I've only just joined this list after being told there was a bit of a raging
discussion on money, with LETS implicated in some of that discussion. Having
just written some chapters on LETS and marxist theory (I'm doing a thesis on
LETS) I found Bill's comments useful and interesting. But I disagree.

> LETS is not a money-system, it is a system for bartering labour.

Barter is very specific - usually use value for use value, direct commodity
exchange. In LETS (and money - which LETS is) you exchange use value for an
exchange value to be realised at some later stage.

> Unfortunately the labour being bartered is usually unaccompanied by the
> tools of production which are required for potential labour to be made
> fully productive. Most people would still prefer to be paid money for their
> labour, as opposed to the promise of receiving labour in return, because
> (as most people control none of the means of production) money is more
> useful.

What scale of 'tools of production' do we have to talk here? Are we talking
factories? Or can we talk at a scale that might be the beginning of something
different? My account in LETS is about -900 at the moment. Singing telegrammes
hasn't
worked too lucratively (for which I take my trumpet - is that a tool?) so I'm
now buying environmentally nice laundry powder in bulk at the factory and
reselling it in yoghurt containers etc for zacs (bendigo LETS' currency name)
(plus a dollar to retrieve my cash outlay). The 'profit' I'm taking in zacs.
Am I being capitalist? I think the tendency is there.

> Since capitalists are the ones who DO
> own the means of production, LETS can only ever be marginal in the context
> of a capitalist system. Socialists are not looking for crumbs, we say the
> working class CREATED all wealth, including the means of production. We say
> we need to own and control it also.

But it has been nigh on impossible to bring about the revolution - No? David
Harvey (geographer, social theorist) digs around in Marx and Lenin to come up
with a theory that capital *needs* to be spatially mobile in order to
survive.  It needs to be able to exploit places. But what if those places are
*more* (not totally) self-reliant because they have a local currency system?
If such a network of local currencies was employed in many many places what
would be the impact on capitalism? The theory as I see it would be have that
'spatial fix' reduced, and hence will be more prone to crisis, bringing about
the conditions more likely for social change.

I'm not saying that this is the case (particularly given the state of many
LETS), but could be, if the idea was successful across the globe on many local
scales.

mk.
--
  ===========================================================
Mark Jackson, PhD student       |
in geography                    |Email: [log in to unmask]
Department of Social Sciences   | Ph: 61-54-447503 (uni)
La Trobe University Bendigo     |     61-54-396460 (hm)
PO Box 199 Bendigo              |     61-54-447970 (fax)
Victoria 3550                   |
Australia                       |

If you would like more information about my work on LETS please visit my home
page at http://luff.latrobe.edu.au/~lssmoj/index.html