Life without Money

LIFE WITHOUT MONEY Anitra Nelson and Franz Zimmerman, Eds. Pluto Press, 2011, 244 pp. The GFC, the European 'de-growth' movement, Occupy Wall St, and the Transition Towns movement, all seem to be part of a long overdue surge in discontent with the unacceptability of the system and the quest for alternatives. Thus this is a timely book, reconsidering some classic themes in a contemporary context focused on alternatives to money. Eleven chapters explore a range of interesting and important themes, loosely divided into critiques of capitalism and consumerism, and activism and experiments. Among the topics are non-market socialism, self management, the labour credit system of the Twin Oaks commune, the money-free economy of Spanish squatters, the elimination of work and wages, and the gift economy. There are helpful introductory and concluding chapters by the editors. Although all chapters are clear and easily understood by the non-specialist reader, the discussions are also likely to be valuable refreshers for professional students of political economy. The book's central thesis is that a satisfactory society requires the scrapping of markets, the state and money. The emphasis on the third of these propositions is particularly distinctive and debatable. It is obvious that many of the most absurd and outrageous aspects of consumer-capitalist society are directly due to the monetary system, especially its taken for granted assumption that money must take the form of credit which has to be repaid with interest, and which has to be issued by private banks. But the key question is, are the resulting effects due to the use of money or just due to the form of money used in consumer-capitalist society? Could a different form retain the advantages of money while avoiding these effects? My main doubts regarding the book are to do with whether the case given for the need to scrap all forms of money is convincing. I firmly believe that we are entering an era of intense and irremediable scarcity brought on by resource and ecological problems, in which the rich countries in particular will be jolted into a scramble for radically different social systems. These will not be characterised by heavy industrialisation, globalisation, economic growth or affluent lifestyles, and they will have to at least heavily control markets if not entirely eliminate them. The new local economies will not function satisfactorily unless they are mostly under participatory social control at the level of the neighbourhood committee and town meeting, with a relatively minor role for the remnant 'state'. …