* PhD Thesis: MONEY FOR THE COMMON WEALTH OF THE MULTITUDE. TOWARD A USER-MANAGED CURRENCY AND PAYMENT SYSTEM DESIGN. Thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Leicester (School of Business). by Marco Sachy

URL = https://lra.le.ac.uk/bitstream/2381/40788/1/2017SACHYMPhD.pdf

Abstract

"This thesis will begin with a critique to the orthodox paradigm in monetary economics.

Secondly, I will offer a theoretical, economic, structural and biopolitical analyses of the origin, nature and effects of money on society. After a critique to conventional paradigm of money, I will then propose a semiotic genealogy of money followed by an analysis of the Common, the Multitude together with a tentative fourfold proposal for monetary reform, i.e. a monetary dispositif for the socio-economic emancipation of the Multitude from the rule of capital to build a new paradigm of money.

In particular, I will discuss the literatures on basic income and the emerging notion for bottom-up welfare named Commonfare; the Neo-Chartalist approach to money; complementary, viz. subaltern currencies; and crypto-currencies and distributed ledgers technology. In turn, I will present the two qualitative methodologies that I endorsed to design and research four sites of inquiry in Iceland, Spain, Finland and Italy: Participatory Action Research and Critical Muti-Sited Ethnography. A discussion of fieldwork findings will follow. Moreover, I will offer a comparative analysis on fieldwork findings by identifying not only commonalities and differences among the four sites, but also by eliciting the limits of methodological choices. I will conclude this thesis by arguing to refine the theoretical framework introduced in the literature review; and notwithstanding personal and objective limitations to the application of the monetary dispositif in the real world, I will advocate for further inquiry on Money for the Common Wealth of the Multitude to increase the quality and effectiveness of the debate on suggestions for monetary reform."

6.1 Common Aspects among the Three Sites
- 6.1.1 Shared Sense of the Role of Money as a Catalyst for Socio-economic Emancipation
- 6.1.2 Money for the Common Wealth of the Multitude as a Bottom-up Practice of Monetary Constituent Governance
- 6.1.3 Common Willingness to Experiment in Software for Monetary Innovation

6.2 Differences among the Four Sites
- 6.2.1 Objective Differences
- 6.2.2 Different Money Creation and Allocation Processes
- 6.2.3 Different Complexity in Technological Design

6.3 Conclusions

7 Conclusions - The Origins of Money for the Common Wealth of the Multitude

Excerpts

Explaining the Contents

From the introduction:

by Marco Sachy:

"In the first chapter of the thesis, I will operate a critique of the current paradigm of money, i.e. a critique of the conventional monetary system. In the introduction to the first chapter in section 1.1, by drawing from Arsperger (2010) and Lietaer et al. (2012), I will identify three issues that a theory and practice on Money for the Common Wealth of the Multitude is intended to tackle: single-currency thinking, the false opposition, at least at the monetary level, between capitalism and socialism and the resulting institutionalised status quo. Secondly, to open the black box of the monetary domain, in section 1.2, I will perform a philosophical critique of the core academic literature on the nature of money by analysing what I consider as an inadequate definition of the ontology of money in both the history of economic thought (Menger 1871 and 1892; and Keynes 1930) and philosophy (Simmel 1900).

After such philosophical critique, in section 1.3, I will narrow the scope of critique to the realm of orthodox monetary economics by presenting five economic and structural shortcomings inherent to the dominant monetary paradigm. Finally, and in order to show the adverse effects of philosophical and economic inadequacy of the orthodox monetary paradigm on the Multitude, in section 1.4, I will offer a biopolitical critique of such paradigm (Foucault 1976; Vitali et al., 2011; Gillespie and Hurley 2013; Hurley et al., 2014; Nienaber et al., 2014). Section 1.5 will conclude this chapter. After a critique of the orthodox monetary paradigm, in the second chapter I will present what I consider to be a more suitable - albeit not perfect - definition of the ontology of money, if compared to the ones supplied throughout the histories of philosophy and economic thought. If the latter proposed either objectual, sociological or still instrumental genealogies of money, by drawing from Italian semiotician Carlo Sini (2005), in section 2.2, I will propose a semiotic genealogy of money as a writing system, which offers in my view a more convincing account of the origin and nature of money at a conceptual level.

