12-08-14
12-08-08
NEU: “Solidarische Ökonomie & Commons” – Exner/Kratzwald
Die Autor/innen haben das Buch Walther Schütz gewidmet. Seinem Einsatz für ein gutes Leben: berührend, ermutigend und begeisternd. Eine Neuerscheinung von Andreas Exner und Brigitte Kratzwald Klappentext Finanz- und Schuldenkrise, Klimakrise, Krise der Energieversorgung und Hunger – all dies zeigt: … Continue reading
12-08-07
Guest blog by Terry Leahy
Terry Leahy, author of Chapter 6 of Life Without Money comments on a recent book.
Daniel Miller’s recent book Consumption and its Consequences (Polity Press, Cambridge, 2012) continues his ethnographic work on the reasons why people consume, but also looks at these issues in relation to the environmental problems of consumption. The middle part contains the heart of Miller’s argument that no amount of green consumerism is likely to restrain consumption in ways that sufficiently protect the environment. This argument he summarizes here:
At one level most consumption is about basic household provisioning, as in food or clothing. More deeply, it is also about the intensity of relationships with the people you care most about or live with, about status and local symbolic systems. (158)
One study, which informs this, followed shoppers on their trips to the shops in the UK. Miller was mainly looking at housewives. What he found was far from a glorious indulgence in ‘materialist’ consumerism. Housewives were concerned to save the money of their family and careful not to splurge on their own fancies. In another of his studies, he looks at the way the people of Trinidad express themselves in showy purchases of clothing or refitting their cars with flash upholstery. He traces this to a situation in which money and dignity is in short supply and local people establish their status through display and a personal expression of their own style.
But what does he then propose to deal with the environmental crisis we are now facing? It is pointless to try to urge people to make different consumer choices; this is the wrong end of the problem to be tackling. We should tackle the production end. The way to do this is to engage scientific advice on what production needs to be curtailed for the sake of the environment. For example, we could ban gas guzzlers, restricting engines to 1.6 litres.
What Miller does not really take into account here are the vested interests of a capitalist economy that make this solution difficult. Such a regulation might well be scientifically rational but the impact would be massive on the economy, wages and jobs, a political hurdle preventing the well-meaning solutions Miller suggests from implementation already. People voting as consumers makes effective environmental regulation very difficult politically. Miller is certainly right in thinking that the current situation makes it difficult to reign in environmental damage through moral campaigns directed at consumer habits but this same situation makes it equally difficult to adopt the solution he recommends.
Miller does not believe any major change away from capitalism is possible or desirable. He writes of himself as a Norwegian social democrat. Miller does not highlight the key importance of people expressing themselves in consumption because they are alienated in their work, a central aspect of consumer pressures in every country that relies on wage labour. They seek expression and social connection through their consumption because they get little of either at work. Whether goods are provided by the market or by the state, the provision of goods has to be impersonal and bureaucratic.
This is where the idea of the gift economy comes in. It is a third alternative for modernity — not capitalism and not a centralized state based socialism. It is really a package of ideas for organizing production and consumption that gets beyond the impasse Miller describes. The model of ethical behaviour normalized in a gift economy is for people to look after the well being of others and to ensure an equality of outcomes.
How would a gift economy avoid the problems that modern economies now experience with consumption? The daily experience of work in a gift economy is engaging and meaningful. Working harder does not produce an increase in your own personal consumption and working is not necessary to survive. There is less motivation to consume because the pleasures of social connection and self-expression are also a strong feature of work. There is less motivation to produce because you are not required to produce to gain an income and consume and you cannot consume simply more by producing more, mechanisms which prevent over-consumption.
In a gift economy there is no government, so no possibility for environmental regulation by government. Producers control the methods of production and are concerned about their own health and the environmental wellbeing of their own community. Production is not for the market, but for use. Decisions about what to produce and for whom are made by a vast and complex set of decision makers. The aim of producers is to produce and allocate goods that are most needed and likely to give pleasure. Doing this they will be most rewarded with status and maintain support for the gift economy. Such a structure for making decisions would certainly do a lot better than the market in terms of redistribution and environmental outcomes and just as well in efficient production and allocation of goods and resources.
To make a final comment, let us return to the Green shopper characterized as a cold-hearted fish who puts abstract environmental goals in front of the interests of their family. How does the gift economy deal with the trade-off between altruism and localism? In the gift economy the producer looks after their community and family by making sure that their production is not damaging their community and environment. Control at the point of production reconciles the supposedly abstract environmental issues with the local and family issues. What about the needs of people outside of their immediate community? People do not just work to provide for their own community but provide gifts for those to whom they are not personally connected by locality. The intention of this work is to bring other people closer and to extend the arena of intimacy to concrete others, rather than to perform a sacrifice in relation to impersonal ideals. They are making friends and extending the affluence of all parties at the same time.
