To understand them and what they’re fighting for, it’s important to understand the system they’re challenging.

Our money system is underpinned by national central banks and treasuries that issue foundational “base” money. This includes the physical cash in our wallets and also reserves, the special forms of digital money that commercial banks hold in their central bank accounts, which are inaccessible to us.

These commercial banks then boost the money supply by issuing a second layer of money on top of the central bank money layer, through a process called credit creation of money (sometimes called “fractional reserve banking”) to create commercial bank money, which we see as bank deposits in our bank accounts.

The details are subtle and complex ― especially at the international level ― but the interaction of these players issuing money and taking it out of circulation makes the money supply expand and contract as if it were breathing. Monetary reform groups target different elements of this. Here are five of them.

1. Government Money Warriors

Stephanie Kelton, professor of public policy and economics at Stony Brook University, is one of the leading lights of modern monetary theory.

We say that the sun rises, but in reality the sun stays fixed and the illusion of sunrise is created by the Earth turning. Modern monetary theory argues that a similar delusion occurs in our thinking about government money ― we often claim that a federal government “raises money” through taxation and then spends it, but actually it is government institutions that originally issue money by spending it into existence and then withdrawing it from circulation by demanding it back in taxation. If the government issues money, then why would it have to raise money by asking for it back?

The idea that a federal government can run out of money like an ordinary household or business is an illusion, argue advocates of modern monetary theory. A government can only run out of money if it either does not issue its own sovereign currency (like the European nations, which have opted for the euro) or if an artificial political limit has been placed on how much money it can issue. In the latter situation, governments must first recall money via tax (and other means) before reissuing it elsewhere.

This is why modern monetary theory advocates are incredulous about conservatives who want to block spending on education and health care by saying we don’t have the money to pay for it. “Governments with monopoly control over their currency can always pay for their policy priorities,” says Pavlina Tcherneva, an economics professor at the Levy Economics Institute at New York’s Bard College.

Under modern monetary theory, if there are unemployed people who want to work and material resources for them to work with, a federal government can issue new money without causing inflation because the increase in money supply will be met with an increase in production. “The goal is to use the public purse to serve the broad public interest without accelerating inflation,” said Stephanie Kelton, professor of public policy and economics at Stony Brook University and former senior adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).

2. Bank Money Reformers

Bank money reformers want to target the powers of commercial banks to create money.

Other reformers target the commercial bank money system. They argue it creates economic instability, over-indebtedness and concentration of power in the hands of banks ― the very banks that led us into the 2008 financial crisis.

Bank money reform groups include the American Monetary Institute, Positive Money, and the International Movement for Monetary Reform.

Commercial banks create new money when they issue loans. The moderate wing of the bank reform movement argues that, because the government grants them this privilege, banks should be subject to greater democratic scrutiny over their lending. The hard-line wing believes bank creation of money should be banned altogether.

The movement to curtail bank money is politically more diverse than modern monetary theory; it’s been supported by certain libertarians, including the late economist Murray Rothbard, neoclassical economists such as Irving Fisher, as well as left-wing proponents, such as the U.K.’s Green Party, which believes bank money-creation leads to environmental crises and corporate domination.

Their prescriptions are not uniform: Positive Money, a research and campaigning organization in Britain, calls for the power to create money to be granted exclusively to a democratic, accountable and transparent public body, creating a “sovereign money” system in which we might all have our own accounts at the central bank. This is distinguished from full-reserve banking, which would require your bank to have the reserves to fully back your account.

3. Cryptocurrency Crusaders

The Bitcoin logo on display at the Consensus 2018 blockchain technology conference in New York City on May 16.

Cryptocurrency crusaders not only reject both national and bank money systems, but also reject the entire concept of credit money (money that is “created from nothing” through law or social agreement), calling for it to be replaced with “commodity money” (money that is “created from something” through production). They have inherited the baton from “goldbugs,” who called for gold to be money.

The movement, which began with Bitcoin, argues that the best money system is one that’s outside of human politics. This comes from a philosophical tradition that says systems should be governed by the boundaries of God, physics or math, rather than laws set by politicians. With gold, for example, these natural boundaries would be geology: how much gold can be found and extracted. In Bitcoin’s case, the boundary comes from the fact that the digital system sets a hard limit on how much digital money can be issued and then forces participants to “mine” it as if it were a commodity.

