Moneyless Man

Book: Mark Boyle. The Moneyless Man. 2010

Review

Katharine Hibbert:

"The first chapter of The Moneyless Man is devoted to an allegory of how money ruined the happy, pastoral life of an imaginary village where everyone bartered wholesome goods made with love in a tight-knit community. Boyle and Ridley agree on the consequence - increasing specialisation and separation between buyer and producer. But Boyle is convinced that this is leading us to alienation, mistrust, ill-health, climate change and, not too long from now, a wave of death and poverty which will leave us all scrabbling to survive on the surface of a baked and chronically polluted earth (something like the scenario described by Helen Simpson in her story Diary of an Interesting Year published in the New Yorker). Better, Boyle thinks, to get out while we still can. He’s not quite as pessimistic as the humans in the prologue to Douglas Adams’ Hitchikers’ Guide to the Galaxy, who “were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.” But he’s getting there. Boyle is convinced that we all need to abandon cities, move into tiny communities and get hoeing and foraging.

Many people appear to feel, instinctively, closer to Boyle’s view than to Ridley’s, although most of us continue to live more like Ridley than Boyle, shopping in the supermarkets and flying away on holiday, albeit with a faint sense of guilt that we aren’t writing with pens made from ink-cap mushrooms rather than our disposable, oil-based biros. Ridley describes himself as puzzled by this pessimism, surprised that “the generation that has experienced more peace, freedom, leisure time, education, medicine, travel, movies, mobile phones and massages than any generation in history is lapping up gloom at every opportunity”, as purveyed by the likes of Al Gore, John Gray, Naomi Klein and George Monbiot. But there can be no doubt that this dissatisfaction exists and that, to quote Adams again, the problem is that “lots of the people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches”. Boyle has attracted a large following on his website www.justfortheloveofit.org, which hosts a skill-sharing forum as well as his blog, from which much of his book is drawn.

I should declare my own interests here. Two years ago, after being made redundant from my job as a reporter, I decided to give up everything else as well – my flat, my credit cards, my record collection - to see whether it was possible to live by using up some of society’s waste – squatting in some of the 1m empty homes and eating some of the 20m tonnes of food waste we throw out every year by scavenging at the backs of supermarkets and cafes. I found it was not only possible, it was, often, quite fun, and made me happier, in many ways, than my previous life. My problem with modernity, however, is less fundamental than Boyle’s, and my aim in writing my book was as much sociological as philosophical or environmental – to document the hidden lives of the 20,000-odd squatters in England and Wales, and to see what the rest of us can learn from them. I don’t want to get rid of capitalism or cities. I don’t want a revolution. I’m optimistic about our capacity to create a better version of modernity, and I don’t want to tear everything up and start again.

But I sympathise with Boyle’s search for an alternative way of life, and would like to be able to cheer him on. The shame is, then, that his book doesn’t make a great case for his lifestyle, neither where he describes it nor where he argues for its rationality and necessity. He is no Thoreau, barely describing the feelings, places and individuals he encounters. We are merely told that winter in the caravan was very cold – he gives us no sense of what that coldness was like. Dozens of characters are named, but we don’t even get a physical description, let alone a character portrait of any of them, and he spends far more time cataloguing the journalists who took an interest in his lifestyle than explaining his breakup with his girlfriend, an event which occupies a single paragraph.

Indeed, his evident enjoyment of media attention becomes problematic when he begins to use it as a tool for getting free stuff - a company selling unpuncturable tyres sends him a set for his bike, and duely recieve a plug in his blog and book. Various businesses loan him equipment on the explicit condition that he mentions them in interviews. And he is able to spend Christmas with his family because an Irish radio station buys his ferry ticket in exchange for his appearance on one of their shows. Every hack knows that junkets are a great way to avoid paying for things - but these freebies hardly fit into the moneyless, businessless new world Boyle is pushing. And if Ridley's doctrine is damaged by the bailout of Northern Rock, Boyle's own "Freeconomy" ideology took a hit in February 2008 when he was forced to turn back at Calais from a well-publicised attempt to walk to India without money, when he found that the French saw him as a freeloader (this blog of a man who managed walk to Israel without money or press attention may be worth reading for proof that the task is possible, particularly if you take yourself slightly less seriously). Boyle's attempt to live without money while staying put is his alternative to the 9000 mile walk - and avoids the problem that he can't speak French.

