.)

One Day Everything Will be Free

One Day Everything Will be Free is a documentary exploring the community dynamics in an alternative economy and ecological restoration project. The project has been initiated by a ‘utopian community’ located in an ecologically degraded area of Haiti known as ‘the wasteland’. It has been made to stimulate discussion on alternative futures to simply throwing  money at poverty, which has been found wanting.

Activist Joseph Redwood-Martinez made the documentary as he worked with Sadhana Forest Haiti in Anse-a-Pitre. If you want to find out more about it, watch the trailer or host an event, say, to show this stimulating ethnographic documentary as a discussion starter, visit the website: http://onedayeverythingwillbefree.com/

You will also find links to trailers of other documentaries that Joseph is in the process of making about permaculture and initiatives — such as the Hayes Valley ‘Farm’ — that focus on developing skills that will make collective sustainability possible. Yes, one day everything will be free.