[wsfii-discuss] Worldchanging article on Complementary currencies

[Saul Albert]

hi paul, jo, all,

On Wed, Oct 05, 2005 at 10:52:36AM +0100, Paul Sanders wrote:
> One day I shall compose a pæan to vagueness.

Well actually I found the lime had vagueness where it counted. Of course
there's a power relationship instigated when you print and control an
event currency, but given that there's no militia (yet) ganging up to
back the lime, I don't think it even approximates the coercive power of
any state-enforced monopoly currency. As Keith Hart pointed out in his
talk on the Community Currency / Finance panel:
http://nodel.org/wsfii/wsfii-day2-audio/13CommunityCurrencies.mp3 , the
fact that you have to pay your tax in 'legal tender', and that tax
collection is backed by state agencies, police and I suppose in some
horrible last resort, the military, is the crux of the power relationship
of monopoly currencies.

There's nothing to stop Abba from Mario's Pizza issuing pizza tokens and
trying to make us use them to buy coleslaw. Or something.

The vagueness the lime gave us was a kind of fuzzy accounting for
remunerating volunteers, workers and participants. People double-backed
the lime by paying £10 for 5 limes and entry - which gave us about £500
to play with over the weekend. We spent this on feeding and watering
staff, participants and volunteers, and when someone wanted some food or
drink, we gave them limes quite freely.  The monopoly moneyness of them
made them surprisingly easy to give away.

So - we didn't have to worry about financing that activity beforehand
with caterers or pay-packets for staff, we just printed limes, and had a
de-facto community credit scheme running with all the places that
accepted them.  So I think it actually enabled us to be vague about
something that would otherwise have been really annoying to take too
seriously - conference packs with per-diems and hotel keys etc..

Anyway - enough in defence of the lime as a pragmatic tool - for which it
was brilliant, the real effect I hoped it had, which I failed to explain
to Keith after his talk, was the potential I see in it and projects like
it for re-routing the poisonous cultural economy that we're helping to
bring to Limehouse. Our (the Limehouse Town Hall Gang's) overall economic
effect on the area is to convert cultural activity and cultural history
into a rise in housing prices and land value. We are the vanguard of
gentrification and we're not entirely happy about it. So what can we do?

Running away is part of the script, where we move out and re-colonise
some other depressed area, and we're not happy with that idea. Systems
like the lime - at least in the very short term, re-wire some of the
benefits of our economic activity into a cartel-like local loop. Backed
by some of the proposals that Chris Cook was making about stake-holding
and 'n'ths of use-value of spaces like Limehouse, and combined with our
as-yet-token public remit to provide access to the heritage of the
building, I think this could be the beginning of an attempt to divert or
convert the gentrification process into something more aware of the
transactions/transformations of value and capital. I still haven't
figured out how exactly, but I saw possibilities for the lime everywhere,
particularly in concert with other free information infrastructures...

XX

Saul.