Nor is he convincing on the task he devotes most of the book to – arguing on principle for a simple life of agrarian self-sufficiency in small communities. Money is inherently bad, he believes, and even bartering isn’t much better. Skipping, my way of getting food, is no good either, because it isn’t a way of creating a new, sustainable future (a criticism I accept, but am not convinced he does better) and because the food itself is unhealthy because it’s processed and usually non-vegan. The best way, he thinks, is for everyone to give to each other unconditionally, while feeling confident that the world will somehow give back to them when they need it most. His main source on this is the Hollywood film “Pay it Forward” – he makes no mention of current thought on the gift economy and whether it is necessarily squeezed out by commercial transactions. Apart from his initial allegory about good old “Mr Baker” and “Mrs Brewer” and evil “Mr Banks” in his “exquisite top hat and tailor-made pin-striped suit”, and the argument that money is debt because banks create money by taking deposits then lending them out to others, he has little more than his own gut instincts to propel him away from any use of money.

This lack of rigour may, of course, be an attempt to attract a very general audience. But in any case, the lack of academic authority for his assertions probably doesn’t worry Boyle too much. “In my experience,” he says, “‘feeling’ is often much closer to truth than ‘knowing’”. A core part of his argument is that we can do far better trading in small groups than in large ones, and he seems to apply this to ideas as well as goods, apparently believing that simply thinking as he forages and digs is as likely to lead him to the truth as years of academic study.

The trouble is that the poverty of his ideas would also be reflected in the poverty of his real life if he took it to its natural conclusion. Both are good arguments for Ridley’s view that we do best when trading, exchanging and specialising in large interconnected groups. Boyle isn’t really forced to face the practical difficulties of life without Ridley’s wide-spread trade. Although he hasn’t handled money since November 2008, he spent some £350 on kitting himself out to start his experiment, and works on a farm in exchange for parking his caravan there – transitional devices, perhaps, like his computer and mobile phone.

The prologue to his book, however, dwells on how crucial his bicycle is to his project. But how, in a community of 150, without any organised form of trade with other groups, would he possibly get the ingredients of even the most basic bicycle? Consider the ball bearings, for instance. Leonardo Da Vinci realised how useful they would be – but it wasn’t possible to actually make them until the 19th century. It seems unlikely, even, that he would be able to get the metal for rudimentary gardening tools. And so with other items - Boyle is lucky enough to find a packet of condoms in a skip, but does he really want to go back to constant pregnancy for any women in his imagined moneyless world? Even leather or intestine condoms, which were in use before they began to be made of rubber in 1855 and latex in 1920, would be ruled out by his veganism, quite apart from the fact that they were unreliable and not exactly, one imagines, conducive to pleasure.

Even getting enough to eat would be difficult in his chaste, immobile community. Today, he regularly barters wild food or his work with those still living in the normal world to get food, which he also gets out of the bins occasionally. Looking at his list of edibles for the summer months, when he has the most abundant home-grown and wild food, all the serious calories – tofu, barley, rye, lentils, oil and vegan chocolate cake come from the bins or from bartering – and most are not easily grown on the smallholding in Bristol which his community would, presumably, have at its disposal. Meat, or at least dairy products, might help people to actually get enough calories from the land to function (even though, on a large scale, it is far more efficient to get calories from soya than pork, for instance). But this is out of the question for Boyle – it would be the moral equivalent, in his view (expressed on his blog but not in his book) of enslaving and eating old men. It seems almost inevitable that, if we were all living without money, Boyle’s tribe would very quickly be conquered and enslaved by a more robust one – behaviour which was, as Ridley argues, commonplace behaviour before the emergence of organised trade.

Neither does Boyle have much to say about whether there’s actually enough land for our current population to survive as he suggests, or what the impact would be if we in the developed world simply stopped trading with the developing world. He merely asserts that “Much of the material poverty of Africa stems from the spiritual poverty of the West, as institutions such as the World Trade Organisation and the International Monetary Fund continue to cripple the ‘developing’ [his quotes] nations with debts and restrictions designed to enable western governments to supply the extravagant products and cheap food we, as consumers, demand”. He may be right on that – some do believe it." (http://www.opendemocracy.net/katharine-hibbert/how-rational-is-optimism)