-'Following the latest post on 'Money' I just could not contain myself any
longer. I do not have the time to look at the material on alternative forms
of money and in any case I do not believe that tinkering with alternative
forms  of money will lead to any meaningful change in my life nor bring
about the kind of liberation which I and many others so desperately seek.

At the risk of repeating myself and perhaps boring many of you - I'll just
restate 'where I am coming from'. Money represents value [more properly
speaking exchange value]. In order for 2 private individuals, governments,
multinational corporations or street corner traders, to exchange
commodities they must have a mutual equivalent. In today's global economy
we have a global or universal equivalent.  All this by the way is not
simply Marx, but was 'common stock' in an earlier age of anarchist,
communist etc thought.

This being the case I cannot see why we need to re-invent the wheel when
capital has already created the global medium of exchange. The discussion
on this list is I feel missing the main point. And that  is that any
critique we have of capital should start off from the nature of commodity
production itself. Exchange takes place after and separated from production
[even if exchange for the capitalist is the main point of it]. If we are to
free ourselves from the commodity form - the cause of my alienation,
poverty and general misery, - necessarily the exchange of commodities must
disappear also.

Now so far theoretical solutions to this problem have been thin on the
ground - I can only think of a serious attempt by the German Left of the
1930s - the GIK, which some people may want to go over.

Fortunately, we do not need to come up with fully worked out answers in
advance. That great laboratory of social practice called the class struggle
already contains sufficient pointers if only we care to look. It is in this
struggle where people's felt needs come into collision with the social
system, where theories and ideas are tested against actual practice. In
this regard I should like to point to two phenomena which it seems to me we
ought take note of.-'

Firstly in this country and in Europe, [I do not know the US or the ' Far
East' as they still say here] there has been the development of LETS [Local
Exchange Trading Systems] and similar schemes. Now I  could go on to
critique them in the manner I set out above, but I am not going to. Judged
by the only criteria which matter, these schemes and similar will grow or
fail in as much as they answer or fail to answer people's felt needs. I
only have two comments to make. Firstly such systems seem unable to grow
beyond a certain optimum size, before they either collapse or seek
'convertibility' with existing monetary systems. Long before this point the
Internal Revenue authoirities have taken an interest and they seem to have
no problem in assessing what is and is not 'taxable income'.

Secondly all the ones I am familiar with have sought and got support from
local, national or federal state bodies. Indeed to the point where they
cannot survive without them.

I leave people to make what they like of that.

The other development that has arisen since the 70s and to which we should
pay attention is the phenomneon known in Europe as 'proletarian shopping'.
Like LETS it too takes on different and varied forms. It is also driven by
the felt needs of those taking part in it. Its development and expression
is conditioned by the strength of the social movement that gives rise to
it. Most people on this list will be familiar with its most widespread form
which is the trashing or looting of shopping malls and other areas given
over to the worship of the commodity form. In this form it is a fairly low
level, and atomised form of struggle.

At other time such as in Italy in the middle 70s or at the height of other
struggles it takes on a social and collective form. I remember riding
around on the newly opened Milan subway system and buses and not paying a
penny because the workers and community were practising what they called
'autoriduzzione' or the self reduction of fares, electricity, gas and
myriads of other basics of life. This was a reflection of the collective
social strength of the oppositional movement at the time. A movement that
the Italian state had to first isolate by branding those struggling as
'terrorists' [it was the time of the assassination of Aldo Moro] and break
by the jailing of over 4000 activists.

On a smaller scale in the UK, I also took part in rent strikes where our
slogan was 'a fair rent is NO rent' and of course we also had our poll tax
- 'can't pay, won't pay !'

You will note that these latter phenomena [and especially the Italian
movement] have received scant attention either in academic or popular
circles. Only this last weekend in Amsterdam as the great and the good of
the EU came together, and the old 'workers movement' had marchers arriving
from all over Europe for the 'right to work' - the 'would not be workers'
were out trashing down town Amsterdam. [Those people who want to see a
discussion of this and other like 'phenomena' should look at the Aufheben
site that Bill Barlett was referring to - there are other links from
there.]

What all this is leading to is a simple question - whose side would we be
on if a demonstration happened to choose a business, which is an active
member/ campaigner for a LETS scheme, as a suitable target for 'proletarian
shopping' ?

ATB

Gra