This will enable me to propose a working definition of money understood as an inter-subjective agreement (Lietaer 2001), rather than an object, a social relation or a tool. After clearing the field with a fresh definition of the genealogy of money coupled with a new working definition of money, in section 2.3, I will give the elements around which such definition will be applied, i.e. the notions of Common (Hardt and Negri 2009) and Multitude (Hardt and Negri 2004) as the main theoretical pillars of a new worldview on the money issue together with four elements for monetary reform. Chapter 2 will conclude with section 2.4.

In chapter three, I will elicit the details of the four components for monetary reform, i.e. a monetary dispositif for substantiating Money for the Common Wealth of the Multitude as a tentative theoretical strategy to encircle what I will define as monetary biopower from both the top-down and the bottomup. As fieldwork will focus more on bottom-up dynamics of such strategy, in section 3.1 and 3.2, I will briefly present the literature on the two top-down components of the monetary dispositif: basic income (Atkinson 1996; Van Prijs 1991 and 2004; and Huws 2016) within the context of Commonfare (Fumagalli 2015); and Neo-Chartalism (Wray 1998). Secondly, in section 3.3, I will discuss more robustly the literature on the first bottom-up component of the monetary dispositif, i.e. complementary (Lietaer et al, 2009 and 2010), viz. subaltern (North 2010b) currencies by chiefly drawing from Peter North’s work in this field in that it helped me to theoretically link my bio political concerns to the field of money in general and subaltern currencies more in particular (North 2016; 2010a; 2010b, 2007, 2006 and 1999).

Finally for this third chapter, in section 3.4, I will introduce and discuss crypto-currencies and distributed ledgers technologies by reviewing the literature on the field relevant to conceive the theoretical framework for this thesis (Nakamoto 2008; Antonopoulos 2014; Sachy et al., 2015; Rio and Sachy 2015; and König and Duran 2016). Indeed, I will argue that the sections of Money for the Common Wealth of the Multitude. In section 4.2, I will introduce both Participatory Action Research and Critical Multi-Sited Ethnography with special focus on the limits of the latter qualitative approach to research (Burawoy 2000). Indeed, during fieldwork research, I applied the tools that critical multi-sited ethnography, i.e. ethnographic research in multi-sites with a political purpose offers such as observation and self-observation, semi-structured interviews and journaling (Walford, 2009). These tools found application from a critical standpoint, a position that allowed different roles to coalesce in the same individual. As I stated above, I was a political activist, a currency designer and also a researcher all at once.

This provided me both points of strength and points of weakness during my academic work, which I conducted while striving to maintain a detached approach. To cultivate detachment from my political position has been indeed a challenge sometimes, and only self-reflexivity helped me to fine-tune my ‘positionality’: “positionality is vital because it forces us to acknowledge our own power, privilege, and biases just as we are denouncing the power structures that surround our subjects. A concern for positionality is sometimes understood as “reflexive ethnography”: it is a “turning back” on ourselves “ (Madison 2004: 7). By stressing my awareness about both my own positionally as an activist in academia and the limits of my methodological choices, I will conclude this chapter in section 4.3.

In chapter five, I will present the fieldwork part of this thesis by describing the research in four different sites in Iceland, Spain, Finland and Italy within the works of two EU-funded projects, i.e. Decentralised, Citizens Engagement Technologies, or the DCENT project and Poverty Income and Employment News, or the PIE News project. In section 5.2, I will introduce both projects’ contexts and their object of design and technological development, i.e. the Freecoin Social Wallet, a social-purpose crypto-currency wallet. In particular, in the DCENT project I developed the design elements for the Freecoin Social Wallet, which I will present in sections 5.3 (Social Krónas - Icelandic site), 5.4 (Eurocat - Spanish site) and 5.5 (Multapaakku - Finnish site). Furthermore, in the PIE News project I had the possibility to also test in the real world such design elements of the crypto-currency wallet prototype whose results will be presented in sections 5.6 on the fourth site (Commoncoin - Italian site). Section 5.7 will conclude this fieldwork chapter.

