Alternative Currencies

Bitcoin is a decentralized system of digital authentication that facilitates the circulation of value on the Internet without the presence of any intermediaries, a characteristic that has often gained it the definition of “digital cash” or “crypto currency”, since it can be used as money for payments. This article consists in a technoetic inquiry into the origins of this technology and its evolution. This inquiry will take in consideration the biopolitical dynamics that govern the Bitcoin community as well specific characteristics of the technical realization, aiming to provide insights on the future of this technology as well a post-humanist interpretation of its emergence.

This article provides a quality check of the degrowth movement’s proposal of local currencies as tools for advancing socially equitable and ecologically sustainable degrowth. The article draws comprehensively upon mainly English-language academic research about four widespread local currency types – LETS, time banks, HOUR currencies, and convertible local currencies (CLCs) – to assess their performance with respect to four degrowth-related criteria: community-building, advancement of alternative values in economic exchange, facilitation of alternative livelihoods, and eco-localization. LETS have been found to support alternative livelihoods under quite uncommon conditions, and contribute indirectly to eco-localization by moderately facilitating informal resale, repair, and sharing of commercially produced goods, although their burdensome management and confinement to small memberships limit their usefulness. Time banks help expand social networks, and are best at reaching the socially excluded. However, they are confined to unskilled personal services and dependent on grant funding. HOUR currencies do not stand out with regard to any criteria, but may have a minor capacity to promote local purchasing. CLCs are best at attracting local businesses, but no significant evidence of their said capacity to localize supply chains has surfaced as yet, and their business-friendly design works to the detriment of other criteria. In sum, existing research provides a very weak basis for advocating local currencies as tools for purposive degrowth. Local currencies are here categorized as two utopian socialist approaches: the behind-society’s-back variety of LETS and HOUR currencies, and the appeal-to-elites variety of time banks and CLCs. Marx and Engels’s critiques of these approaches remain valid: successful monetary systems require resources that are not available behind society’s back, notably the power to levy taxes and designate by which means they can be paid. Local currencies that appeal for elite support – without mass popular backing – have shaken off most radical connotations, and are vulnerable to changing policy agendas. Given the present historical conjuncture of popular outrage against the banking sector, this paper argues that the degrowth movement would improve its chances of contributing to purposive degrowth by prioritizing government-centred ecological reform of the monetary system over local currencies.

As well as paying attention to adapting design to the various scales of ecological design for
sustainability, members of the emerging natural design movement are addressing a number of
diverse and interrelated scale-linking design issues.  I will concentrate on ten of them, that I
regard as particularly important in the creation of a sustainable human civilization.  There are
certainly others that will be explored in future research.
Subchapter one explores the crucial role of education in the cultural change towards a
wide spread intention to participate appropriately in natural process.  It discusses the importance
of ecological literacy and the role of formal and informal life-long learning in creating a socially
and ecologically literate citizenry able to assume its participatory responsibility.
Subchapter two discusses how the creation of locally and regionally based sustainable
food systems and their associated economies can be extremely effective in increasing
community participation and ecological awareness as well as promoting more sustainable
patterns of production and consumption.
Subchapter three picks up on the importance of local economies for bioregionally based
sustainable design.  It discusses the unsustainability of a purely globalised economic system
without strong regional and local economies to ground such global economic interactions in
local sustainability.
Subchapter four enters into more detail on the design of alternative currency systems
and their diverse applications in creating solutions that are more ecologically, socially and
economically sustainable.  Various design tools for sustainable monetary systems are discussed.
In subchapter five the scale-linking design issue of appropriate energy supply systems is
discussed within the context of the ‘Soft Energy Path’ first proposed by Amory Lovins.  A variety of issues regarding both renewable and non-renewable energy sources are discussed as
well as the present and long-term dangers associated with nuclear energy systems.
Sustainable consumption as a scale-linking design issues is explored in subchapter six. 
Concepts like sustainable genuine progress, sustainable consumption, and sustainable economic
growth are discussed as well as ways to express the material intensity associated with products
and guidelines for choosing more appropriate products.
In subchapter seven, I briefly introduce the concept of natural capitalism in more detail. 
The subchapter discusses concepts like ecosystem services, natural and social capital, service
and flow economy, and a factor ten or factor four reductions in resource use along with an
increase in resource efficiency.  It explains the fundamental assumptions and strategies of the
natural capitalism approach.
Subchapter eight takes a closer look at the scale-linking importance of creating
sustainable transport systems at the local, regional and global scale.  It addresses aspects of the
currently unsustainable transport patterns and suggests more sustainable alternatives.  A
hydrogen-based energy and transport economy is discussed in some detail, alongside
complementary technologies.
Taking care of the world’s water is of utmost importance if we hope to create a healthy
and sustainable human civilization.  Subchapter nine discusses the crucial issue of designing for
access to clean water as a basic human right, while simultaneously increasing water efficiency
drastically and restoring fresh and salt-water ecosystems.
The final subchapter puts all theses scale linking design issues into the wider context of
restoring the Earth and design for human and planetary health.  The importance of maintaining
diversity and the dynamics of natural processes is discussed, as well as the role of resilience and
systemic health as the underlying goal of all sustainable design.