12-08-06
Demonetization Would Make Moral Choice More “Normal”
By Kéllia Ramares-Watson
Billy, don’t be a hero,
don’t be a fool with your life.
Billy, don’t be a hero,
come back and make me your wife.
And as he started to go,
she said, “Billy, keep your head low!”
Billy, don’t be a hero,
come back to me.
–”Billy, don’t be a hero”, Vietnam Era American pop song.
On July 23, 2012, journalist Chris Hedges wrote an article for truthdig.com in which he blamed “careerists” for facilitating many of the great evils of the world, including the Holocaust. In opening his column, he described these people as:
The bureaucrats. The cynics. They do the little chores that make vast, complicated systems of exploitation and death a reality. They collect and read the personal data gathered on tens of millions of us by the security and surveillance state. They keep the accounts of ExxonMobil, BP and Goldman Sachs. They build or pilot aerial drones. They work in corporate advertising and public relations. They issue the forms. They process the papers. They deny food stamps to some and unemployment benefits or medical coverage to others. They enforce the laws and the regulations. And they do not ask questions.…
They are there to make corporate systems function.
Hedges goes on for three pages condemning the careerists, criticizing them as being “… blind and deaf… [u]tterly illiterate”. He paints them as devoid of empathy, a sense of history, and the ability to think critically. He calls upon significant writers and historians such as T.S. Eliot, Blaise Pascal, and Claude Lanzmann, who made the documentary film “Shoah,” on the Holocaust, to back him up. Hedges gets so worked up about the careerists that, at first, he says, “Good. Evil. These words do not mean anything to them. They are beyond morality.” But later he says, “They assure themselves of their own goodness through their private acts as husbands, wives, mothers and fathers. They sit on school boards. They go to Rotary. They attend church. It is moral schizophrenia.”
Amorality and moral schizophrenia are two different things. What are these people, really?
Hedges leaves the answer to that question to Hannah Arendt, author of “Eichmann in Jerusalem”. In one of the many references to the Holocaust in his essay, Hedges quotes Arendt as saying that Adolf Eichmann was motivated by “an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement…. The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that there were so many like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal.” In other words, the careerists are people.
It is clear from this essay and several others that Hedges has written of late, that he sees something akin to the Holocaust occurring in the genocides and ecocides of today. I tend to agree with him, although today there is no singularly perverse figure such as Hitler upon which to focus. Likewise, we both wish that there would be a mass refusal to cooperate with systems of killing and slavery such that they would collapse from nonparticipation. We both wish that the Everyman and Everywoman doing the 9-to-5 in monstrous corporations, such as Monsanto and Goldman Sachs, would bring down such entities from within by looking out more for their fellow human beings than for their careers. But while Hedges recognizes that these facilitators of atrocity have existed throughout history, he fails to see why; the heroism he asks of the vast majority of the American public, and people in the world at large, is not possible, precisely because most people are “normal”, that is, they are motivated by desires for themselves and their loved ones, first of all, to survive the conditions in which they find themselves, and secondly, to prosper therein. Outside of that intimate circle, their fellow human beings are “Others”, concern for whom lessens as the degrees of separation – by kinship, race, ethnicity, religion, gender identity, nationality, political identity, geography, and economic status – increase.
Today, we admire the people who hid the Jews or tried to assassinate Hitler during World War II, or who acted heroically during more recent atrocities, such as Nelson Mandela did in the years of South African apartheid. But these are heroes, moral giants, not normal people.
Most of us have, at some time or another, faced a situation in which we had to decide whether to walk away from a job or a business deal on moral grounds, even if the decision to walk away might cost us money we desperately needed to pay our next bills or cost us the reputation needed to advance our careers. Kudos to the brave ones who have made those sacrifices, especially when the survival stakes were very high. However, we simply can’t expect that kind of bravery from everyone. “Normal” people are programmed biologically to survive. The black hats know this. They also know that we are programmed socially by our parents, teachers, and peers to survive within our cultural milieu, to be “accepted”.