By approaching the conclusion of the thesis, I will propose a comparative analysis among the four sites. In chapter six, I will highlight both commonalities (section 6.1) and differences (section 6.2) among the four sites together with reflections on the limits of my methodological choices. The common themes will document, first, a shared sense within the sites’ communities around the role of money as a catalyst for socio-economic emancipation. Secondly, I will underline that in all sites Money for the Common Wealth of the Multitude manifested as a bottom-up practice of monetary constituent governance. I will phrase a last theme present in all four sites as a common willingness of each community to experiment with state-of-the-art software for monetary innovation. By contrast, I will analyse three main differences emerged after a comparative analysis among the four sites of this research such as objective differences, different money creation and allocation processes and, finally, the different complexity in technological design. I will complete this chapter with section 6.3.

Chapter seven will conclude this thesis, whereby I will invite the reader to understand this research as an invitation to further focus efforts in academia in the direction of the betterment of the monetary system, especially by others more adapt to work in academic research than the author, a political activist and currency designer, rather than a vocational academic aspiring to a career in the Business School. Hence, as I will state in the conclusions below, this thesis is not intended to demonstrate a successful attempt of a paradigm shift in the monetary domain as the need for further refinement of the theoretical framework coupled with both personal and objective limitations emerged after fieldwork did not allow to aspire to such an unrealistic outcome, especially within the span of a PhD. Indeed, both my theoretical framework and practical research findings presented below should be understood as attempts to open the curtains on the window of the future about a new reality and experience of money, rather than pretending to have already reached such reality both within and without academia. Notwithstanding the limits of this thesis, I am firmly convinced of the genuine value of both germinal theoretical framework and embryonic practical findings that I will discuss in this thesis. Therefore, I will conclude by advocating for the development of further theoretical, policy and practical efforts toward monetary reform to build constituent governance structures for the socio-economic emancipations of the Multitude."

