An open farm day tour in Zsambok’s Organic Garden, Cargonomia’s organic farming partner. Credit – Logan Strenchock

The cooperative supplies more than 3,000 food boxes per year, with messengers cycling nearly 18,000 km while servicing a 27 km2 section of the city annually. This directly reduces the environmental impact of food production and distribution that at a global level accounts for about a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions as well as an alarming amount of food waste.

Cargonomia operates from a hub that serves as the messenger dispatch centre; food box pickup point; do-it-yourself repair workshop for bicycles, clothing and electronics; and logistics centre for sustainable urban transport solutions where community members can borrow locally manufactured cargo-bikes. The site also serves as a space for community activities that focus on sustainable transitions, community building and ways to find alternatives to limitless, consumerist growth.

Cargonomia illustrates that prioritizing relationship-building, direct interaction and community development can trigger substantial reductions in carbon emissions while delivering important positive social impacts. By lending its cargobikes to neighbours, music bands, non-governmental organisations and artists, it has helped generate a growing interest in alternatives to motorized vehicles in Budapest. The wider impact of this localized network is felt most within the community through regular activities offering citizens open spaces for learning and exchange, creating conditions for meaningful dialogues between neighbours, craftspeople and volunteers.

Vincze with a cargobike loaded with organic vegetables and bread on a delivery day. Photo Credit: Stefan Roch

“What inspires me most about this initiative is the systems thinking that underpins the initiative bridges urban/rural livelihoods, and attempts to orientate the solidarity economy towards concrete political activity.”

– Bertie Russell

Would you like to learn more about this initiative? Please contact us.

Or visit cargonomia.hu

Transformative Cities’ Atlas of Utopias is being serialized on the P2P Foundation Blog. Go to TransformativeCities.org for updates.

The post Budapest, Hungary: Cargo-Bikes Reduce Transport Emissions, Build Alternative Economy appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Niko Georgiades: Athens, Greece – Tools born from the internet, applied across autonomous networks and movements seeking alternatives to capitalism, are providing the infrastructure of alternative societies. In the last of our specials on community currencies and alternative economies, we showcase FairCoop, a self-organized and self-managed global cooperative created through the internet outside the domain of the nation-state.

During a conference on alternatives to capitalism inside of the self-organized and squatted Embros Theater in Athens, Greece in the summer of 2017, a Catalan speaker (who remained anonymous for safety purposes) gave a presentation on FairCoop, which informed much of this reporting.

Alternative economies are typically separate economic structures operating outside of the traditional economy and based on the common principles of a community. FairCoop is a function of an alternative economy and was built out of the necessity to provide an “alternative system outside of capitalism” and merge many autonomous movements and networks together to form a society based on each community’s values.

FairCoop was created a few years after a nearly half a billion euro banking system expropriation action from 2006-2008, generally attributed to Enric Duran. The expropriation of monetary value from the banks was used to fund social movements and as a way to jump-start alternatives to the capitalist system.

Watch the video below for an introduction to FairCoop:

During the presentation on FairCoop, the speaker inside of Embros Theater said that in Catalonia, Spain, around 2009, 2010, the Catalan Integral Cooperative (CIC) was created, to “build another society by self-organizing” and to provide the needs of the people, “from food, housing, education, and health, etc.”

Since the creation of the Integral networks in Spain seven years ago, “a lot of people [have been] working for the commons” as there are more than 1,000 projects that are autonomously self-organizing to create cooperative networks of sharing.

Watch the video below, or see our full report here, for more information on the CIC [also see The Catalan Integral Cooperative: An Organizational Study of a Post-Capitalist Cooperative by George Dafermos]:

The idea for FairCoop was brought to an assembly in 2014 as a proposal by Enric Duran and was created by people within the movement to serve as economic infrastructure for a new society.

The Catalan speaker described FairCoop as “an open global cooperative, self-organized via the Internet and remaining outside nation-state control,” but one “that is controlled by a global assembly.” The speaker explained, “We don’t say cooperative in the traditional way, we say cooperative because we work with economy and we work in a participatory way and in a equal way.”

