Life Without Money

Description

The money-based global economy is failing. The credit crunch undermined capitalism's ability to ensure rising incomes and prosperity while market-led attempts to combat climate change are fought tooth and nail by business as environmental crises continue.



We urgently need to combat those who say 'there is no alternative' to the current system, but what would an alternative look like? The contributors to Life Without Money argue that it is time radical, non-market models were taken seriously. The book brings together diverse voices presenting strong arguments against our money-based system's ability to improve lives and prevent environmental disaster. Crucially, it provides a direct strategy for undercutting capitalism by refusing to deal in money, and offers money-free models of governance and collective sufficiency.



Life Without Money is written by high-profile activist scholars, including Harry Cleaver, Ariel Salleh and John O'Neill, making it an excellent text for political economy and environmental courses, as well as an inspiring manifesto for those who want to take action.
CONTENTS

Preface

Acknowledgements

List of Boxes

Abbreviations

1. Use Value and Exchange Value, by Anitra Nelson and Frans Timmerman

PART I. CRITIQUES OF CAPITALISM AND COMMUNISM

2. Money v. Socialism, by Anitra Nelson - Honorary Associate Professor of RMIT University (Australia)

3. Work Refusal and Self-Organisation, by Harry Cleaver - Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Texas (Austin)

4. Money, Markets and Ecology, by John O’Neill - Hallsworth Professor of Political Economy at the University of Manchester (England)

5. The Value of a Synergistic Economy, by Ariel Salleh - Researcher in Political Economy at the University of Sydney (Australia), and previously Associate Professor in Social Ecology at the University of Western Sydney

6. A Gift Economy, by Terry Leahy - Senior Lecturer in Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Newcastle (Australia)

PART II. ACTIVISM AND EXPERIMENTS

7. Non-Market Socialism, by Adam Buick - Member of the Socialist Party of Great Britain and regular contributor to the Socialist Standard

8. Self-Management and Efficiency, by Mihailo Markovi - Widely published Serbian philosopher and scholar, worked for many years in the University of Belgrade Faculty of Philosophy

9. Labour Credit – Twin Oaks Community, by Kat Kinkade with the Twin Oaks Community - Founding member of Twin Oaks Community, established in Virginia (USA) in 1967, and co-founder of the East Wind and Acorn communities, and the Federation of Egalitarian Communities, which still exist today

10. The Money-Free Autonomy of Spanish Squatters, by Claudio Cattaneo - Obtained his PhD at the Institute for Environmental Science and Technology (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona) and teaches ecological economics at Carlo Cattaneo University (Italy)

11. Global Strategy: Contract and Converge, by Anitra Nelson and Frans Timmerman - Prominent socialist faction leader in the Australian Labor Party for decades and a political adviser to several members of parliament. Co-editor of Free Palestine published by the General Palestinian Delegation in Australia (1979–1990)

Notes on Contributors

Index

Sujets

• Political Science
• Histoire
• Theory
• History

Informations

• Publié par: Pluto Press
• Date de parution: 07 novembre 2011
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783711000
• Langue: English

