Reproduced from Andreas Exner, on the emerging ‘gift economy’ and ‘communization’ mentalities:

“A new thought lingers through society like a viral mem. It pops up at unfamiliar places and is transmitted fast via different social milieus – the time, it seems, is ripe for it. Who wants a society beyond capitalism has to look for it beyond money, market and state. This thought is no longer confined to marginal magazines such as the Streifzüge (http://www.streifzuege.org) but is watched a million times and more – in the movie Zeitgeist: Moving Forward. This phenomenon most strikingly shows that ever more people reject the dictatorship of competition, management and state. They do not look for a Gemeinwohlökonomie in the sense of Christian Felber (a concept of an “economy for the common good” that has emerged within the NGO attac in Austria) or similar reforms of the market economy. They are looking for an alternative to their unnecessary suffering.

The “Left”, which was traditionally in charge of “the alternative”, has completely failed to deliver one. However, one must not over-generalize this judgement. Autonomist currents that operated outside of parties, syndicats and the like have time and again fought for a life beyond the distortions which the market and state domination inflict on them. But they either had only temporary, local success such as the Diggers of the Westcoast Hippie scene or they were content to take for free what supermarkets and the state supplied, as was the case during the 1970s in Italy. They did not succeed to formulate a viable alternative, to clearly conceive how life beyond capitalism has to be organized and realized.

The misery that a retarded capitalist modernization imposed on the people in the European East make it almost impossible nowadays to use the terms communism and socialism to describe this alternative and the transformation it requires. All the more it is surprising that the Zeitgeist movement picks up the original meaning of communism. In this way, it meets with other currents of the “Left” who refused to follow both the social democratic and the bolshevist versions of capitalism, which those had thought to be an improvement of the human condition. So the “invisible committee” states that “the practical abolishment of money thus can only be achieved by extending the communes”.

“All of our actions”, another group writes in 2009 during the students protests in the USA “from an absent future” (the title of its communiqué), “must push us towards communization; that is, the reorganization of society according to a logic of free giving and receiving, and the immediate abolition of the wage, the value-form, compulsory labor, and exchange.”

The idea of free life is expressed in an even more pronounced manner by the gift economy paradigm as propagated by the radical feminist debate. Under this headline, Genevieve Vaughan developed a fundamental critique of patriarchy that is based on exchange. Exchange, according to Vaughan, is not only a material praxis, but also a mode of how to conceive the world and our relations. Just as exchange makes money its only measure, the male functions as the measure of all human beings. An alternative, Vaughan says, has to start in our way to perceive the world. We have to realize that the logic of exchange feeds like a parasite on the much more basic logic of gift, subordinating the gift to exchange both in our minds and social relations. A similar analysis is developed by Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen in her book “Money or Life”.

Most noticeably the gift economy paradigm opposes not only capital, but also money and exchange. Therein, it overlaps with some currents of Marxism that range from the critique of value in the sense of the groups Krisis and Exit, Michael Heinrich, Nadja Rakowitz or Alfred Fresin to authors with a stronger connection to social movements such as John Holloway, Harry Cleaver or Friederike Habermann. Gift economy is an approach that does not only aim at intellectual change and it seems to be more apt to initiate a shared praxis and to foster international networking than many of its marxist “brothers” have been.

All those theoretical approaches and agitation seem to accompany social movements that call with differing emphasis for a practical perspective to overcome money and exchange. While the demand for a basic income, in those cases where actually a free life is the ultimate goal, expresses this ambition in a very contradictory way, the debate on resources that are used collectively and with equal participation, the so called commons, seems to be more promising. Not only an enormous range of currently existing modes of production can demonstrate how a life beyond money, exchange and state looks like. Some of the people debating commons even explicitly advocate for a society fully based on commons.

However, also the commons debate is plagued by contradictions. Many fans of the commons want to supplement capitalism and market economy with them. Often, commons are reduced to natural resources, supposing that there is some sort of natural reason why a pasture can be a commons, but not a steelmill. Finally, there are many that think the transition to a better society will be smooth. They seem to expect that corporations will first acknowledge that they can make more profits with commons than by destroying them and will then retreat voluntarily, as soon as they realize that they had been deceived.

It is not a specter that haunts the world, but it is a sprout that becomes visible: the thought that a life without money and exchange is possible and good. This sprout also consists of collective projects, of many different material attempts to contribute to the perspective of demonetization. In order to strengthen those efforts getting stronger these days even more, the network Demonetize.it! was founded. Online, the platform http://demonetize.it summarizes informations from various projects and coordinates activities.”