The steps taken to get to the point of the creation of FairCoop were explained by the speaker as followed:

“The first action was hacking the banks [expropriation of money through the internet], the second action was hacking the state [creating a taxing system to fund the creation of autonomous alternative systems], and the third one was hacking the money markets.“

“Usually the powerful money markets attack the weak economies and they get their resources with inflation and things like that. So, for centuries people have lost a lot of resources, a lot of capital” from those in control of the money – the speaker continued, “with FairCoin we are, like, revenging on that, let’s say, and we are recovering value.” They are growing that value to “use it for the commons” and assist in building their self-managed alternative society, said the presenter.

“They’re are many people in more than 30 countries” that have combined their local currencies and communities into autonomous local nodes and are connected in a network of cooperatives, said the speaker, who gave examples in the presentation about a Guatemalan and Greek sharing network.

“Local nodes acts as decentralized local assemblies of FairCoop, and meeting point between global projects of FairCoop and the various projects developed locally, creating links, synergies, knowledge development and growth of the entire ecosystem we are creating together. Autonomously, they serve as a point to spread, help and welcome people in FairCoop, as well as an exchange point of FairCoin.” – Description of a local node, FairCoop website

To build “a society without money, takes money,” and also requires having a plan to fight against capitalism by empowering the “local, regional, and global level,” so, the speaker said FairCoop created a “global assembly” to determine the value of the currency in a way of “self-management in the political process, not in the market“.

Listen to the fifteen minute presentation on FairCoop (full presentation with Q&A session is further down the post):

Audio Player

FairCoop was described as “a political movement building an alternative” that operates with many open decentralized working groups and assemblies deciding by consensus what actions to take in the FairCoop.

“FairCoop understands that the transformation to a fairer monetary system is a key element. Therefore, FairCoin was proposed as the cryptocurrency upon which to base its resource-redistribution actions and building of a new global economic system.” – FairCoop website

FairCoop utilizes FairCoin cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrencies, the most famous being Bitcoin, are digitally created on the internet, decentralized, and out of the control of central governments.

The difference between FairCoin and Bitcoin, said the speaker, is that “in Bitcoin, they are not one community, there are many different interests fighting each other, like what’s happening in the capitalist world is happening in the Bitcoin.”

They utilize FairCoin to the “benefit of the self-management of the alternative economy, not in the benefit of decentralizing capitalism that is around Bitcoin,” and to economically sustain the process of building the network of FairCoop.

For a bit of an explanation on what FairCoin is, watch this excerpt of an interview with Theodore, from the Athens Integral Cooperative, below:

Cryptocurrencies are block-chain transactions tracked through public ledgers, however, FairCoin has recently created the world’s first ever “co-operative blockchain … by creating an algorithm based on mining processes that rely on a proof of co-operation.”

FairCoin was developed “as a transition tool for building that eco-system at the global level that can be useful for supporting the building of autonomy and the building of self-organizement” around the world, said the speaker.

The speaker said that with the self-management of FairCoin, they are recovering value instead of extracting it from the people as the current banking system with its money markets does.

Faircoin governance image

In efforts to control all of the FairCoin, 80 to 90 percent of the FairCoin is now in the hands of the “movement“, said the speaker. With FairCoin, the value of funds is over 2 million euros and the speaker said, “this is just the beginning of the way how we are creating value by this hacking.”

When asked for a practical example of how FairCoop could be put to use in the self-managed Embros Theater, the speaker said that the first step would be to start accepting FairCoin for the transactions of economy inside the theater, such as beer. The next step would be to share that you accept FairCoin, which will then be seen in the FairCoop network and when more people start exchanging FairCoin, local nodes create assemblies focusing on different qualities that branch out to the global networks.

The speaker touched on Freedom Coop, which according to their website, is a “European Cooperative Society (SCE) that creates toolkits for self-management, self-employment, economic autonomy and financial disobedience for individuals and groups striving for fairer social and economic relationships.”

On the larger scale of building “a new way of life,” newly created Bank of the Commons is “a project for bringing on an alternative banking system to the world“, said the speaker, who explained it’s a way to bring different movements, cooperatives, and different groups the “capacities for doing their activities without the control of the normal banks.”

