[Nettime-bold] RE: <nettime> Open Source and Open Money

[Doug Henwood <dhenwood@panix.com>]

Kermit Snelson wrote:

>In fact, a community may choose not to address the risk at all.  If it is
>sufficiently small and saintly (or simply harmless) it may be perfectly safe
>to allow any member to "create money" anonymously to her heart's content.
>The key point is that any self-constituted community may enjoy the
>market-making benefits of a currency without having to buy into a bundled
>social norm that it may find inappropriate, unnecessary or even oppressive.
>
>This LETS design feature leads directly to the concept of plurality of
>currencies.  Because such systems don't assume any social norms in their
>design, they may be used efficiently by any kind of community, from
>commercial banks to autonomous worker collectives.  Instead of the
>monolithic, one-size-fits-all design of national currencies, the LETS design
>enables a flexible constellation of interacting payment systems that operate
>for different purposes and on different levels of scale.

If a community is small enough, you barely need a currency - you can 
just barter (which is what these instruments are really all about). 
But what about buying anything more complicated than a locally 
produced haircut? Where will the haircutter get scissors and clippers?

What does money represent? Past labor time used as a claim on present 
or future labor time? If you're going to exchange products of labor 
across an area larger than a backyard, or over a timescale longer 
than the day after tomorrow, you need something more formal - and 
state-backed. If you're going to trust the person and not the token, 
you have to know everyone invovled, which makes production beyond the 
most intimate scale nearly impossible.

The U.S. had all kinds of local and private moneys in the 19th 
century, and there were frequent crises - frauds, defaults, panics, 
etc. It seems like people are fetishizing the instrument of exchange 
rather than the system of social relations it both constitutes and 
depends on.

Doug Henwood

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