The heroes have a “defect” in their social and biological survival mechanisms. Scientists today look for genetic factors and differences in brain structure to explain why some people are more “risk-averse” than others. Whatever the reason, some people are more willing to step out of line than others. The rest of us figure out at an early age that if we obey, we will be rewarded with acceptance and thus, survival. Sometimes we’re wrong, but that, at least partially, explains why so many people quietly marched off to the ghettos, concentration camps, and gas chambers of World War II. There were those in denial of the situation, and there were those who lacked the financial means to flee to safer places. But for many, there was the hope that obedience would mean survival. Perhaps for some people it did, as they were able to hold out physically until rescue came. But for millions that was not the case. Yet this persistent belief among the many that obedience means survival is how the black hats have maintained various systems of slavery and death throughout the millennia.
The Nazi regime was, of course, an extreme example of keeping people in line. It not only kept its enemies in line, but it kept its own people in line with the fear that the price of disobedience would be too great. Thus, you had “normal” people, who, in ordinary circumstances wouoldn’t harm anyone, helping to facilitate atrocities because they thought it best to keep their noses to the grindstone. To condemn “careerists” is to condemn the desire to survive, which is to condemn our own basic biology and psychology.
Those of us who do not care about being accepted are in a certain sense “abnormal.” Heroes, the kind of people who, at risk of their own survival, biological or social, step out of the crowd to stand up to a great evil power and say, “you shall not pass”, are truly admirable; they may save the rest of our lives by their courage. But they are as abnormal as the evil powers they face. If heroic actions were normal, they wouldn’t be very heroic, would they?
Rather than to wish that human beings would be more heroic more often, as I think Hedges wishes in his essay, I would make doing the right thing less costly, and thus, more within the spectrum of “normal” behavior. If we could take the threat to survival out of most of our moral decision-making, more people would make the right choice more often.
In a demonetized society, no one would be denied survival resources because of lack of money to buy them, and thus, any person could extricate himself or herself from any endeavor that turns out to be discriminatory, genocidal, or ecocidal. In fact, it would be difficult for those harmful systems to endure without the ability to pressure compliance with threats to biological survival. Moral decision-making would be commonplace, not heroic.The black hats would have to resort to literally putting guns to our heads.
In a world without money, the threat to our survival would still be there in cases such as a decision to attempt to save a drowning person, or a person in a burning building or car, but the existential threats the “careerists” now face would be removed.
The subtle threat intimated by Alan Greenspan in his claim that debt was a great tool for obtaining labor quiessence because no worker wanted to strike and risk being unable to make the mortgage or credit card payment, would be eliminated. It is because, in a monetized society, our ability to feed, clothe and shelter ourselves is most often in the hands of others that we do not rise up against genocidal, ecocidal or otherwise tyrannical employers and systems until we’ve reached an extreme threat point. And we are more likely to rise up when we feel the threat personally, than when a stranger, even a neighbor, feels it..
Which would be easier to do: to make most of us more heroic, or to free all of us from the money-jobs system that fetters our moral decision-making? Without the need to be accepted so that someone pays us money with which we can buy our survival resources, we would be free to make more moral choices for our selves, our fellows, and our planet. Neither path would be easy, but I would trust our ability to change economic systems more than I would trust our ability to change biological and psychological ones.
Kéllia Ramares-Watson is an independent journalist in Oakland, CA. Her pro-demonetization web site, “The End of Money” is at https://endmoney.info/ Her email address is theendofmoney@gmail.com.
12-07-27
Der „Schrei“ des Theoretikers. Zu Robert Kurz, ein Nachruf
Robert Kurz, geboren 1943, verstarb am 18. Juli 2012 von Andreas Exner Meine persönliche Bekanntschaft mit Robert Kurz war ebenso flüchtig wie seine Wirkung auf mich tiefgreifend. Sie begann im Winter des Jahres 2003, wenn ich es recht erinnere. Ein … Continue reading
12-07-23
LIFE WITHOUT MONEY: Building Fair and Sustainable Economies 2012-07-23 12:12:00
I had some really great discussions with people in my last week in Barcelona where monetary fragmentation and striving for a sustainable livelihood are present issues.
On Sunday 8 July I visited the Can Masdeu squat again and talked about Life Without Money in English, with a translator, with 40 to 50 people at the Degrowth Bike Tour Open Day. We gave the bike tour a fond farewell. So many people turned up there was barely enough food to go round, quite the fishes and loaves story. Both the photos, on the left and right, below, were taken at Can Masdeu, one during the talk and the other when I was looking after the cafe earlier in the day. This is in their social centre, at one end of the building they call home. 