Extrait

Life Without Money

First published 2011 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA
www.plutobooks.com
Distributed in the United States of America exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of St. Martin s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010
Copyright Anitra Nelson and Frans Timmerman 2011
The right of the individual contributors to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 7453 3316 8 Hardback ISBN 978 0 7453 3165 2 Paperback eISBN 978 1 7837 1100 0 ePub
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data applied for
This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental standards of the country of origin.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Designed and produced for Pluto Press by Chase Publishing Services Ltd Typeset from disk by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England Simultaneously printed digitally by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham, UK and Edwards Bros in the United States of America
Contents
List of Boxes
Preface
Acknowledgements
1.  Use Value and Non-Market Socialism
Anitra Nelson and Frans Timmerman
PART I    CRITIQUES OF CAPITALISM AND COMMUNISM
2.  Money versus Socialism
Anitra Nelson
3.  Work Refusal and Self-Organisation
Harry Cleaver
4.  Money, Markets and Ecology
John O Neill
5.  The Value of a Synergistic Economy
Ariel Salleh
6.  The Gift Economy
Terry Leahy
PART II   ACTIVISM AND EXPERIMENTS
7.  Non-Market Socialism
Adam Buick
8.  Self-Management and Efficiency
Mihailo Markovi
9.  Labour Credit - Twin Oaks Community
Kat Kinkade with the Twin Oaks Community
10.  The Money-Free Autonomy of Spanish Squatters
Claudio Cattaneo
11.  Contract and Converge
Anitra Nelson and Frans Timmerman
Notes on Contributors
Index
List of Boxes
1.1 Thomas More on Utopia, 1516
2.1 Norman Geras on Utopia
2.2 Karl Polanyi on Land, Labour and Money as Commodities
2.3 Che Guevara on the Transition to Socialism: Morality and Materialism
3.1 E. P. Thompson on Time and Money
3.2 Peter Kropotkin on Mutual Aid or Cooperation
5.1 From the Anchorage Declaration, April 2009
5.2 Ariel Salleh on Meta-Industrial
5.3 Vandana Shiva on Scientific and Commercial Forestry in India
5.4 David Suzuki on the Wisdom of Subsistence Farming and Unity in Diversity
6.1 Alexander Berkman on Anarchism
6.2 David Holmgren on Permaculture Design Principles
6.3 Murray Bookchin on an Anarchist Utopia
7.1 Milovan Djilas, Ex-Vice President of Yugoslavia, on Communist Workers and Plans
7.2 On the World Socialist Movement
7.3 Conversation from William Morris s Utopian Novel News From Nowhere
7.4 The World Socialist Movement on Labour Vouchers
8.1 Mihailo Markovi on Self-Management
8.2 Mihailo Markovi on Needs
10.1 Freegans on Freeganism
10.2 United Kingdom Freegans on Fairtrade
11.1 World Scientists Warning to Humanity, 18 November 1992
11.2 From the Declaration of the Paris DeGrowth Conference, 2008
11.3 Graham Purchase on Bioregional Interfederations
Preface
The aim of this work is to show the potential of non-market socialism in addressing contemporary economic, political and environmental challenges. On the one hand, the effects of the global financial crisis that appeared forcefully in 2007 have continued to reverberate around the world while, on the other hand, delays in implementing significant international measures to combat rising carbon emissions signal deep systemic failings to protect natural environments. Such challenges highlight that capitalism - seemingly at its zenith since the fall of the Berlin Wall - can neither satisfy people s basic material and political needs nor respect natural ecosystem requirements.
The contributors to this book are activist scholars who are international experts in diverse fields. They were selected for their capacity to develop two cases: one against a system that elevates monetary values above human and natural ones, and another for alternatives that will better provide for humans collective sufficiency and the future of the Earth. We decided to produce a readable book that activists and scholars would find intriguing and enlightening. We made sure that the book explored how non-monetary systems might work in practice, while referring to historical, revolutionary and utopian debates.
As the world heads towards environmental and social catastrophes driven by the unrestrained growth of market economies - in the tradition of Thomas More s Utopia - our book aims to provoke urgently needed debate about the need to dispense with money in order to achieve a sustainable and humane world. As such, we hope that Life Without Money helps you discover that non-market socialist models offer a future for humanity and the Earth.
Anitra Nelson and Frans Timmerman,
January 2011
Acknowledgements
