Demonetize it!

Call for papers! Demonetization!

For the upcoming issue of the Austrian journal “Streifzüge“, we are looking for papers on demonetization. We would be glad to get submissions in English and would translate them. The issue would be the first publication on demonetization debates in German and one of the first worldwide. Please find below the call in English and German.

ENGLISH

For the special issue of “Streifzüge” (No. 54), which will be published in March/April 2012, me and Martin Scheuringer are responsible. We would like to translate English contributions, preferably original papers, but also essential papers which have been published already elsewhere in English. Translation into German will be done by the editors of “Streifzüge”.

This issue argues for demonetization, considering the following aspects:

Every mode of production and every way of living is based on unconditional giving, direct communication between producers, cooperation and the riches of the earth. The monetary economy uses the social and natural world for its own destructive goal, which is an end in itself: accumulating money. Besides the domination of man over man, an enormous dynamic of the expansion of domination enfolds, which permanently revolutionizes the ruling class as well.

We do not really believe that it will be possible to get rid of this destructive machinery and its constructive mode of strengthening social domination by means of education. More confidence we would place in movements that reclaim the commons and rely on their own power. The conscious reorganization of social relations without money takes place in a wide range of niches. Yet it is evident that these attempts to demonetize society are weak and have to struggle with a lot of deficits.

We would like to publish contributions on tactical questions of demonetization as well as about wider perspectives: Is a global revolution necessary or is it possible to construct demonetized zones? Or is it only possible to make progress by applying both strategies? Is it necessary to promote social struggles against the rule of money and its beneficiaries or can demonetized ways of living only be supported by attractive best practices without involving struggles? Or is there again a third way, i.e. is it necessary to link struggles and practical alternatives? What is the logic of money? Where does it start to structure our way of thinking and to form our way of acting? Are we human beings so deeply structured by money that we first have to change ourselves before demonetization could be possible? Or can we only change psychologically if demonetization makes progress?

Deadline for submissions is mid of february 2012. We accept book reviews (1600 signs), short essays (2000 signs), short articles (5000-6000 signs), normal articles (5000-12000 signs), long essays (12000-18000 signs), and long articles (24000-31000 signs).

The language should be as accessible as possible. Citations and references should be kept as brief as possible.

DEUTSCH

Für den kommenden Schwerpunkt der Ausgabe 54, Erscheinungstermin März/April 2012, sind ich und Martin Scheuringer zuständig. Dieser Schwerpunkt argumentiert für eine DEMONETARISIERUNG, und zwar mit den folgenden Überlegungen im Hintergrund:

Jede Produktion und jede Lebensweise beruht auf bedingungslosem Geben, der direkten Kommunikation zwischen den Produzierenden, Kooperation und den Reichtümern der Erde. Die Geldwirtschaft benutzt unsere soziale und natürliche Welt für ihren eigenen, destruktiven Selbstzweck: Geld, das sich vermehrt. Neben der Herrschaft von Menschen über Menschen tritt eine gewaltige Dynamik der Expansion dieser Herrschaft hinzu, die auch die Herrschenden beständig revolutioniert.

Dass man diesen destruktiven Selbstzweck und sein konstruktives Herrschaftsmotiv über einen pädagogischen Etappenprozess loswerden kann, glauben wir eher nicht. Ein größeres Vertrauen setzen wir in die gemeinschaftliche Aneignung der Reichtümer und in die je eigene Kraft. Die bewusste Organisation des Anderen, sie wird in den verschiedenen Nischen der Geldwirtschaft praktisch angegangen: örtlich, zeitlich, aspektuell. Dass dies an vielen Stellen lahmt, ist freilich sichtbar.