The next day Carolina Zerpa arranged a workshop about our book and acted as translator for Trade School Barcelona at AureoSocial in Carrer de Sardenya near the Sagrada Familia with about ten people. Trade School Barcelona is just starting and there were competing events so we were pleased with the turnout.Again there was a great discussion about the possibilities and problems with extricating our livelihoods from monetary structures.
The photos below were taken by Carolina, who is a photographer as well as a driving force behind Trade School Barcelona. We met when she was in New York City, where Trade School started.
On the Wednesday, 11 July, I talked at the ICTA UAB 3rd Summer School and Workshop on Environmental Conflicts and Justice. I had participated on the first day and the 5–6 July workshop at Gaudi's La Pedrera. Do you like the students' sense of humour about our democracy in the photo below? — you can just read it: VOTE HERE.
12-07-15
Money robs us of life and freedom
[this essay was published in German in the newspaper “Der Standard”, 13. July 2012, online here]
Kéllia Ramares-Watson
People invented money to make their commercial transactions easier. At first, money was a medium of exchange and a unit of account. Money was a symbol. What mattered were the things being exchanged or accounted for. But then money began to take on a life of its own. As the writer EM Forster said, “One of the evils of money is that it tempts us to look at it rather than at the things that it buys.” Money has become the über-asset that buys all other assets: materials, such as food, clothing and shelter, services, such as education and entertainment, and psychological well-being, such as status and security.
We hear daily about the scandal over manipulation of the LIBOR rate, the interest rate at which banks loan funds to each other overnight. Several of the world’s largest and most famous financial institutions, including Barclay’s, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan Chase, are implicated in this scandal. In reporting on it, Washington’s Blog noted:
[A]ccording to the CIA’s World Factbook, the global economy – as measured by the world’s gross domestic product – is less than $80 trillion.
In contrast, over $800 trillion dollars worth of investments are pegged to the LIBOR rate. In other words, a market more than 10 times the size of the entire real world economy is effected by LIBOR …[T]he derivatives market is approximately $1,200 trillion dollars.
This means that trading in pieces of paper or computer pixels is vastly more important than engaging in real activities, such as building houses or growing crops. We see today desperate efforts by governments and financial institutions around the world to keep this monetary system, which is a system of debt and interest, going, no matter how many people suffer as a consequence. Thus, while the European Union tries to keep the Euro afloat, and certain banks in the United States call themselves “too big to fail”, suicides motivated by financial distress are increasing all over the world.
In 2011, the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice of the NYU School of Law reported that more than a quarter of a million Indian farmers had committed suicide in the last 16 years, that in 2009, the most recent year for which official figures were available, 17,638 farmers committed suicide, and that this striking figure was an underestimation because it did not including farmers who did not have title to their land. (Women typically fall into this category). The report also said that a great number of the victims were cash crop farmers, particularly cotton farmers. These are the people drawn in to the so-called “Green Revolution” by the promises of greater yields and more income from genetically modified crops, only to end up under a pile of insurmountable debt from crop failures and the vastly higher costs of inputs.
Suicides are increasing in Greece and Italy as a result of austerity, despite the fact that these two nations are stronglly influenced by the Greek Orthodox and Roman Catholic Churches, both of which forbid suicide. On April 6, 2012, CNN.com published an article titled “Austerity drives up suicide rate in debt-ridden Greece.”The articlestated that “according to the health ministry data, the suicide rate jumped about 40% in the first five months of 2011 compared with a year earlier.”
In the United States, poster child for the havoc the monetary system wreaks on individual lives, student loan debt has now exceeded $1 trillion. Students burdened with excessive educational debt and a few job prospects are taking their lives. In an article on student suicide titled, “The Ones We’ve Lost: The Student Loan Debt Suicides”, author Cryn Johannsen quotes this statement from the American Association of Suicidology (APS),
“There is a clear and direct relationship between rates of unemployment and suicide. The peak rate of suicide in 1933 occurred one year after the total US unemployment rate reached 25% of the labor force. Similar findings have been documented internationally. At the individual level, unemployed individuals have between two and four times the suicide rate of those employed.Economic strain and personal financial crises have been well documented as precipitating events in individual deaths by suicide.”
The need for money also curtails our freedoms in many ways. We lose the freedom to be ourselves, to let our work be a true expression of our personalities, talents and interests rather than an indication of how we can best fit into an often manipulated market that may change its tastes or needs for certain skills while we are in the middle of our education or sometime thereafter. How many readers of this article are working a job that is really not suited to who they are?
A monetized world robs us of our dignity as human beings. The desire or need for money makes us engage in behaviors that are not authentic to ourselves, but will gain the approval of people who are in a position to give us money for performing those behaviors. How different is that from the plight of a circus animal who is trained to do a trick for a morsel of food and cruelly punished for refusing to cooperate with the trainer?