RESUMEN A partir de nuestro proyecto de investigación, decidimos abordar el estudio de la sustentabilidad de la experiencia del "Banco de Horas Olga Cossettini" a partir de la Carta de la Tierra (2000), una declaración internacional de principios y propuestas de corte progresista, promovida por las Na-ciones Unidas, dado que es la orientación que la propia Fundación SOL utiliza para evaluar su sus-tentabilidad y las de las experiencias asociadas. Por otro lado, hemos observado que muchas alternativas de análisis de la sustentabilidad se ciñen a las esferas medioambiental y económica, y no incluyen la política y la social, las cuales creemos necesarias para un abordaje integral de la moneda complementaria en nuestras sociedades. El concepto de desarrollo en sí, a su vez, presupone muchas veces la idea de progreso lineal y sos-tenido-propio de la modernidad-, hablando por ejemplo de sociedades "en vías de desarrollo", como si hubiera un paradigma único de "sociedad desarrollada", cuando hoy, desde diversos abor-dajes disciplinares, se cuestiona esta mirada. La Carta de la Tierra revisa esta concepción del desarrollo. Esta nueva concepción del desarrollo, parte de la idea de que el mismo debe ser concebido dentro de una sociedad equitativa, a partir de la participación ciudadana de los implicados en el proceso. Es necesario, entonces, incorporar el componente ético, desde una ética de la responsabilidad y la conciencia, frente a la consecuencia de nuestras acciones en todos los ámbitos de nuestra vida. Este nuevo paradigma se sustenta también en un desarrollo endógeno como modelo alternativo, el cual supone el desarrollo de las comunidades, de dentro hacia fuera, con respecto a sus tradiciones, valores y culturas, entre otros, al igual que la autogestión de los recursos. Este es el caso de la Cooperativa y Banco de Horas Olga Cossettini y de muchas experiencias de monedas sociales y complementarias, que surgen desde la propia comunidad, promoviendo una ciudadanía más integrada y comprometida con su entorno.

Was bedeutet eigentlich Geldemission? Sie bezeichnet den Prozess der Erzeugung und des erstmaligen Einbringens des Geldes in den Wirtschaftsverkehr – eine Tätigkeit, deren Bedeutung für das Überleben der Gesellschaft kaum überschätzt werden kann. Die Tatsache, daß sie heutzutage Banken vorbehalten ist, ist zwar Realität, aber keine Notwendigkeit.

In ihrem neuen Buch untersucht O. Förtsch das Geld in seiner Eigenschaft als Hilfsmittel der Wirtschaft und zeigt, wie und warum der Zugang zu einem solch wichtigen Gewerbe wie die Geldschöpfung nach und nach für freie unternehmerische Betätigung gesperrt worden ist.

Das erklärte Ziel des Buches ist jedoch nicht die Analyse herrschender Mißstände, sondern das Konzept eines neuen Geldsystems,  dessen Realisierung der Autorin durchaus möglich erscheint. Geschrieben an der Schnittstelle von Informatik, Wirtschaft und Soziologie, führt dieses Buch in das nicht alltägliche Thema der „Geldschöpfung für alle“ ein und stellt das Konzept in seinen wichtigsten Aspekten vor: von der Logik der technischen Kommunikationsabläufe bis zur täglichen Praxis eines Emissionsmanagers.

In this Commons Transition Special Report, George Dafermos documents the organizational model of one of the most interesting cooperative projects to have emerged in Europe in the age of crisis – the Catalan Integral Cooperative (CIC).
Founded by an assembly of activists in Catalonia in 2010, the CIC’s revolutionary aspiration is to antagonize Capital by building cooperative structures in the Catalan economy. Its commitment to the principles of the Commons, Open Cooperativism and P2P, make it a prototypical example of a new generation of co-ops connecting the Commons and cooperative movements. Their position is that a truly collaborative economy can only develop when it’s commons-based.