Many people contributed to the development of this publishing project. We thank all those academics and activist friends who offered suggestions and support, especially: Mike Berry, John King, Joan Martinez-Alier, Bill Metcalf, Alan Roberts, David Spratt and Janna Thompson. We are most indebted to all those contributors who freely engaged in a two-way process with us to develop their chapters before we had engaged a publisher, and we thank Pluto Press s commissioning editor David Castle for all his support.
Some parts of this book have appeared before in print or are revised versions of previously published material.
Chapter 2 by Anitra Nelson ( Money versus Socialism ) is a revised and updated version of The Poverty of Money in Ecological Economics , Vol. 36, No. 3, 2001, pp. 499-511.
Chapter 3 by Harry Cleaver includes revised and updated versions of some passages from previously published work: Close the IMF, abolish debt and end development: a class analysis of the international debt crisis , Capital Class , No. 39, Winter 1989, pp. 17-50; Kropotkin, self-valorisation and the crisis of Marxism , Anarchist Studies , Vol. 2, No. 2, 1994, pp. 119-35; and Socialism in The Development Dictionary: Knowledge as Power , (ed. W. Sach), London: Zed Books, 1992, pp. 233-49.
Chapter 4 by John O Neill developed out of a revised version of Socialist calculation and environmental valuation: Money, markets and ecology , Science and Society , Vol. 66, No. 1, 2002, pp. 137-51, complemented by edited extracts from his Socialism, associations and the market , Economy and Society , Vol. 32, No. 2, 2003, pp. 184-206 (reprinted by permission of the publisher, Taylor Francis Ltd, http://www.informaworld.com ) and from Ecological economics and the politics of knowledge: the debate between Hayek and Neurath , Cambridge Journal of Economics , Vol. 28, No. 3, 2004, pp. 431-47 (courtesy Cambridge Political Economy Society and Oxford University Press).
Chapter 7 by Adam Buick draws on some passages, which have been revised, from Where LETS schemes fail , Socialist Standard , December 1994; Marx: money must go , Socialist Standard , September 1985; and Bordigism in Maximilien Rubel and John Crump (eds), Non-Market Socialism in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries , Houndmills: Macmillan, 1987 (reproduced with permission of Palgrave Macmillan). The chapter also includes an extract from John Crump and Adam Buick, State Capitalism: The Wages System Under New Management , London: Macmillan, 1986 (reproduced with permission of Palgrave Macmillan), and extracts from Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, Volume 3 , London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1975 (reproduced with permission of Lawrence and Wishart).
Chapter 8, by Mihailo Markovi , first appeared as Chapter 12 in his The Contemporary Marx: Essays on Humanist Communism , which was published by Spokesman Books (Nottingham), European Socialist Thought Series No. 3, 1974, pp. 208-17. The book is out of print. Copyright had reverted to Mihailo Markovi , who gave initial agreement to its reprinting. However, he died before the book manuscript was finalised so we thank his son, Zoran Markovi , for formalising the contributor s agreement.
Chapter 9 Labour Credit - Twin Oaks Community is compiled from extracts from two books by Kat Kinkade: Is It Utopia Yet? An Insider s View of Twin Oaks Community in its Twenty-Sixth Year , Louisa: Twin Oaks Publishing, 1994, and Kathleen Kinkade, A Waldon Two Experiment; the First Five Years of Twin Oaks Community , Louisa: Twin Oaks Publishing, 1972, complemented with material from Twin Oaks Community s February 2009 Labor Policy . We are very grateful that Twin Oaks Community, copyright owner of Kinkade s books, gave permission to publish all the material in this chapter.
As editors, we selected extracts by other authors to complement each chapter and to enhance the work as a whole, as a contemporary primer on non-market socialism. Therefore, we gratefully acknowledge permission to reproduce the following extracts:
Thomas More, Utopia , (translated by Paul Turner), London: Penguin Classics, 1965 [1516], pp. 76-7, 80, 84-5, 86, 87, 89, 128, 130 (Box 1.1, courtesy Paul Turner and Penguin).
Vandana Shiva, Monocultures of the Mind ; Perspectives on Biodiversity and Biotechnology , London: Zed Books Third World Network, 1993, pp. 19-21, 21, 24, 24-5 (Box 5.3).
William Morris, News From Nowhere , London: Routledge Kegan Paul, 1970 [1890], pp. 79-80 (Box 7.3).
1
Use Value and Non-Market Socialism
Anitra Nelson and Frans Timmerman
In capitalist societies the market is an elaborate set of social structures for exchanging commodities, which are created within a social system based on production for trade. In capitalism money , the medium and measure of exchange value, determines decisio