A brief History of Complementary Currencies

"The history of monetary systems is not as linear as it may seem at a first glance. Indeed, even within the historically dominant forms of money, change and diversity have manifested continuously, albeit the substance has remained the same. According to Marieke De Goede, “Braudel’s work documents [that] various forms of money, barter networks, silver and gold coin, paper money, and credit, existed side-by-side instead of subsequent stages of monetary evolution” (De Goede 2005: 18). In this evolutionary context of dominant forms of money, complementary currencies emerged every time that an alternative means of payment needed to be found. According to scholar Peter North, “it is worth exploring how people have responded to previous financial crises, as I think that what they did can teach us one thing or two” (North 2010a: 59). Although in modern times there has been an ex131 pansion in the number of complementary currencies adopted in different parts of the world, it is possible to find traces of such systems also in ancient epochs. For instance, in Ancient Egypt, gold was the currency for long trade transactions used by the higher strata of society. In parallel, common Egyptians used a more widespread and less valuable currency, the ostraca, which was connected to the food storage system: “Imagine you are a farmer in ancient Egypt who, after the harvest, has a surplus of ten bags of wheat. You bring them to your local storage site and the scribe gives you a receipt saying, “Received ten bags of wheat,” followed by an official’s seal and today’s date. Those receipts were usually written on pottery shards, technically called “ostraca,” of which many thousands have been found all over Egypt. They were used as currency for most ordinary exchanges.” (Lietaer 2000: 117) In more recent times, the period from roughly 1050 A.D. to 1290 A.D. is acknowledged in Medieval Europe as the Age of the Cathedrals. Indeed, most of the cathedrals were built in this period of economic well-being and systemic resilience. At this time, as well as using gold as a long distance trade currency, there was another type of currency in circulation for reinforcing local credit lines. According to Lietaer, “this ‘First Renaissance’ happens to coincide with the period where the demurrage-charged currency systems were prevailing” (Lietaer 2000: 143). Demurrage-charged currencies - or negative interest-bearing currencies - had indeed the following two main features: they discouraged hoarding in the form of currency while they “encouraged savings in productive goods that would last for a long time. The ideal investment vehicle became land improvements or high quality maintenance of equipment, such as water wheels or windmills, or long-term investments for the community, such as the cathedrals” (Lietaer 2000: 144). Throughout the modern era, the most documented systems adopting complementary currencies had been set up in the Western world with the U.K. as the starting point. In Britain, as a socio-economic and political response to the difficult economic decade of the 1830s, artisans belonging to cooperative so132 cieties in London, Birmingham and Liverpool designed and deployed complementary currencies. Indeed, the ideas of Welsh manufacturer turned social reformer, Robert Owen (1771 - 1858), gathered momentum when he designed a currency to help craftsmen who were unable to sell their goods on the open market. This led to some cooperatives establishing Exchange Bazaars, in which craftsmen traded with each other using “Labour Notes - a money denominated in time” (North 2010a: 59). As North stresses “Robert Owen developed the first practical examples of alternative currencies as a political challenge” (North 2007: 43). A second remarkable example of the implementation of complementary currencies as bottom-up expressions of resistance to monetary biopower is the institution of ‘Banks of the People’. In the 1840s, French anarchist PierreJoseph Proudhon organised “confederations of 50-100,000 artisans who would agree to issue exchange notes and guarantee their reciprocity, to meet social needs and without speculation or charging interest, which was condemned as usury” (North 2010a: 62). In the following decade, complementary currencies were also implemented in the USA with the first example of a Time Bank issuing Labour Notes. In Cincinnati, Josiah Warren ran the bank for three years and later constituted two “intentional communities”, which lasted twenty years: “‘Modern Times’ and ‘Utopia’” (North 2010a: 62). Moreover, in the 1880s and 1890s, America experienced mass struggles for a silver currency to use in parallel with gold (Gramm 2004). In the twentieth century, Hugo Bilgram and L. E. Levy started up the first Credit Clearing Union. They assumed that “it is manifestly due solely to a consensus of the members of the community to accept certain valuable things, such as coin and certain forms of credit, as mediums of exchange” (Bilgram and Levy 1914: 95 - italics in the original). By recognising the nature of money as writing system, in 1914, as a bottom-up response to the 1913 Federal Reserve Act, they drafted a Credit Clearance plan written in plain English. The goal was to 133 fight monetary biopower at its own game by combining “[a number of businesses] for the purpose of organizing a system of exchange, effective among themselves. [The] greater the number of businessmen that would thus cooperate, the more complete would be their own emancipation from the obstruction to commerce and industry which existing currency laws impose” (ibid.). In this system, the method for clearing accounts was “similar to that used by depository banks to clear accounts among its depositors” (Greco 1994: 49). Indeed, members’ personal credit was the medium of exchange in the form of credit cheques. During the Great Depression, “besides learning how to ‘make do, or do without’, people began to establish mutual support structures, like workers’ cooperatives, many of which would recycle and repair donated or broken items. People learned to share what they had, and to by-pass the market and financial systems” (Greco 1994: 39). This happened within more or less politically charged initiatives, such as the Green Shirts movement in the UK in the 1930s. According to North, their members “provided food and clothing for the hungry, camping opportunities, excitement, and solidarity to unemployed people in grave economic times as well as a philosophy that explained a way to a better future and, it must be said, a convenient scapegoat—high finance and the banks” (North 2007: 69). Moreover, the Green Shirts had a programme that “was clear, concise, and simple” (North 2007, ibid.): 1. Take control. 2. Close the “chatterbox” at Westminster. 3. Take over the Bank of England in the name of the people. 4. Open the National Credit Office. 5. Issue the National Dividend to every citizen. 6. Enforce the scientific price. 7. Set up Local Hundreds (constituent assemblies) in every district to give expression to the will of the people throughout the country. 8. Put down any counter revolutionary “fascist” activity, or attempts to overthrow the party of the people’s credit (the Green Shirts). 