The economic crisis that broke out in 2007–2008 and the ongoing crisis in the Eurozone has given a new urgency to discussions about alternatives to capitalism, and a new salience to proposals for monetary reform and for grassroots economic alternatives. Using Marx and Engel's concept of Utopianism as an analytical tool to distinguish between what is the work of 'cranks', and what of 'brave heretics', the paper examines four monetary responses to the crisis: (1) Positive Money's call for a state monopoly on money issuance; (2) the reintroduction of national currencies, in particular the drachma; (3) proposals for state-issued parallel currencies; and (4) grassroots or subaltern money networks of various types. The paper argues that the dominance of neoliberal ideology at a European Union level means that proposals for monetary reform at the international and national level are unlikely to be taken seriously by elites and consequently seem utopian in Marxian terms. There seems to be little political will to engage with the complexities of and potential opportunities of a more diverse monetary architecture within the Eurozone, and a perceived need to 'discipline' potentially 'irresponsible' governments like Greece's SYRIZA, although 'responsible' actors in the north of the Eurozone get more leeway. The potential of grassroots alternatives is also too often overstated. While alternative currency networks developed as part of the Greek crisis are not particularly well developed, alternative currency networks could work as sites of innovation, normal-ising the idea that there are progressive alternatives to Eurozone breakup.

Money has gone above and beyond any right, any privilege, any sense of self preservation.  It has become stronger than religion, a universal axiom untouchable by defiance and finally, it has become more than stealth.
In our present times of abundance, there is a great deal of pain and suffering throughout the globe and money has become the limiting factor to any chance of betterment.

The euro crisis forces us to completely rethink European monetary policy. The European Central Bank’s policy of buying back sovereign debt does not address the real problem: it is only a way of propping up a system that has already failed. A structural response to the crisis would consist of giving states back the power to act, but in a way that would not destroy the monetary union. This paper suggest a way in which, while preserving the Eurozone, each state would put into circulation in its own territory a comple-mentary currency guaranteed by tax revenue and pegged to the euro, what we call a “fiscal currency”. This parallel currency would be a “popular” currency, issued as bills in small denominations and intended for day-to-day purchases. The euro would continue to be used for large transactions, transactions occurring at the European level, and for savings.
The kind of monetary federalism we propose would end the private banking system’s monopoly on currency issuance. Alongside a common currency regulated by European monetary authorities, it would create complementary national currencies subject to individual governments. At the same time, it would offer a response to the current crisis, though its scope is not limited to the problems afflicting the Eurozone’s “peripheral” countries.
More fundamentally, we affirm that a currency’s organizing principles must be consistent with a political community’s foundational values. In the case of the European Union, the goal is to transpose onto monetary policy the old maxim “unity in diversity” and to recognize monetary policy as a tool that must be available to a sovereign people to ensure its survival.
A decentralized fiscal currency—whether it be national, re-gional, or local, as it is perfectly possible to envisage several levels of issuance, providing they are backed up by anticipated fiscal revenue—is first of all a form of short-term credit that is cheaper than credit offered by financial mar-kets. But its goals could also be more ambitious: it can be designed as a full-fledged means of payments, a currency that permanently circulates through the local economy alongside the euro. To this end, it must be accepted by the population, and its implementation must be negotiated with the private sector. To do so, the government must actively build trust in the new currency and ensure its convertibility into euros.
The third goal of a fiscal currency is to force states to pursue more responsible fiscal and financial policies. When a supe-rior federal currency exists, a state issuing its own means of payment has every interest in maintaining its value: inflationary policies would reduce the value of its own future revenue and undermine its credibility and thus viability by increasing its dependence on federal authorities.
The need for internal convertibility and the defense of euro parity distinguishes our proposal from other ideas that have been recently advanced in the European debate, notably relating to the crisis in Greece, where a parallel currency would be devalued as soon as it was established.
Creating a parallel fiscal currency and defending its parity are challenging but feasible political actions, as several international political experiments indicate. Ultimately, it is an attempt to reform public governance in the midst of a crisis of confidence in the usual procedures of neoliberal “good governance.” Its success depends on the capacity of issuing authorities to win the trust of their populations: a fiscal currency issued by a state or local government must be seen as legitimate as the euro itself.

The potential of time currencies to serve as a tool of social change remains relatively unexplored, and yet these alternative currencies make it possible to combine into a single mechanism several different social and environmental goals: reducing work hours, increasing civic engagement in public affairs, lowering public debt, and redistributing wealth.