Wir würden daher gerne Beiträge über die taktischen ebenso wie über die perspektivischen Fragen publizieren: Braucht es eine globale Umwälzung oder gelingt der Aufbau demonetarisierter Zonen? Oder ist beides nur als ein Zusammenhang zu denken? Ist mit kämpferischen Mitteln gegen das Regime des Geldes und seine Nutznießer vorzugehen oder ist das gute Leben nur als attraktives Vorbild kampflos zu verwirklichen? Oder, wiederum als dritte Möglichkeit, ist beides nur in einer Synthese wirksam? Was ist die Logik des Geldes? Wo beginnt sie unser Denken zu strukturieren und unser Handeln zu prägen? Gibt es mit uns, den Menschen wie wir sie in der Gesellschaft des Geldes eben sind, Ansatzpunkte der Befreiung, und wenn ja, wo sind sie: in, um oder doch erst vor uns?

Darüber hinaus freuen wir uns wie immer auch über Beiträge zu anderen Themen.

* Was die Textsorten und diverse Formalia betrifft, bitte einen Blick auf die Hinweise für AutorInnen werfen!
* Redaktionsschluss der Nummer 54 ist im Mitte Februar 2012

Demonetarisierung: für eine Welt ohne Geld – Call for papers

Andreas Exner Für den kommenden Schwerpunkt der Ausgabe 54 der Zeitschrift “Streifzüge“, Erscheinungstermin März/April 2012, sind ich und Martin Scheuringer zuständig. Dieser Schwerpunkt argumentiert für eine DEMONETARISIERUNG, und zwar mit den folgenden Überlegungen im Hintergrund: Jede Produktion und jede Lebensweise … Continue reading →

From Land Grab to Food Sovereignty

Talk given at the Cross Border Experience conference in Ljubljana on 27.10.2011, on a panel together with Tom Kucharz (Ecologists in Action, Spain) and Elisabeth Janssen (ASEED). by Andreas Exner In my talk (download slides) I will raise the question … Continue reading →

Is demonetization a really good idea?

Recently a companera asked me, if it really is such a good idea to start from abolishing money, since it seems to enhance freedom and quality of life especially for the most poor of us. I thought about it for a while and than answered that I do not see evidence for that.

Over the last year, I read and thought a lot about Tanzania (as a case study for the land grab, the results are partly published in German). Having now quite a good picture of the situation in Tanzania (and some overview of the situation in Africa as a whole), I doubt that money ever did any good job there.

Actually, I would say, things are getting increasingly worse particularly because of monetary relations.

You can differentiative two kinds of social dynamics in capitalism: (1) disintegration through money relations (competition, precariousness), (2) integration through the capital relation and its accumulation (wage labour, social infrastructure, the welfare state). If tendency number 1 is not counterbalanced by tendency number 2, than disaster is the immediate outcome: that is the misery in Africa. You can name it “markets (almost) without capital”. It is the famous “non capitalist market economy” what you actually find there.

Traditional reciprocal relations (which were to a considerable extent — not entirely — also relations of social dominance) erode and a capitalist type of cohesion of social life does not appear, since wage labour does not play a decisive role in most of subsaharian Africa.

I think, when striving to overcome money we struggle for three things: (1) protection of subsistence and commons where they still exist (still, in Africa) from capital and commodification, (2) degrowth of the capital relation (which will not be an entirely voluntary process), (3) building an alternative, which will look (very?) different in the North and in the different parts of the South.

Of course one could still call for a basic income for all, but I see demands based on money more as strategic demands with limited merits. And it seems doubtful that there is any political strategy which could be applied without taking into account specific contexts. For instance — I unfortunately have to confess — focusing on basic income possibly will not do much good in Africa, precisely because (1) transfer payments would have partly to rely on capital prospering in the North, which is no solution and option at all and (2) commodification is just the prelude to full fledged capitalism, in my view.

Considering the question of strategy in more general terms, one must conclude that the conception of “the alternative” to the market economy and capital as a global blueprint is actually based on a gross misconception of the complexities of our world. One gets very sceptical about any “model solution” when observing how different social relations on this planet really are (despite the homogenizing force of capitalism, and sometimes because of it).

In this respect, it is interesting to study actual struggles peasants fought, i.e. in Tanzania. The history of peasant struggles and the alternatives they tried to create are hardly known even in development circles. For instance in Tanzania, there was at least one movement of peasants (the Ruvuma Development Association, RDA), which combined self-determined “development” with a struggle against authorities in order to take control of their lives. This association was crushed by the “socialist” state in 1969.