People often stay inunsafe, discriminatory, or otherwise exploitive working conditions because they cannot afford to quit. Recently, there was a scandal over the exploitation of Chinese workers by a contractor of the Apple company. We in the West get so many over-priced, shiny gadgets at the expense of people’s lives in the East.
Money interferes with our freedom to learn. Education has become so expensive that adults who want to return to school often cannot.
Money has cost us our political freedom, too. True democracy means one person, one vote. But, especially in the United States, where the Supreme Court has ruled that corporations are people with constitutional rights, including the right to free speech via spending money on elections, we are under a new golden rule: those who have the gold make the rules.
Why must we pay to live on the planet we’re born on? Why must we “earn a living”? Aren’t we already living? Who has the right to deny another human being access to the means of survival because he or she does not have the money to buy those means? I believe very strongly in the great words of Thomas Jefferson in the American Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal…” But if you are subservient then you’re not equal.
David Korten, cofounder of Yes! Magazine, wrote that: “Money is a system of power. The more our lives depend on money, the greater our subservience to those who control the creation and allocation of money.”
Yet, here is the fundamental truth that money hides: we are equal despite our many superficial differences. We come into the world naked and helpless from the womb of a woman;we all go through the same maturation process: crawl before we walk, walk before we run etc. Rich or poor, we all die and you cannot take it with you! He who dies with the most toys still dies!
Money creates scarcity, much of which would fall by the wayside without money to enforce inequitable distribution. Where there truly is scarcity, such as with certain natural resources, we must learn to distribute according to need, not according to money. Despite the claim of some that money is needed to ration scarce resources, we know that the rationing by price is often ineffective. A person with money and the will to waste a resource will do so because he or she can afford the tax or fine placed on the wastrel. A person who truly needs a resource but does not have the money to pay for it will not get it. Under demonetization, rationing of truly scarce resources can be done first of all, according to need, and secondly, if people are of equal need, by mutual agreement to share.
Some people believe that without money there will be no incentive to work. Indeed, money is a great incentive to the work of warfare. But, for peaceful pusuits, Antoine de Saint-Exupery said it best, “If you want to build a ship, don’t herd people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.” We all have the right to work in passion instead of in fear that if we do not do what other people want us to do, we will lack the money to survive.
Honoring the diversity of human beings, not only in terms of things such as race, gender and religion, but also diversity of interests and aptitudes, will assure that each society has a good mix of products and services that suit their both their individual and societal needs and desires. What we have now with money, and especially with globalization, is a growing economic monoculture that does not need everyone’s products and services, yet still demands that everyone be a producer (or the family member of a producer) in order to acquire survival resources. Those who are unwanted by the marketplace and unrelated to a producer get little or nothing. Throwing people away is cruel, unjust, and immoral.
End money before it ends us!
Kéllia Ramares-Watson is an independent journalist living in Oakland, California, USA. She is working on a book about demonetization. Her website The End of Money (https://endmoney.info). She is a member of the platform https://demonetize.it/
12-07-15
Geld raubt Leben und schränkt unsere Freiheit ein
[erschienen in “Der Standard” vom 13. Juli 2012, im “Kommentar der Anderen”, online hier]
Kéllia Ramares-Watson
Geld wurde erfunden um kommerzielle Transaktionen zu vereinfachen. Zuerst diente Geld als Mittel zum Tausch und Wertmaßstab, es war ein Symbol. Was zählte waren die Dinge, die getauscht oder deren Wert gemessen wurde. Doch dann begann Geld ein Eigenleben anzunehmen. Wie schon der Schriftsteller E.M. Forster sagte: „Eine der Übel des Geldes ist, dass es uns dazu verführt, auf es zu mehr zu achten als auf die Güter, die es kauft.“ Geld ist zum Über-Wert geworden, der über alle anderen Werte verfügt: Stoffe wie Nahrungsmittel, Kleidung und Behausung, Dienstleistungen wie Bildung und Unterhaltung, psychisches Wohlbefinden wie Status und Sicherheit.