Rachel O'Dwyer and Stefan Heidenreich in Conversation at Transmediale 2018
Even mainstream economists now seem to maintain that our monetary systems, coupled with global finance, are in crisis as well as in urgent need of innovation. The creation and destruction of value cannot be left to bankers and stock-market traders with their failed utopia of a self-regulating free market. What other utopian visions of valuation and of economic governance are currently being mobilized, and how do they relate to recent political developments, social movements, and artistic imaginations? This conversation features two researchers who engage in speculations on possible new ways of living and self-organizing: from non-monetary economies to the role of technological infrastructures such as blockchain to new ways of governance. Will we live in a world of future money or in a future without money?

Explores a variety of non-standard moneys, in speculative fiction and in the real world: biological currency, including the leaf currency of Douglas Adams’s The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (1980) and Adam Roberts’s Stone (2002); the Whuffie of Cory Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (2001), which I argue can be usefully thought of as an affect-based currency rather than purely as a reputation-based currency; the golem-backed currency of Terry Pratchett’s Making Money (2007); the slow, medium, and fast money of Charles Stross’s Neptune’s Brood (2013). This paper asks: what is money? What might money be?

Las cuasimonedas argentinas pueden contribuir a evitar problemas para la moneda común europea, plantea el investigador francés que vino a Tucumán para establecer cómo hizo el bono tucumano para sobrevivir a las crisis durante más de 18 años.

The 2015 Special Issue of The International journal of Community Currency Research is available online! The Academia.edu format does not permit me to announce the full issue, which can be found here http://ijccr.net/2015/03/12/2015-special-issue-multiple-moneys-and-development/

The sustainability transitions literature seeks to explain the conditions under which technological innovations can diffuse and disrupt existing socio-technical systems through the successful scaling up of experimental ‘niches’; but recent research on ‘grassroots innovations’ argues that civil society is a promising but under-researched site of innovation for sustainability, albeit one with very different characteristics to the market-based innovation normally considered in the literature. This paper aims to address that research gap by exploring the relevance of niche development theories in a civil society context. To do this, we examine a growing grassroots innovation – the international field of community currencies – which comprises a range of new socio-technical configurations of systems of exchange which have emerged from civil society over the last 30 years, intended to provide more environmentally and socially sustainable forms of money and finance. We draw on new empirical research from an international study of these initiatives comprising primary and secondary data and documentary sources, elite interviews and participant observation in the field. We describe the global diffusion of community currencies, and then conduct a niche analysis to evaluate the utility of niche theories for explaining the development of the community currency movement. We find that some niche-building processes identified in the existing literature are relevant in a grassroots context: the importance of building networks, managing expectations and the significance of external ‘landscape’ pressures, particularly at the level of national-type. However, our findings suggest that existing theories do not fully capture the complexity of this type of innovation: we find a diverse field addressing a range of societal systems (money, welfare, education, health, consumerism), and showing increasing fragmentation (as opposed to consolidation and standardisation); furthermore, there is little evidence of formalised learning taking place but this has not hampered movement growth. We conclude that grassroots innovations develop and diffuse in quite different ways to conventional innovations, and that niche theories require adaptation to the civil society context.

Paper published at Organisation Studies, 2018 - Online first.
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0170840618800102?journalCode=ossa

Abstract
This article discusses solidarity economy initiatives as instances of grassroots organizing, and explores how
‘values practices’ are performed collectively during times of crisis. In focusing on how power, discourse
and subjectivities are negotiated in the everyday practices of grassroots exchange networks (GENs) in
crisis-stricken Greece, the study unveils and discusses three performances of values practices, namely
mobilization of values, re-articulation of social relations, and sustainable living. Based on these findings, and
informed by theoretical analyses of performativity, we propose a framework for studying the production and
reproduction of values in the context of GENs, and the role of values in organizing alternatives.

Keywords: financial crisis, Gibson-Graham, grassroots exchange network (GEN), Greece, Judith Butler, performance,
values practices

In this brief monograph, I weigh the advantages and difficulties of the world adopting a universal currency. I do this bearing in mind three key economic factors 1. The function of reserve currencies and their history 2. Historical precedents of a group of nations in the adoption of unified currencies 3. Contemporary impetuses in the adoption of a new global currency and its politico-economic repercussions.

To what extent will social topics like health, housing and family help people to become aware of their pension? This study investigates the use of a social currency as a source for complementary pension provision, measuring and saving the hours of informal help one gives to others.

... 12 . Gesell's purpose was to help workers face a monetary system which was allocating wealth away from its poor producers, but as Dillard states, his theory does not explain its practical proposition 13 . Keynes had almost the same view about Gesell's theory 14 . ...