The RDA is seldomly discussed in the literature on “African socialism” which president Julius Nyerere turned into the ideology of the single party state. It was profoundly analyzed by Michael Jennings in “Surrogates of the State“.  Descriptions are also to be found online.

A further example on a much bigger scale are the peasant movements that tried to capture the development policy of the state after 1961 (the date of independence). In this period, peasants actually tried to seize the policy of the postcolonial state by engaging in a countrywide self-determined construction of social facilities, roads etc. — at that time such projects were often granted money by a state that feared to loose legitimacy that was built on high expectations of rising living standards. Peasants achieved a lot of “development” (in a traditional sense), but quite soon the state cut off support, simply because this would have been “development from below” and as such destroyed the capacity of the state to direct social developments or — at least — the disbursement of its budget. These events are hardly ever studied in any detail and we owe again Michael Jennings a valuable study published in the Journal of  Modern African Studies in 2003 (“‘WeMust RunWhile OthersWalk’: popular participation and development crisis inTanzania, 1961-9″).

Michael Jennings explains:

People at the grassroots level actively engaged the political process: by undertaking informal self-help activities, the construction of schools and dispensaries not contained in the development plan, they sought to mobilise funds for the local community. Self-help was more than provision of unskilled labour to provide the infrastructure demanded by the administrative and political officials. It was a chance for the people to dictate the pace and form of development at the local level. Self-help was an engagement in a political process, albeit in a position of weakness, in which the goal was to secure resource allocation to the area in competition with other areas.

It was a relatively successful strategy to adopt with a government determined to maintain the support of its rural constituency, and equally determined that independence should bring the benefits of development to the peasantry. For Nyerere’s government, leaving a school without a teacher, or a dispensary without drugs or a nurse, was unacceptable for both political and moral reasons.

His summary:

For a short period, the Tanzanian peasantry in many parts of the nation were able to exercise a degree of control over the development process, a level of control about which the central state became increasingly concerned. The course of this policy over the 1960s was of critical importance in shaping the relationship of the state to the peasantry, and in the rise of the impulses that would lead to the establishment of statism by 1969.

Maybe it is noticeable that none of these movements did abstain from money. The RDA used development funds, and peasants who built up infrastructures after 1961 in an impressive effort of (largely unpaid) self-help hoped to get support by the state in the end. Yet money was not the first target and state support was seen as an added resource, which people tried to mobilize to realize their own notion of “development”. The success of the peasants in their struggle for independence raised the expectations of quickly improving their living conditions — and this was a critical psychological resource for the scale of self-help that took place in the early 1960s.

In the case of the RDA, it was self-determination which peasants fought for: to produce more food for own consumption, to build up knowledge with teachers that trained themselves and came from the community and so forth. The RDA also wanted to act as a countrywide model for self-determined “development”, which possibly was the reason why the state confiscated its property, dispersed its activists and stopped the project. Indeed, Nyerere developed his notion of “African socialism” taking the RDA as a best practice example. But there were also other forces in government, which proved stronger in the end, and we generally may doubt that a state-led policy of “socialism” would ever be able to scale up what initiatives such as the RDA achieved locally and could have spread by leading through example, encouraging self-organization, networking and collective action of the peasants themselves.

Also in the case of the broad scale movement of self-help in the years immediately after independence peasants wanted concrete improvements, not money in the first place. Analysing their projects at the time they viewed social services (dispensaries, schools, clinics, community centers) and roads as progress and achieved quite a bit of it even without state support.

We do not know which trajectory such movements would have taken, if the state had abstained to intervene. Maybe a demonetized structure of collective facilities would have been constructed. At least such a process would have been feasible.

It is a bitter irony, that neither social services nor roads have been developed much further in Tanzania after 50 years of top down “development” that ensued after the state had repressed self-organized movements and planted itself effectively at the village level in the course of the massive forced resettlement campaign in the 1970s. Neoliberal adjustment since the 1980s brutally drove down the standard of living , and the increasing commodification of social relations seems to undermine resources of solidarity and egalitarian collectivity that would be crucial for any perspective of demonetized well-being.