Die Nachrichten sind voll über den Skandal der Manipulation des LIBOR, das ist jener Zinssatz, mit dem Banken einander Geld über Nacht verleihen. Einige der weltgrößten und bekanntesten Finanzinstitutionen, darunter Barclay’s, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs und J.P. Morgan Chase, sind darin verstrickt. In einem Bericht darüber notierte Washington’s Blog: „Dem CIA World Factbook zufolge umfasst die Weltökonomie, gemessen am Weltbruttoprodukt, weniger als 80 Billionen US-Dollar. Im Unterschied dazu sind Investments im Wert von mehr als 800 Billionen US-Dollar an den LIBOR gekoppelt. In anderen Worten, der LIBOR beeinflusst einen Markt, der mehr als 10 Mal größer ist als die gesamte Weltökonomie“. Der Markt für Finanzderivate umfasst in etwa 1.200 Billionen US-Dollar.
Das heißt, der Handel mit bloßem Papier oder Computerpixels ist weitaus bedeutender als sich der realen Produktion zu widmen wie etwa dem Hausbau oder der Landwirtschaft. Wir sind heute Zeugen des verzweifelten Versuchs von Regierungen und Finanzinstitutionen überall auf der Welt, dieses monetäre System aufrecht zu erhalten, das ein System von Schuld und Zinsen ist, ohne Rücksicht darauf, wieviele Menschen seine Konsequenzen erleiden. Während die Europäische Union also versucht, den Euro über Wasser zu halten, und gewisse Banken in den USA sich selbst als „too big to fail“ einschätzen, nehmen Selbstmorde aufgrund von finanziellem Stress weltweit zu.
Das Center for Human Rights and Global Justice der NYU School of Law hat 2011 berichtet, dass in den letzten 16 Jahren mehr als eine Viertelmillion indischer Bauern Selbstmord verübten und dass 2009, dem letzten Jahr, wofür offizielle Zahlen zur Verfügung stehen, 17.638 Bauern Selbstmorden zum Opfer fielen. Dabei unterschätzt diese erschreckende Zahl noch das wahre Ausmaß, denn sie unterschlägt jene, die keine legalen Landrechte haben, was vor allem Frauen betrifft. Eine große Zahl der Opfer sind Cash Crop-Farmer, insbesondere Baumwollproduzenten. Genau das sind die angeblichen Gewinner der „Grünen Revolution“, denen man höhere Erträge und mehr Einkommen durch den Einsatz gentechnisch veränderter Organismen versprochen hat, die aber tatsächlich unter der Last uneinbringbarer Schulden zusammenbrechen, aufgrund von Ernteausfällen und der weitaus größeren Kosten industrieller Produktionsinputs.
Selbstmorde nehmen wegen der Kürzungsmaßnahmen auch in Griechenland und Italien zu. Trotz des großen Einflusses der griechisch-orthodoxen und der römisch-katholischen Kirchen in diesen beiden Ländern, die Selbstmorde als Sünde betrachten. „Kürzungen treiben Selbstmordrate im hochverschuldeten Griechenland in die Höhe“, so titelte etwa ein Artikel auf CNN.com vom 6. April 2012. Angaben des Gesundheitsministeriums zufolge schnellte die Selbstmordrate im Vergleich zu den ersten fünf Monaten des Vorjahres um ganze 40% nach oben.
In den USA, dem Vorzeigefall für die Zerstörung individueller Leben durch das monetäre System, hat die Verschuldung von Studenten bereits 1 Billion US-Dollar überschritten. Studierende, die von exzessiven Ausbildungsschulden belastet sind und kaum Jobs in Aussicht haben, nehmen sich häufig das Leben. In einem Beitrag über Selbstmord unter Studierenden mit dem Titel „The One’s We’ve Lost: The Student Loan Debt Suicides“, zitiert Cryn Johannsen die American Association of Suicidology (APS): „Es gibt eine klare und direkte Korrelation zwischen der Arbeitslosen- und der Selbstmordrate. Ein Jahr nachdem die Arbeitslosenrate 25% aller Beschäftigungssuchenden erreicht hatte, erreichte die Selbstmordrate 1933 ihren Gipfelpunkt. Ähnliche Ergebnisse sind international dokumentiert. Arbeitslose haben eine zwei- bis vierfach höhere Selbstmordrate als Beschäftigte. Es ist gut bekannt, dass ökonomischer Stress und persönliche Finanzkrisen Selbstmorde auslösen.“
Der Zwang zu Geldeinkommen tötet nicht nur, er schränkt auch unsere Freiheiten in vielfältiger Weise ein. Wir verlieren die Freiheit, wir selbst zu sein. Tatsächlich ist unsere Arbeit nicht der wahrhaftige Ausdruck unserer Persönlichkeiten, Talente und Interessen, sondern eher ein Zeichen dafür, wie gut wir uns dem oft manipulierten Markt andienen, der seine Moden oder die Nachfrage nach bestimmten Qualifikationen häufig ändert, während wir gerade inmitten einer Ausbildung stecken oder einen Job suchen. Wieviele der Leserinnen und Leser dieses Essays arbeiten denn in einem Job, der dem entspricht, wer sie wirklich sind?