See the 2017 FairCoop Structure Chart for a visual learning experience of how the networks connect to each other:

After the presentation by the Catalan speaker, dozens of audience members asked many clarifying questions as to how this system of an alternative economy works. The presentation lasted a bit over two hours. Listen to the full presentation below:

With the building of these networks of social economy and solidarity, people are rethinking their ideas of how society could be more equitable. Creating alternative economies using the internet and autonomous working groups to decentralize the power has many people in Europe and across the world very excited at the prospects of a new society outside of capitalism and nation-states. In the words of the speaker, the future of mass movements providing real change are based in being able to have economic power, “As a movement, we need to be stronger economically to be stronger politically.”

The post Greece: Alternative Economies & Community Currencies Pt. 3 – FairCoop appeared first on P2P Foundation.

What practices and places can we rely on and strengthen in the years to come?

What might be called an “alternative” economy in the United States is known globally as the solidarity economy. The solidarity economy identifies and unites grassroots practices like lending circles, credit unions, worker cooperatives, community safety initiatives, community media stations, and community land trusts to form a powerful base of political power. The concept emerged in the global South (as economia solidária*) and is now gaining support in the United States under many names, including the community economy, the peace economy, the workers’ economy, the social economy, the new economy, the circular economy, the regenerative economy, the local economy, and the cooperative economy.

As many people finally wake up to the reality that white supremacy threatens public health on a daily basis, a wide range of people are educating themselves, assertively dismantling structures of oppression in organizations, and learning to follow the lead of black and brown artists and organizers who have been under siege for centuries and who have always been leaders in the solidarity economy. For more information about the solidarity economy, please visit: http://www.communityeconomies.org/Home and http://solidaritynyc.org

Marco Arruda of the Brazilian Solidarity Economy Network stated at the World Social Forum in 2004: “A solidarity economy does not arise from thinkers or ideas; it is the outcome of the concrete historical struggle of the human being to live and to develop him/herself as an individual and a collective… innovative practices at the micro level can only be viable and structurally effective for social change if they interweave with one another to form always-broader collaborative networks and solidarity chains of production-finance-distribution-consumption-education-communication.”

Text by Caroline Woolard

The post Illustrating the Solidarity Economy appeared first on P2P Foundation.

By setting up a perpetual trust fund the family wealth is immune to taxation. In effect, the trust operates outside the system. Like corporations in the USA, the trust is a person. It can own property and conduct business. Family members named in the trust can benefit from it, but since they do not “own” the trust’s assets the family members are not taxed.

Royalty, the wealthy elite, criminal enterprise and corporate interests all operate outside the system. Why shouldn’t normal citizens also create a vehicle for operating outside the system? Think of it; eventually, there will be no system left.  Which is why normal people need to cooperate to survive.  Faircoop may be a vision of our shared future.

Extracted from https://www.facebook.com/groups/p2p.open/permalink/1210714848972692/

Freedom Coop is a Faircoop project based around a European Cooperative Society (SCE) which creates toolkits for self-management, self-employment, economic autonomy and financial disobedience for all individuals and groups striving for fairer, more solidary and cooperative social and economic relationships.

With the launch of this early beta we hope that the projects interested in joining will register and walk side by side with us, supporting the development of this tool, and of all its potential.

Fly with us!!

The website is already available in English, Spanish, Greek, French, German and Catalan. More languages will come soon.

http://www.freedomcoop.eu/

This is the link for the register form:https://ocp.freedomcoop.eu/membership

Here you can see also more longer news in different languages:

EN https://fair.coop/freedom-coop-a-tool-for-the-people/

ES https://fair.coop/…/freedom-coop-una-herramienta-para-la-g…/

CA https://fair.coop/ca/freedom-coop-una-eina-per-a-la-gent/

GR https://fair.coop/el/launch-of-freedom-coop/

IT https://fair.coop/…/freedom-coop-uno-strumento-per-le-pers…/

DE https://fair.coop/…/freedom-coop-ein-werkzeug-fuer-die-men…/

Extracted from: https://freedomcoop.eu/local-nodes/

Local Nodes are the regional representation of both Freedom Coop and FairCoop and are a very important part of this European Network. Local node groups do not just represent the people who compose them, but also give feedback to Freedom Coop as a whole. In this way, Local Nodes are able to become an interconnecting doorway between people at the local and global level.