9. Defend the victorious Social Credit revolution from international financial sabotage. (Zavos 1981: 203 quoted in North 2007: 70) In 1935, the movement moved from the underground to the mainstream by becoming part of the Social Credit Party of Great Britain and Northern Ire134 land, but it did not last to see the start of WWII as it was outlawed by the 1937 Public Order Act (ibid.) A second example from the Great Depression years comes from Germany, thanks to the efforts of German businessman Silvio Gesell (1862 - 1930). He proposed and implemented the issuance of a provisional and complementary form of money subscribed to a company entitling the holder to a formal certificate, namely ‘scrip’. The most common denominations were certificates of indebtedness, tax anticipation notes, payroll warrants, trade scrip, clearing house certificates, credit vouchers, moratorium certificates, and merchandise bonds. In his book The Natural Economic Order (1913), Gesell set out his views on the nature of money and its functioning in the economy. In fact, one of the problems afflicting Europe in those years was the hoarding of conventional currency and none of the stimulus packages was as effective as forecasted by central authorities managing monetary policy. Accordingly, the nuisance of money hoarding at a systemic level was opposed by a strong and widespread desire of free circulation of money among economic agents. One such idea, based on the concept of Freigeld (Freemoney), had been developed in German-speaking countries and Scandinavia. According to Swiss Prof. Tobias Studer, Freemoney theory can be reduced essentially to three axioms: 1) To stabilise sales of goods of all kinds, money in circulation must be precisely adjusted to the supply of goods. 2) In order for money to function solely as means of payment for the free flow of commerce, it must have the character of an interest-free clearing certificate. 3) A demurrage-charged currency should be adopted to complement the positive interest characterising conventional money (Studer 1998). On the other side of the Atlantic ocean, Greco showed that these three principles were represented in the main features of Gesell’s ‘stamp scrip’: the lat135 ter “was designed to have 52 spaces on the reverse side, one for each week of the year, and the scrip was to have the value of its stated denomination only for one week. In order for the scrip to maintain its face value, a stamp, costing two percent of the face value of the note, had to be affixed on the back, in the space allocated to that week” (Greco 1994: 42). Since the Reichsmark was being overly hoarded as a side effect of a three-year period of deflation, the stamp was purposely a device introduced in order to discourage the hoarding of scrip and, thereby, to increase its velocity of circulation within the community adopting it as a means of payment. The result was that people tried “to spend it prior to the day the stamp had to be affixed and thus avoid the cost of the stamp” (ibid.) In 1931, Gesell’s friend Hans Timm decided to set up an association for deploying the stamp scrip idea. Scrips were named Wära, “a name derived by combining two words - ‘Ware’, the German word for goods, and ‘Wahrung’, the German word for currency” (Greco 1994: 43). In 1932, Wära was deployed in the Bavarian town of Schwanenkirchen, where associations of factories, merchants, a bank and any other business issued stamp scrip in order to improve the level of trade within the small city. Indeed, Gesell-inspired scrip was issued in convenient denominations to be used either for the payment of wages or for trading. In the specific case of Schwanenkirchen, Mr. Hebecker, the owner of coal mine, used Wära notes “to reopen his mine, with the Wära passed on to local merchants, then to the wholesalers, then on to the manufacturers who returned [them] to the coal mine for coal” (North 2007: 64). Gesell’s mechanism created a dual-currency system which boosted business improvement only at a municipal level. However, the experiment was so successful that Irving Fisher acknowledged that “even in the United States one read about it in the financial sections of most big papers” (Fisher 1933). The following lucid account appeared in a journal of that time: “Herr Hebecker assembled his workers. He told them that he had succeeded in getting a loan of 40,000 Reichsmarks, that he wished to resume operations but that he wanted to pay 136 wages not in Marks but in Wara. The miners agreed to the proposal when they learned that the village store would accept Wara in exchange for goods. When, after two years of complete stagnation, the workers for the first time brought home their pay envelopes, no one was interested in hoarding a cent of it; all the money went to the stores to pay off debts or for the purchase of necessities. The shopkeepers, too, were happy. Although at first they had felt a little hesitant about Wara, they had no choice, as no one had any other kind of money. The shopkeepers then forced it on the wholesalers, the wholesalers forced it on the manufacturers, who in turn tried to pass it on to those who carried their notes, or they exchanged it at Herr Hebecker’s mine for coal. No one who received Wara wished to hold it; the workers, storekeepers, wholesalers and manufacturers all strove to get rid of it as quickly as possible, for any person who held it was obliged to pay the 2 cent stamp tax. So Wara kept circulating, a large part of it returning to the coal mine, where it provided work, profits and better conditions for the entire community. Indeed, one could not have recognized Schwanenkirchen a few months after work had resumed at the mine. The village was on a prosperity basis, workers and merchants were free from debts and a new spirit of freedom and life pervaded the town” (The New Republic - August 10, 1932) Figure 16: Face and reverse sides of Two Wära note from Schwanenkirchen, Germany, 1932 (Source: http://community-currency.info). The adoption of the Wära complementary currency resulted in a win-win situation for all participants involved: production surged and coal began to be extracted after two years of forced mine closure. Workers started to work and wages flowed into their pockets to pay debts and buy goods. Retailers returned to serve customers and had the money to pay their suppliers. Wholesalers in turn received a reliable means of payment to transfer to man137 One of the most famous and effective implementations of Gesell’s idea of stamp scrip was designed in the Bavarian town of Schwanenkirchen. Associations of factories, merchants, a bank and any other business issued stamp scrip in order to improve the level of trade within the small city. Indeed, Gesell-inspired scrip was issued in convenient denominations to be used either for the payment of wages or for trading. In the specific case of Schwanenkirchen, Mr. Hebecker was the owner of coal mine who used Wära notes "to reopen his mine, with the Wära passed on to local merchants, then to the wholesalers, then on to the manufacturers who returned to the coal mine for coal"19. Gesell’s mechanism created a dual-currency system which boost business improvement only at a municipal level. However, the experiment was so successful that Irving Fisher acknowledged that "even in the United States one read about it in the financial sections of most big papers"20.

