Re: [ox-en] There is no such thing like "peer money"
- From: "Michel Bauwens" <michelsub2004 gmail.com>
- Date: Wed, 9 Jul 2008 16:55:39 +0700
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From the very start?
This means you are going to outlaw the use of any money, and use dramatic
coercion to achieve that effect.
I'm sorry, but that sounds like a Polpot-ian scheme, and I believe,
extremely dangerous.
I resonate much more with this approach:
Charles Eisenstein:
"In a highly specialized, technological society, most of us need to perform
exchanges to live. To do so we need a medium of exchange – money. Some
people, noting this inescapable fact, can see no alternative but to return
to a primitive society, to undo the millennia-long course of civilization,
which they quite understandably view as an enormous mistake. The scenario
changes if money is used to recreate rather than destroy the social
relations of a hunter-gatherer. In those societies, when a hunter killed a
large animal, he or she would give away most of the meat, dividing it
according to kinship status, personal affection, and need. As with demurrage
money, it was much better to have lots of people "owe you one" than it was
to have a big pile of rotting meat, or even of dried jerky that had to be
transported or secured. Why would you even want to, when your community is
as generous to you as you are to it? Security came from sharing. The good
luck of your neighbor was your own good luck as well. If you came across an
unexpected large source of wealth, you threw a huge party.
A negative-interest currency is a step toward the gift economies of yore
that strengthen and define communities. Describing Lewis Hyde's theory of
the gift, author Jessica Prentice writes, "Part of the sacred/erotic energy
of gifts is that the receiver cannot accumulate them—either a gift needs to
be passed on, or another gift needs to be given so that the gift-giving
energy keeps moving. Gifts are about flow, and they are meant to
circulate."[9] This is a perfect description of free-money, which like a
gift collecting dust in the closet loses its value when kept unused.
Free-money reverses the compulsion to constantly expand and fortify the
accumulation of the private, the realm of me and mine. Just as interest
shrinks the circle of self until we are left with the alienated, mercenary
ego of modern civilization, demurrage, the opposite of interest, widens it
to reunite us with community and all humanity, ending the artificial
scarcity and competition of the Age of Usury.
Demurrage recreates, in the realm of money, the hunter-gatherer's
disinclination toward food storage or other material accumulation. It
resurrects the ancient hunter-gatherer mentality of abundance, in which
sharing is easy and natural, in which there is no mad scramble to enclose
the world. It promises a return in spirit to the "original affluent society"
of Marshall Sahlins, but at a higher order of complexity. It is not a
technological return to the Stone Age, as some primitivists envision after
the collapse, but a spiritual return. " (
http://realitysandwich.com/money_a_new_beginning_part_2)
For more details see http://www.p2pfoundation.net/Demurrage
On Tue, Jul 8, 2008 at 7:34 PM, Christian Siefkes <christian siefkes.net>
wrote:
Hi Michel, hi all,
Michel Bauwens wrote:
Thanks Sam, I totally agree, and this is the background to the 'beef' I
have
with the Stefan's. Granted that we 'need' money, at least in a
transitional
state (which may last forever, unless a system a la siefkes takes over),
then it is just inconceivable that we would use the present capitalist
protocol for such a money. That is a very simple, and for me, irrefutable
premise.
I think we'll have to do without money from the very start, otherwise the
transition simply won't take place. For the internal organization of the
new
mode of production, that is--it's probably possible (and indeed necessary)
to collect money and use it to buy things on the market with we cannot yet
produce ourselves, but it's just using money in "pass-through" mode. The
new
mode of production won't produce an income for anybody, that's indeed a
precondition for its success (since otherwise the rules of market
competition will still govern the transactions between money owners, and
the
new mode will revert into the old one).
For a successful transition to a post-capitalist way of production, a
protocol such as the one I describe has to be used from the very start.
That'll require some modifications (to make it more suitable for smaller
groups, for example), but it's not impossible. I'm thinking about it.
Best regards
Christian
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