Eine monetarisierte Welt beraubt uns der Würde als menschliche Wesen. Der Wunsch oder die Notwendigkeit Geld zu besitzen treibt uns zu Verhaltensweisen, die nicht authentisch sind, dafür jedoch den Sanktus jener erhalten, die uns mit Geld für solche Verhaltensweisen belohnen können. Wie groß ist der Unterschied zu dem Leiden eines Zirkustieres, das für einen Happen Futter auf ein paar Tricks trainiert wird, und das man grausam bestraft, wenn es sich der Kooperation mit dem Trainer verweigert?
Menschen verharren in unsicheren, diskriminierenden oder in anderer Hinsicht ausbeuterischen Arbeitsverhältnissen aus dem schlichten Grund, weil sie es sich nicht leisten können zu kündigen. Der jüngste Skandal der Ausbeutung chinesischer Arbeiter durch einen Apple-Zulieferer ist da nur ein kleines Beispiel. Wir im Westen kaufen soviele überteuerte, glänzende Gadgets auf Kosten von Menschenleben im Osten.
Geld schränkt auch unsere Freiheit zu lernen ein. In den USA, aber auch in vielen anderen Ländern sind Bildung und Ausbildung so teuer geworden, dass es Erwachsenen, die etwas Neues lernen wollen, oft unmöglich geworden ist.
Und Geld hat uns auch um unsere politische Freiheit gebracht. Wirkliche Demokratie beruht auf dem Prinzip „eine Person, eine Stimme“. Doch in der Realität gilt vielmehr eine andere goldene Regel: Wer Gold hat, macht die Regeln. Das trifft insbesondere auf die USA zu, wo der Oberste Gerichtshof Unternehmen zu Personen mit verfassungsmäßigen Rechten erklärt hat, darunter das Recht auf freie Meinungsäußerung, was die Beeinflussung von Wahlen durch Parteispenden inkludiert.
Warum müssen wir für das Leben auf dem Planeten zahlen, auf dem wir geboren wurden? Warum müssen wir unser Leben erst „verdienen“? Leben wir noch nicht? Wer hat das Recht, anderen menschlichen Wesen den Zugang zu den Mitteln des Lebens zu verweigern, nur weil er oder sie nicht über die Mittel verfügt, sie zu kaufen? Ich glaube aus tiefstem Herzen an die großen Worte von Thomas Jefferson in der US-amerikanischen Unabhängigkeitserklärung: „Wir befinden diese Wahrheiten für unmittelbar einsichtig: dass alle Menschen gleich geboren sind (…).“ Wer unterwürfig und anderen dienstbar ist, ist jedoch nicht gleich. David Korten, Mitbegründer des Magazins „Yes!“ meint dementsprechend: „Geld ist ein System der Macht. Je mehr unsere Leben von Geld abhängen, desto größer ist unsere Unterwürfigkeit unter jene, die die Schaffung und Verteilung von Geld kontrollieren.“
Geld verschleiert eine fundamentale Wahrheit: Wir sind gleich, trotz unserer vielen oberflächlichen Unterschiede. Wir kommen nackt in diese Welt, hilflos, aus dem Bauch einer Frau, und wir alle gehen durch den gleichen Prozess der Reifung, wir krabbeln bevor wir gehen, wir gehen bevor wir laufen und so fort. Alle Menschen sterben, ob reich oder arm, und kein Reicher kann etwas von seinem Reichtum mitnehmen. Noch der vermögendste Mensch ist sterblich!
Geld schafft Knappheit, wovon ein großer Teil ganz einfach wegfallen würde, wenn Geld nicht eine sehr ungleiche Verteilung erzwänge. Wo es wirklichen Mangel gibt, wie bei bestimmten natürlichen Ressourcen, müssen wir dagegen lernen, sie nach Bedürfnissen zu verteilen, nicht nach dem Besitz von Geld. Auch wenn manche meinen, Geld wäre notwendig um knappe Ressourcen zu allozieren, so ist doch offenkundig, dass die Rationierung über den Preis in vielen Fällen unwirksam ist. Eine Person mit ausreichenden finanziellen Mitteln und dem Hang zur Verschwendung einer Ressource wird sich um Ökosteuern oder Strafen nicht viel kümmern. Und eine Person, die eine Ressource wirklich benötigt, wird sie nicht bekommen, weil es ihr an Zahlungsfähigkeit ermangelt. In einer demonetarisierten Gesellschaft können limitierte Ressourcen erstens nach Bedürfnis verteilt werden und zweitens, bei gleichen Bedürfnissen, durch die wechselseitige Übereinkunft, sie zu teilen.