Photo by jared

Extracted from: https://freedomcoop.eu/management/

To become a member of Freedom Coop you have to make a non-recurring membership contribution by underwriting at least 1 share as an individual (or 2 for group memberships) with the option of underwriting as much as you want, at a nominal value of 30€ (600 FAIR) each. With this membership contribution you help Freedom Coop build the financial resources it needs. The shares do not bear any interest and would be recovered (linked to the Euro value contribution) upon termination of your membership.

For the ongoing administrative and technical costs, a periodical membership fee should be payable every three months, depending on the profits of each member, according to the invoices of incomes and expenses of the member. This quarterly fees only affects the self-employed members.

Therefore, the amount you pay depends dynamically on your periodical profit using Freedom Coop’s tools. If you have a low or no income at the beginning of your economic activity, the fees will stay at a minimum level. Compared to many state taxation systems this is fair. By doing so we all can avoid entering a debt spiral, which would work in favor of the states and banks.

Extracted from: https://freedomcoop.eu/tools/

Open Collaborative Platform (OCP)

The first step to become a member of Freedom Coop is to join our Open Collaborative Platform(.) The OCP is the key organizational tool we offer to individuals, collectives, and management inside Freedom Coop.

The OCP can be used to:

• Account the time spent by every member to use it as a base of income distribution and a way of self-actualization for any project.
• Execute a quarterly fee and tax distribution between Freedom Coop and their members.
• Manage an online Faircoin wallet to accept and make payments.

Alternative Banking

Freedom Coop provides an alternative banking tool for members with economic activity. This specific bank account has crucial features for our system.

This alternative banking tool can be used to:

• receive payments from the current system (bank transfers, credit/debit cards etc.) and convert it directly into Faircoin.
• Autonomously manage economic projects with your bank account, for example to pay providers and be paid by clients, thus creating an international/European/local relationship beyond the control of the financial system.

Furthermore, you can use the VAT number of the Freedom Coop for invoicing the good and services offered through Freedom Coop and for request receipts.

Extracted from: https://freedomcoop.eu/faq/

If I have a project outside Europe, is it still useful for me to join?

There are two ways in which Freedom Coop can help projects in other continents.

Firstly, in the case of projects that are produced online – or without a public physical activity-, you could use the european cooperative’s legal personality for invoicing as if you were in Europe.

Secondly, you could be interested in selling your goods and services in Europe and join Freedom Coop to make it easier to have a relationship with your European clients.

Photo by National Media Museum

Photo by in_ar23

Photo by Panegyrics of Granovetter

The post Project Of The Day: Freedom Coop appeared first on P2P Foundation.

“Bruno Chies: Let me go back to complementary and alternative currencies. Do you mean they are a way to empower people directly on a local level?

Matthew Slater: If they would work, they would empower people. But they don’t work when people don’t use them. If they were to be used, it would mean that communities are acting in solidarity with each other are empowering each other. The reality is that most people don’t seem to feel very much solidarity others and they certainly don’t express that by using a complementary currency. So, the tool is there but we lack the consciousness, awareness or will to use it. We the people, need to start working together, taking on responsibility, taking on leadership roles, and not relying on authority figures and governments to do it. This is difficult because we’re also paying taxes. There’s not a lot left over these days. We tend to chase the money and we do what the people with the money tell us to do. Which leads to the need to compete with each other and the wasting of resources in the process. If we want to be sovereign, we have to either find sources of money that don’t come with a value obligations, that are already aligned with what we want to do, or we’ll have to do without money.

Talking about real utopias, you envision an economy in which complementary currencies play a role but economy is not fully monetized. There are spaces in the economy for gift, barter and exchange with complementary currencies.