Nevertheless, the most significant documentation about the use of Wära is certainly the

crystalline account appeared on a journal of that time: "Herr Hebecker assembled his workers. He told them that he had succeeded in getting a loan of 40,000 Reichsmarks, that he wished to resume operations but that he wanted to pay wages not in Marks but in Wara. The miners agreed to the proposal when they learned that the village store would accept Wara in exchange for goods. When, after two years of complete stagnation, the workers for the first time brought home their pay envelopes, no one was interested in hoarding a cent of it; all the money went to the stores to pay off debts or for the purchase of necessities. The shopkeepers, too, were happy. Although at first they had felt a little hesitant about Wara, they had no choice, as no one had any other kind of money. The shopkeepers then forced it on the wholesalers, the wholesalers forced it on the manufacturers, who in turn tried to pass it on to those who carried their notes, or they exchanged it at Herr Hebecker’s mine for coal. No one who received Wara wished to hold it; the workers, storekeepers, wholesalers and manufacturers all strove to get rid of it as quickly as possible, for any person who held it was obliged to pay the 2 cent stamp tax. So Wara kept circulating, a large part of it returning to the coal mine, where it provided work, profits and better conditions for the entire community. Indeed, one could not have recognized Schwanenkirchen a few months after work had resumed at the mine. The village was on a prosperity basis, workers and merchants were free from debts and a new spirit of freedom and life pervaded the town"21. Figure 5.1: Face and reverse sides of Two Wära note from Schwanenkirchen, Germany, 1932. 5. Complementary Currencies: New Semiotic Processes in Monetary Economics for counteracting the shortcomings of Modern Bank Money 79 19 North 2007: 64. 20 Fisher 1933. 21 The New Republic - August 10, 1932. ufacturers. Finally, the latter purchased the local raw material with local currency. Wealth was thereby retained in the community. A person absent for a year and coming back in Schwanenkirchen some months after the introduction of stamp scrip would have expected to see a community experiencing hard times. Surprisingly, s/he would have entered a town where citizens were experiencing new economic prosperity. Wära spread in various parts of Germany. Unfortunately, the central bank exerted pressure on the government, and the experiment in Schwanenkirchen ended. To recap, scrip was implemented to supplement scarce supply of conventional national currency in 1930s Germany. According to Greco, the lesson of Wära to monetary economics is that “the permanent use of a locally issued and controlled exchange medium, such as scrip, has clear advantages for insulating local economies from the distorting effects of global finance and banking” (Greco 1994: 46). According to North, “by the Second World War, subaltern forms of money had died out as modernist state planning became the new norm. It was not until the breakdown of the Keynesian settlement in the late 1980s that we saw new forms of money generated from below” (North 2007: 78). Indeed, in the last quarter of the past century, the design of complementary currencies included valuable practices inherited from the experiences of the interwar period. Although the “fifties and sixties did not see many grassroots alternative or complementary currency experiments” (North 2010a: 68), the following decades were a period of intense innovation. For example, in 1983 Michael Linton designed LETSystem, which is the first type of LETS system. A LETS - Local Exchange Trading Scheme - is a not-for-profit community enterprise, which is democratically organised and local. The goal of the enterprise is to provide commercial information to the community and record transactions of members who exchange goods and services through rebalanc138 ing LETS credits. The only requirement for prospective subscribers is that they must accept credit in payment while there is no need for securitisation such as bonds, stocks, mortgages, etc., as it was the case in Bilgram and Levy’s Credit Clearing System (Greco 1994). A final historical example is a new and successful practical implementation of Owen’s Labor Notes idea. In the 1990s, the city of Ithaca (upstate New York) adopted Ithaca Hours, with 1 Hour = US$10 (Glover 1995). According to North, Ithaca Hours are a “form of currency valued in just time [which] passes from person to person and among businesses like cash. You find out where to spend Hours by looking to newspapers, or seeing flyers in shop windows” (North 2010a: 106). Most importantly, Hours are loaned with no interest charges. Since it may be fiddly to relate Hours and conventional national currencies for mixed payments, Ithaca Hours are printed with a denomination of a ‘tenth of a hour’, worth a dollar, for facilitating calculations to retailers. Such problem would virtually disappear