Nun glauben manche, dass es ohne Geld keinen Anreiz mehr zur Arbeit gäbe. Und in der Tat: Geld ist ein grandioser Anreiz für das Kriegshandwerk. Für friedliche Zwecke allerdings sieht das anders aus. Antoine de Saint-Exupery drückte das auf unnachahmliche Weise in folgendem Bild aus: „Wenn du ein Schiff bauen willst, treib die Leute nicht zusammen um Holz zu beschaffen, teile sie nicht ein um die notwendigen Arbeiten zu erledigen. Lehre ihnen vielmehr die Sehnsucht nach den endlosen Weiten des Meeres.“ Wir alle haben das Recht, aus Leidenschaft zu arbeiten anstatt aus Angst davor, kein Geld zu haben, wenn wir nicht tun was andere Leute von uns verlangen.
Die Wertschätzung der Vielfalt menschlicher Wesen, nicht nur in Begriffen ethnischer Identität, Geschlecht oder Religion, sondern auch als Vielfalt von Interessen und Fähigkeiten, wird eine solche Kombination aus Gütern und Dienstleistungen hervorbringen, die gleichermaßen ihren individuellen wie ihren gesellschaftlichen Bedürfnissen und Wünschen entspricht. Auf der Grundlage des Geldes dagegen, und insbesondere unter den Bedingungen der Globalisierung, erleben wir eine wachsende ökonomische Monokultur. Sie braucht gar nicht Produkte von uns allen, und doch verlangt sie von uns allen, Produzent zu sein, um zu überleben, oder jedenfalls die notwendigen familiären Beziehungen zu haben. Deshalb bekommen jene, die der Markt nicht will, und die nicht über solche Beziehungen verfügen, wenig oder gar nichts. Auf diese Weise Menschen einfach wegzuwerfen ist grausam, ungerecht und unmoralisch. Überwinden wird daher das Geld, bevor es uns überwindet!
Kéllia Ramares-Watson ist unabhängige Journalistin in Oakland, Kalifornien, USA. Sie arbeitet zur Zeit an einem Buch zur Demonetarisierung. Ihre Website ist The End of Money (https://endmoney.info). Sie ist Mitglied der Plattform https://demonetize.it
12-07-12
Walther Schütz: die Liebe zum Leben
Walter Schütz: 1958-2012 Ich erinnere mich an ein Gespräch mit ihm. Walther kommentierte darin die allgemeine Ansicht, ein gutes Leben wäre auch ein langes Leben. In der für ihn typischen Art hinterfragte er eine Selbstverständlichkeit: die Verlängerung des Lebens, das … Continue reading
12-07-05
Ostrom and common property
WEDNESDAY, JULY 04, 2012
Elinor Ostrom and common property
Posted by ajohnstone at 1:20 PM
On the 3rd July the Times of London carried an obituary for Elinor Ostrom who died on 12 June. She was the first (and so far only) woman to have been awarded a Nobel Prize for economics, not that this is necessarily an honour given the long line of capitalist apologists who have been awarded it in the past. Ostrom, however, was a little different in that she carried out research which refuted one capitalist argument as to why socialism would not work, the so-called "tragedy of the commons". Here's how the Times obituary-writer described her research:"She put to rest a fallacy that suggested that, left to their own devices, people were incapable of properly managing commonly held property. The widely held belief in the 'tragedy of the commons' stemmed from the bitter experience of selfish herdsmen over-grazing shared common pasture-land, rendering it barren and useless.
By studying first the sharing of common drinking-water supplies in Southern California, then the management of forests in South America, irrigation in Nepal, and fishing off the Maine coast, Ostrom turned conventional wisdom on its head. The traditional response to the 'tragedy of the commons' was for such scarce resources, including common land, public forests, drinking-water stocks, oil fields, and fish in rivers and seas, to be either strictly regulated by government or leased to private interests.
Ostrom showed, using the first-hand tools of the anthropologist rather than the big-canvas theories of politics and economics, that smaller units invariably work better than larger ones and that community management is better than state regulation or private ownership in distributing goods fairly and sustaining scarce resources."
For this, she merits a favorable mention on the Socialism Or Your Money Back blog.