In this utopia what people would do would be a much closer expression of what they value, because they don’t have this top-down monetary system, expressing the values of either the tax recipient, the philanthropists, or the trillionaires. You wouldn’t need everything to be monetized. Everything is monetized now because the economy is huge and it still has to grow. More things have to be monetized so that a greater proportion of our activities can be taxed and more money has to be borrowed. If that wasn’t the case, then there would be much less need for money. It’s by no means an impossible utopia, there already are tiny societies working like that. It seems that when our societies grow bigger they become dysfunctional. We need to bring the self-determination level down to the local, small groups, because the system is less easily corrupted this way.

That makes sense, and I think this is a very good bridge to your Credit Commons project. Is this a way to connect local economies operating with complementary currencies and create more solidarity?

Yes, I think that’s exactly it. The tag line is ‘money for the solidarity economy’. Some people would argue that it’s not money, it’s merely a system of exchange. But that is a function of money, so it depends on what your definition of money is. It seems to me that what’s needed is a global protocol to help us exchange with one another. Credit Commons could be used locally or intercontinentally; it’s only a protocol.

How does it differ from other platforms, like Community Forge or Community Exchange System (CES)?

Because it’s a protocol, it is not a platform. CES is a platform with hundreds of groups in it that trade with each other and have nominal balance limits that are not harshly enforced and there isn’t really any governance about what the credit limits or the exchange rates should be. The Credit Commons seeks to formalize that arrangement as well as open it up to groups outside that platform. The only requirement becomes running software that implements the protocol. I’m also likening it to a cryptocurrency. It’s not a currency but it is a distributed ledger and that means we can all agree on what the ledger says.

Is it based on blockchain?

I haven’t gone so far as to specify the blockchain. It would be a consensus algorithm. For example, Ripple… It’s called a permission blockchain, which means you don’t need the mining. The clients trust each other, so they don’t have to fight or compete. They trust each other and the ledger stays intact, as long as they’re all good. That means an outsider cannot come in. The thing about Bitcoin is that anybody can implement the protocol and participate, but they have to do the mining to make sure it’s good. In the permission blockchains you just do it with your friends and the people you trust.

So you really build trust, not through code, but through people.

It’s trust at two levels: 1) if I give you credit, I trust that you’re going to pay it back, and 2) we’re both participating in a trust group, with protocols, and I trust that you’re not gonna hack the ledger. However, I’m not an expert in the software’s architecture, so I’m leaving that open at the moment. The aim of the Credit Commons white paper is to create discussion.

How does that apply to the issue of convenience when using money? A problem with complementary currencies is that they’re very limited in scope and are not very convenient. Do you think that the Credit Commons could change this?

Yes, it should, but not directly. At the moment each complementary currency is working pretty much with its own software or with a family of softwares, but there is no grand interoperability plan, there are no protocols that everyone agrees on. If the platforms are joined together through the Credit Commons but every group is still using their own software, those issues are still exactly the same. It becomes possible for credit to move between platforms when they use a common protocol, a backbone to the system. A platform would have a payment form that facilitates paying somebody in a different platform. But that still doesn’t help you pay for the groceries in the shop.

It might give you access to other markets…

Yes. That’s one reason why we also need to work on the advertisers’ API, in order to see what’s in other markets. There isn’t any way to do this yet.

Are you seeking software developers to this project?

I’d love to involve some developers in this, but it’s hard. We’re talking about hundreds of existing communities that are expressing a real need to go forward in radical reforms and cooperations. I thought this would be very appealing to developers, to have a chance to write some software that will be used in this way. Many activist developers are imagining what’s needed and they think ‘if we write this, we’ll save the world’, and then it doesn’t happen.

Perhaps your advice to activist developers who want to make a difference in the world is to re-learn how to cooperate and collaborate…

And to adopt an attitude of service. You can collaborate and still build something that nobody needs. Be sure that you’re serving people whose values you agree with. That might not be the way to write an app that goes viral, but it is the way to do something that really is useful. Otherwise you’re taking an all or nothing risk.

The term commons usually takes me back to the work of Elinor Ostrom and the question of governance: how can people find ways to govern these commons? How does that work in terms of money and credit in your proposal?

