Keith Hart on Sat, 19 Jan 2002 22:17:01 +0100 (CET) |
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[Nettime-bold] Re: <nettime> In Gold We Trust, part 1 |
Doug Henwood wrote: >I'm still at a loss to understand how these "community currencies" would be used to pay for products outside the community. Or will every community have its own steel mill and chip plant? It's a big leap from using scrip to exchange products at a roughly similar level of technical complexity and capital intensity - meals for haircuts, housecleaning for dogwalking. But what about things that require machinery, financing, specialized labor, and entities that extend across time and space to produce them? How would a New Yorker like me get a computer or an orange? Once you get beyond exchanging simple goods and services in a small geographical area, you have to have a state-guaraneteed token (or gold), or you can't have commerce. Or are you really proposing that production be undertaken strictly on a local scale? Do you even think about the relations between money and production beyond the level of sentiment and wish?< Networks using community currencies are very limited in size of membership and economic scale at this time. They also tend to be highly localized. There is no question of them, in their present form, being able to replace existing capital markets or for that matter public economies financed by state taxation. It is unlikely that steel mills or computer manufacturing will be funded in this way soon. But there are LETS systems in which businesses participate. They may be willing to sell quite complex manufactures on a part national, part community currency basis. This increases their turnover and expands the spending power of their customers. The technology that would allow virtual exchange networks to be organized through open money is in the process of being developed. This involves multiple currencies operating through smart cards and internet communication organized through a national domain naming system. This involves serious international collaboration in software engineering which rests on more than mere sentiment. It is true that much of this remains potential, but there are significant actual achievements and some parts of the economic establishment are taking open money seriously. Thus some Japanese corporations have joined grassroots organizations to explore the use of LETS; a department of the government has also shown interest. Given the ubiquity of mobile phones linked to the internet there, who knows what will come out of it? The European Commission in Brussels has begun to look into community currencies as a way of addressing the problem of electronic micro-payments. The recent Argentinian crisis revealed a proliferation of self-made currencies below the state level from the provincial governments downwards. Red Global de Trueque Solidario issued 15 million creditos in an attempt to get some liquidity into the economy. There are many precedents for such developments. What makes now different is the communications revolution breaking out all around us. So Doug Henson is right to point out that most existing community currencies operate at a low level of complexity and they cannot organize a full-scale capitalist division of labour. Most of the achievements I can point to are more potential than actual. Even so e-bay and paypal have revealed possibiltities in electronic commerce that would have been unimaginable a few years back. Those of us working on community currencies see no point in limiting our aspirations to current empirical knowledge, even less to the idea that the only forms of money with any clout will always remain state money and commodity money (eg gold). There is work to be done on improving the model and inserting it into new situations. It is true that we are focused mainly on the sphere of circulation, but that is not to say that we are indifferent to production. It is highly unsatisfactory trying to persuade a skeptic (to be kind) of what this project is worth in a few paragraphs of an email message. That is why my partners and I are currently writing a book about it. It may be that our eyes are trained on the future more than the past, but our present is fully occupied in all kinds of practical and theoretical ways. Keynes said that a writer depends on a lot of sympathy from his readers. If the metaphysical gap is too great, mutual understanding is impossible. Or, as the Reverend Sidney Smith once said, while observing an quarrel between two women leaning out of windows on opposite sides of the street, Those ladies will never reach agreement, for they are arguing from different premises. I have read Doug Henson's recent book and benefited from it immensely. I would be interested in what he thinks of mine. Perhaps these issues can only be pursued effectively through serious publication. Nevertheless, it may be that some nettimers have been provoked by these exchanges to think about money in a slightly different way. Keith Hart _______________________________________________ Nettime-bold mailing list Nettime-bold@nettime.org http://amsterdam.nettime.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nettime-bold