with the massive technological framing - as I will show in the chapters below - that complementary currency design is experiencing in the 2000s. From the 1990s through the new Millennium, as the mainstream economy suffered various crises globally, complementary currencies found a resurgence that is still continuing at the time of writing. For instance, in Argentina with the redes de trueque, researched and documented by North: “The complementary currency movement that emerged in the late 1990s and the first three years of the twenty-first century in Argentina, the redes de trueque, seems to be different in scale, with levels of mobilization previously achieved perhaps only by the Populists: literally millions of users. The literal translation of redes de trueque is “barter networks.” In Argentina, “barter” is not used in the sense of one-to-one exchange without use of money; it refers to exchange using nonstate forms of currency generated by community groups, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), communities, and private business people. We call it “barter,” as Argentines do, but technically it is not barter.” (North 2007: 149) Indeed, in response to the crisis of 1990s, which was ushered in by deregulation and privitisation processes and which saw the Argentine Peso pegged to the US dollar, at the beginning of the 2000s Argentinians almost sponta139 neously formed neighbourhood barter networks and the practice successfully spread in all corners of the country involving millions of people. However, this massive adoption of different local currencies collapsed as “overissuance or political attack led to their decline” (North 2007: 177). Finally for this section, in the 2010s, what can be considered one of the best complementary currency experiences is the Bristol Pound. In fact, this local complementary currency is to be thought of as a barrier-breaking project, if one looks at it as a bottom-up component of the dispositif designed to remove the monetary blindspot through constituent governance initiatives: “In March 2015, Bristol City Council became the first local authority in Britain to accept a community currency - in this case the Bristol Pound - as a means to pay council tax. As well as representing a landmark project for the community currency movement, the council’s announcement essentially guarantees that anyone holding Bristol Pounds will always have a spending opportunity - everyone needs to pay council tax. Gaining this level of participation from a council helps hugely in building trust in a currency and establishing belief in its value” (NEF 2015: 78, my italics) This innovative initiative, backed by Bristol’s former Mayor, George Ferguson, can be considered as a watershed in the complementary currency domain as, finally, the circuit closes in that to be able to pay taxes with the Bristol Pound is an important step towards a more widespread social acceptance and institutionalisation of this monetary instrument. Similar developments at the regulatory level are springing globally as the recent motions in California (Alternative Currencies Act, AB-129, approved by the Governor on June 28, 2014) and France (French Law for the Economie Social et Solidaire passed on July 2014) illustrate. In conclusion, from Ancient Egypt to the present Digital Revolution, many times when the mainstream economy suffered a crisis, various forms of alternative, complementary currencies emerged from the bottom up. This happened in different contexts and with different degrees of success, but the common theme of the resistance of the Multitude against its oppressors had been - and is - well documented by academic and activist literatures. From 140 the ostraca to the Bristol Pound, people of different social status and culture have designed and implemented currencies that attempted, some more successfully than others, to counteract the shortcomings of conventional money in the various forms that the latter embodied during the past by offering an array of benefits and best practices to overcome the status quo. In the next section, I will draw on the body of literature on complementary currencies to identify those benefits and best practices that they offer that may cure the monetary blindspot and overcome the hegemony of monetary biopower."

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Hegemony of Single Currency Thinking

Money for the Common Wealth of the Multitude

Contents

Abstract

Contents

1 A Critique to the Orthodox Monetary Paradigm

2 Overcoming the Monetary Blindspot to define Money For the Common Wealth

3 The four components of the dispositif to frame Money for the Common Wealth of the Multitude

4 Methodology: Participatory Action Research and Critical Multi-Sited Ethnography

5 Fieldwork Findings

6 A Comparative Analysis among the Four Sites

7 Conclusions - The Origins of Money for the Common Wealth of the Multitude

Excerpts

Explaining the Contents

A brief History of Complementary Currencies

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