Common Good Units
= commons-friendly (or commons-centric) monetary reform proposal, called "Unités de Bien Commun (UBiC)" in French, proposed by Michel Foata-Prestavoine.
Description
Michel Foata-Prestavoine:
Translated from the French by ChatGPT:
"What we call Common Good Units (UBiC) would be a field of monetary exploration that recognizes the obsolescence of any tool incapable of integrating that with every transaction, there is not only an exchange of private value—recognized by current "Private Good Units"—but also a creation (or destruction) of common value. This common value must be recognized as a credit (or respectively, a debit) to the actors involved, and not the other way around. The goal, therefore, would be to break with transactional symmetry to implement a bonus-malus mechanism through the issuance/destruction of Common Good Monetary Units for transactions using such an alternative currency.
These bonuses and malus must represent, in an indisputable and legitimate manner, the collective economic value of the private transaction's impacts on the commons. Consequently, the seller of a "virtuous" product ends up with more monetary units in their pocket than what left the buyer's, and the seller producing negative impacts ends up with less. Similarly, a buyer making a responsible consumption choice has fewer monetary units leave their pocket than what enters the seller's, while an irresponsible buyer has more leave theirs.
It is very important to note the difference between such mechanisms and current systems for transferring private value (bonus/malus, ecological taxation, carbon offsetting). The latter move monetary values that have already been created but do not reform the origin of their creation. The proposal here is to transform the transaction itself into an act of legitimate monetary value creation or destruction based on the impact of the production process. The private economic interests of all parties would then be structurally and systematically aligned with maximizing the common value created, rather than its sacrifice.
Similar to several recent proposals (Grandjean and Dufrêne 2020; Couppey-Soubeyran, Sersiron and Delandre 2024), it seems essential to involve citizens, experts, and local actors in defining the legitimate criteria and methods for this evaluation. The aim is to propose a link between monetary instruments and democratic governance to effectively and accurately reveal the local values of our territories within our economies, and to involve actors in the creation of a transition project that is truly economically profitable.
This proposal to design asymmetric currencies, initially outlined in the Glocal Low-Tech operation report (2022) in response to the 2020 "Low-Tech and Territorial Resilience" call for commons, deserves, in our view, as much attention as it raises major questions regarding the legitimacy of the criteria, compatibility with the existing legal framework, social acceptability, and the risk of territorial fragmentation. These are open questions that we encourage the scientific community to examine.
The question of the link between physical degrowth and economic degrowth is central because it reveals a structural lock-in in our societies: the monetary and accounting architecture inherited from the Neolithic. As long as money remains based on Transactional Symmetry and driven solely by the creation of private value, any material reduction will be recorded as an economic regression.
This link is difficult because it cannot be resolved by technical adjustments or local impositions conceded to alternative indicators: it requires a profound transformation of how we conceive the value of our economic exchanges and coordinate our collective activities.
The challenge for research and democratic debate is now clear: to invent instruments that allow us to distinguish the objective—material sobriety and the care of the commons—from the instrument—the measurement and circulation of value by our obsolete current monetary tools—so that physical degrowth ceases to appear as a recession and can be recognized as a societal project that is economically profitable today."
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More information
Bibliography
Aglietta, M., & Orléan, A. (1982). La violence de la monnaie. Presses Universitaires de France.
Blanc, J. (2011). Les monnaies complémentaires. Un outil pour la transition ? Éditions Yves Michel.
Couppey-Soubeyran, J., Delandre, P., & Sersiron, A. (2024). Le pouvoir de la monnaie : Transformons la monnaie pour transformer la société. Les Liens qui libèrent.
Douthwaite, R. (1999). The Ecology of Money. Schumacher Briefings / Green Books.
Grandjean, A., & Dufrêne, N. (2020). Une monnaie écologique : Pour sauver la planète. Odile Jacob.
Lietaer, B. (2001). The Future of Money. Century.