Struggles for Land – Well-being in a World without Fossil Fuels

A new volume on land grab, peak oil and alternatives to capitalism appeared in German. Below a description of the main contents is given. We currently look for an english publisher. Struggles for Land – Well-being in a World without … Continue reading →

A note about Steve Jobs and moneyless ways of learning

Steve Jobs was by no means a figure of demonetisation. But looking at his 2005 Stanford commencement speech, I can’t help but wondering how many commentators disregard the obvious, and so a great little paradox went almost unnoticed by the world.

In the first of his impressive three life stories Jobs describes his time at Reed College, a place he attended six months as a regular student for an astronomical price in relation to his working class parents income. (Steve was adopted, his biological mother only accepted the Jobs couple after getting their promise to send him to college). Jobs decided to “drop out and drop in”, which means simply continue attending classes but not as a regular student.

This must have happened on a nonmonetary base. Jobs was so poor he slept on the floor in friends rooms and he walked through the whole town on Sunday to get a free meal at the Hare Krishna temple.

Jobs said he learned invaluable things in these 18 months, that helped him to shape the world of modern computing. If the college was policed and non-payers would be at least thrown out and criminalized at those times – how much poorer would the world be? And how can you know in any particular case that the limitation of our freedom of access does not kill genius?

Jobs did not favor moneyless relations, rather – for example – he saved the music industry with iTunes. Many say that he made music affordable. But that came at a high price: the generalisation and canonisation of monetary relations. When I was doing the HyperCard support for Apple Austria in the late 1980s, we had a free sharing spirit and an explosion of user communities. This was the birthplace of many fantastic projects that changed the face of modern computing, for example it was the first lab for the World Wide Web. But the spring lasted only for a short time.

This is another story unnoticed: The monetisation of application development killed what could have become an Open Source Culture. We might be far, far ahead in development if sexy Apple gear would have stayed connected with Open Source spirit. The two worlds drifted apart, and I think we missed a lot of innovation because of that. Thanks, Steve. You were a great innovator after all. And your personal story tells us that moneyless niches are far more important than many think. And that they will be even more important as we can share easily nowadays.

Profit durch Ausbeutung von “Gemeinwohl”. Die “Gemeinwohlökonomie” in der Praxis

Die von mehreren Leuten geäußerte theoretische Kritik der “Gemeinwohlökonomie” hat so manche Zweifel an dem Konzept gesät, das unter anderem Attac Österreich vertritt. Jetzt zeigt sich wie die Praxis aussieht. Enthüllend. von Andreas Exner Man kann Perspektiven, die auf eine … Continue reading →

Why the economy will never work for all of us – Kellia Ramares-Watson

This speech of independent journalist and activist Kellia Ramares-Watson is available now as an mp3 at http://www.sendspace.com/file/11mvp3

The talk was held at the event “Rebuilding Village Economy Through Local Exchange” at the Berkeley Ecology Center on 9/29/11

Grundeinkommen: ein wichtiger Kerninhalt, aber allein zu wenig

Am Freitag, 23.9., fand in Graz eine Podiumsveranstaltung mit Leo Kühberger und Christine Werner zum Thema Grundeinkommen statt, organisiert vom Arbeitslosenverein AMSEL. Den Rahmen bot die österreichweite Woche des Grundeinkommens. Die Veranstaltung war mit schätzungsweise fünfzig Leuten für Graz gut … Continue reading →

Einladung/Invitation: Workshop “Solidarische Ökonomie und Demonetarisierung”, 21.-22. September in Wien/Vienna!

(English version below) KriSU und Vivir Bien laden zum 4. Seminar und Workshop zu solidarischer Ökonomie und Demonetarisierung – am 21. September ab 16 Uhr in der Schenke Wien [1]. Es soll kurze Inputs (je 10-15 Minuten) geben von allen … Continue reading →