There’s no credit without governance. In Debt the first 5000 Years, David Graeber drew a sweeping portrait of history in which there are times of stability, which is to say times of governance and trust in systems, when we used credit money, and times of instability, when there is a lot of conflict between nations and governance wasn’t something that could be relied upon, which are times of commodity money. Governance is even more important than money. What we need is systems of governance that help us organize ourselves. Money and credit arrangements will follow. There are many people involved in monetary reform, and for many it’s a very compelling subject, but ultimately you cannot really get anywhere with money. The solutions have to be situated at a deeper level. The issue about creating a commons and governing it, is what I’d like to bring attention to with the Credit Commons. We need to think in terms of forming groups of solidarity and have those groups form groups. The Credit Commons presents this sort of nested structure of groups of trust.

Basically it’s an architecture for scaling up trust and solidarity.

Yes, I believe we could do the whole global economy that way.”

Photo by sociotard

The post Matthew Slater on scaling trust with Credit Commons (Part 2) appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Biography

Matthew Slater is a software developer and has been involved with complementary currencies for at least 8 years, since the crash of 2008. He is the co-founder and main developer of Community Forge, a platform for complementary currencies that runs more than 150 LETS and Time Banks. Together with professor Jem Bendell, he has also designed and is a tutor of the free massive open online course (MOOC) Money and Society, directed at people who want to understand money from a social innovation perspective. Education about money and all that it implies is a critical part of what Slater does.

Interview – Part 1

“Matthew Slater is a community currency engineer. He proposes a technology that will scale trust and solidarity beyond the local level, for communities running their economy with their own currencies. ‘You could do the whole global economy that way’, Slater envisions in this new monetary architecture of interconnected complementary currencies. There is, however, no sense of gullible techno-fetishism in his ideas. He is very much aware that technology, and top-down reforms to the monetary system, are not enough to change power relations in society if they are not accompanied by a simultaneous change of consciousness among the people.

In this interview, we discuss his project the Credit Commons (part 2), in greater detail, as well as broad range of topics: his reflections on our contemporary monetary system, the role of complementary currencies for achieving more self-determination at a local level, the importance of governance for the Credit Commons and his view on a more collaborative economy based on solidarity, where relations intermediated by money would be not so prevalent.

Bruno Chies: Let’s start with a very general question: What is wrong, in your opinion, with today’s state-backed money?

Matthew Slater: It’s hard to separate what’s wrong with money from what’s wrong in everything else in society. The fundamental problem with the design of money is that it’s treated in all respects as a commodity which is owned by rich people and lent to everybody else, while money should be a medium of exchange first and foremost. In fact, rich people don’t own money, they’re actually lending it out of nothing. They do have their own assets, but what they’re lending is a legal fiction and it is a privilege that they have been given by the government, the crown, the sovereign, whatever, and can then charge interest on. So that’s a problem that goes deeper than the monetary system, to the system of privilege in society.

BC: What do you think about proposals of monetary reforms at the level of the state, like the Positive Money proposal in which money should be created debt-free and solely by the government, through a democratically accountable committee?

MS: I think it’s great if you regard the monetary system as a separately individual system. But as soon as you start bringing in the critique that a government is owned by corporations, this changes. You start seeing that either a reform like that cannot happen at all, in which case all you can do is raise awareness about how bad things are, or you can say that if it did happen somebody will get to this democratically accountable committee. That committee will never be neutral.

It is not simply a matter of redesigning money and the purpose it should serve…

I think that’s naïve. Money reflects our attitude towards the government, our attitude towards the rich and their attitude towards us. If you changed money, but not the attitude, the attitude would change it back. Money isn’t real, it’s only a reflection or projection of other power dynamics in society.

What do you think is the role of complementary and alternative currencies in the process of transitioning to a different social model?

I think they have several roles. One is to prototype. Another one is to understand more deeply how these systems work. Yet another is to take a little bit of sovereignty into our local groups. I think those are the main ones.

The idea of taking back sovereignty sounds like it is about taking back power and expanding democracy. It this what you mean by it?

