The idea we could build an alternative economy is hubristic, to say the least. The economy is how the material world is organised, and that system is defended by the powerful with military force where necessary. Economies based on exploitation will always provide better value for money and can never be outcompeted by an economy based on justice. The best I can hope for is to build an economy in the cracks, and wait and hope that the internal contradictions of capitalism will be its undoing, and that that will happen without too much violence.
Adventures in mutual credit
For much of the last six months I have been doing a daily 20 min march bearing a Palestinian flag up and down the high street in Matera, Italy, close to which I live. This blog is a record of the technique I've developed. This is not an attempt to take the campaign online, quite the contrary, this has been a rare opportunity for me to work IRL! (in real life)
Intent/Audience
After five iterations of the mutual_credit module for Drupal over 12 years, I developed the Credit Commons API and reference implementation for recursive mutual credit accounting, and last year also implemented it in version 6 of the mutual credit module.
Today I'm releasing this paper which discusses how a stable unit of account is created without the resources of the state (of elites) to back it. There are two ways, when there is sufficient willingness to share risk, mutual credit is the way, otherwise much more complex and costly infrastructure is needed.
This January it was my privilege to be invited to visit Grassroots Economics Foundation (GrE) in Kenya, a project which has inspired me since I first met founder Will Ruddick at a conference in 2011. The trip was generously funded by the One Project which supports and promotes his work in various ways.
I just came back from the 3rd CryptoCommons Gathering at the Commons Hub in Austria. I was financed to create a course to introduce the notion of Collaborative Finance to the blockchain demographic. Perhaps a midsummer conference isn't the ideal setting for a daily one hour class, or mky time-slot wasnt't ideal, but around 1/4 to 1/3 of the participants attended each day. The four lessons were:
Report on the first Collaborative Finance Gathering at the Commons Hub, Austria, May 22-28, 2023.
It was an honour to be asked by the Commons Hub to design a conference and I took the opportunity to bring together crypto-people with some working on more traditional complementary currency innovations.
Just a short glance indicated to me that this would be worth recording, and I was right. With a flair unexpected in a PhD thesis, Drumm draws on English and classical history, much of it presented through Shakespeare, to show how history has been defined by the politics of liquidity, and how this politics is really the management of an unresolved dilemma at the heart of the monetary theory.