I don’t know much about the history of the word sovereignty, but it usually starts with the king. The king is the sovereign and nobody tells him what to do. Sovereignty is not something we can all strive towards, but greater self-determination is something we could. This will always be at the cost of whoever is telling us what to do and how to be. I would like to see a society in which people exercise greater self-determination. A complementary currency could build trust and issue units among a group that wants to exercise a little bit of economic power. Typically, they will issue these units out of nothing, as if they had currency or as IOU credit obligations, because you don’t benefit very much from a currency if you have to buy it first…

Which is the difference between commodity-based currencies and credit-based currencies…

Exactly. You can exercise some sovereignty by creating a unit of account and everyone agreeing that to value it in exchange with each other. These units of account are worthless to anyone outside that group, so they can’t be taken away in tax. It also provides a way to build your own taxing system which leads to self-determination by allocating those resources. When groups come together to work in solidarity, there are loads of devices they can use, hacks and things like that, and a currency is one of them. It helps them to allocate resources and helps them to agree on what they value together.

Such as issue new tokens in order to fund collective projects?

It would be very similar to taxing and spending. If you issue new tokens, their value will go down, but the issuer takes the spending power. This is exactly what governments do. In theory, they spend, which is an act of issuance, and then tax back to prevent the inflation. It’s not the other way around, as the myth of handbag economics suggests. In this myth, the government is like a household, that has to earn before spending, and money is treated as a commodity. If you spend more than you take in, you have to borrow and pay interest. On one side of the economy, ordinary people would earn and then spend, and on the other side, the government would spend and then earn, which would make a good cycle. Now, along with others in government, George Osborne of the British Conservative Party is saying that the government should run a surplus, which means that the rest of the economy must run a deficit. That’s a problem. It looks good for the government because it can say it’s not spending too much, but at the same time it forces everybody else to spend too much.

And go into debt…

The government’s role is to issue money by spending more than it takes back in tax. The difference is the supply of money. That is the theory of fiat money, which we don’t have anymore. Currently, the supply of money is all that the banks lent, that hadn’t previously been saved. The banks have taken on the role of sovereign.

They are creating money out of nothing.

Yes, and that’s a very serious issue because it is impossible to argue that the banks are working with and for the people in their act of issuing money. The banks are profiting from the people by their very constitution. So Positive Money, in restoring the money-creating power to the state is at least trying to tell the story that the state is in partnership with the people, and that, rather than banks, the state has the legitimacy to be sovereign and to issue money. Of course, (neoclassical) economists do not acknowledge that what the banks are doing is issuing money, their theory is that banks only lend money that already exists. But this turned out to be false, so false, that the Bank of England admitted to it two years ago. This myth is taught in economics classes still and the implications of its wrongness are very profound.”

This is the end of Part 1 of this interview. Part 2 discusses the Credit Commons.

The interview was originally published at the Institute of Network Cultures (INC).

Photo by Trenten Kelley

The post Matthew Slater on scaling trust with Credit Commons appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Full title: “Exchange and Finance for the New Economy: Principles and Practice”

“In the face of the ongoing global economic and financial crisis and increasing centralization of power, it is becoming ever more urgent that communities take the initiative to implement mechanisms that assure the resilience and sustainability of their local economies. Of fundamental necessity are the provision of non-bank financing and locally controlled currencies and moneyless payment mechanisms that enable communities to control their own destiny and quality of life, and local enterprises to thrive.

Over the past three decades, a great many complementary currencies and exchange schemes have sprung up, gained some degree of acceptance and notoriety, then faded away.

This workshop will focus in on the reasons why none of them has become a significant factor in their community economies, and uncover the principles of design and implementation that need to be applied to make exchange alternatives more effective, robust, and scalable.

This course is designed especially for social entrepreneurs, enthusiastic agents of change, local government officials, and serious students who are ready to co-create a new sustainable and convivial economy from the bottom up. In this highly participatory workshop, we will use a combination of presentations, discussion groups (some on the beach), videos, and simulation games, to dive deeply into the process of exploring and developing innovative methods of finance, exchange, and value measurement.

It will be held from 24 June to 1 July, 2016 at the Kalikalos holistic summer school on the Pelion peninsula in Greece.

Moreover, there is the possibility of a couple substantial scholarships based on need. Last, Greek participants will get a 33% reduction.

Details and registration can be found here.”

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