Because Bitcoin hard-liners believe true money is a limited-supply good that must be extracted through production, they claim that fiat money ― created by banks or countries ― is artificial or deceitful money under the control of corrupt powers. There’s a puritanical edge to these cryptocurrency crusaders, who mistrust human institutions and trust in an abstract ‘godlike’ order of mathematics and markets.

While theories like MMT hinge on collective human political institutions, crypto crusaders see politics as foolish. This distrustful attitude shows: The movement sometimes seems as much at war with itself as with the fiat money system, with bitter in-fights between supporters of different crypto-tokens.

They are, however, the richest of all monetary reformers, with many crypto users having ironically become millionaires in the fiat currency they claim to dislike so much.

4. The Localists

A note worth 10 Brixton pounds, an alternative currency in London, is illustrated with an image of David Bowie.

There’s a whole history of alternative non-government money prior to cryptocurrency. These original alternative currency variants include mutual credit systems, timebanks (where time is used to measure how many credits you earn), local community currencies, such as the U.K.-based Brixton pound, and systems like the Swiss Wir, a currency used between businesses.

The tradition is also skeptical of large-scale government-bank money systems, but rather than calling for them to be replaced by a robotic algorithm, they believe small-scale communities should take control to issue money locally.

Unlike cryptocurrency advocates, they have no problem with money being “created out of nothing.” Rather they have a problem with who gets to do that and at what scale. They believe large-scale systems alienate people and dissolve close-knit communities.

A mutual credit system like Sardex in Sardinia, for example, does not reject the idea of money expanding and contracting, but it brings together an island community to decide on what terms that occurs.

While the other movements are outspoken, local complementary currency enthusiasts are often humble and below-the-radar, working for low pay to build resilient community structures.

“Local currencies change how money is issued,” says Duncan McCann of the New Economics Foundation, “how it circulates and what it can be spent on in order to re-localize economies, encourage environmental behaviour, and promote small businesses.”

The crypto-credit alliance looks to merge older, alternative currency systems with blockchain technology.

5. The Crypto-Credit Alliance: Mutual credit meets blockchain technology

This is the least-known or developed of the movements, but is perhaps the most exciting. Nascent initiatives, such as Trustlines, Holochain, Sikoba, Waba and Defterhane, seek to hybridize older alternative currency systems like mutual credit with the blockchain architectures that underpin cryptocurrencies. They share common ground with both modern monetary theorists, who also see commodity money as regressive, and cryptocurrency advocates, who wish to bypass the government.

Cryptocurrency unleashed a lot of creativity, but much has been wasted on toxic speculation. On the other hand, localist mutual credit movements have powerful ideas but often struggle to get heard or to spread. Crypto-credit innovators are exploring the creative possibilities of merging these two to solve flaws in both.

Originally published in the Huffington Post

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Excerpted from his blog, Stan Jourdan talks about his new role working with Positive Money and how it ties in with his previous work on Basic Income.

After serving for the past 4 years as coordinator for the basic income movement in France and at European level, I will now be focusing on monetary reforms and a campaign for making ECB’s quantitative easing program serve the real economy.

For the past 4 years, I have been dedicating my life into making a movement for basic income take shape in Europe and France. During this period, we achieve to collect 300,000 supports for the European Citizens Initiative, and we now have setup an official organisation based in Brussels (AISBL). By doing that we have created a new wave of attention towards basic income, and consequently many new groups have formed across Europe, in countries like Portugal, Spain, Greece, and others.

In France, the movement is now well structured. After only two years of existence, it has now more than 500 members, among which many enthusiastic young activists leading fascinating projects have recently joined. Over the past year, we have achieved key milestones such as the launch of a print newspaper L’Inconditionnel, the organisation of a conference in the French Senate and a recent poll survey showing 60% of French backing the idea.

Overall, it seems the movement for basic income is up on its rails. So how to accelerate the shift?

As the eurozone crisis just got a lot more worse since the last bailout deals for Greece, I have been looking for new ways I can contribute to a necessary shift of mentality in Europe, and to cope with the lack of imagination from the european leaders.

The latest developments in Greece have shown: Europe is leashed by the goodwill of the European Central Bank to help its member states or not when a financial crisis hits.

Lately, the ECB has started a quantitative easing (QE) program which will do nothing to help the economy recover, but will increase inequalities in Europe, to the benefit of the financial system – the one which failed the economy in the first place.

The current QE program is unfair and inefficient. It must be stopped. Or serve People.

A growing number of economists have recently expressed their support for alternatives forms of QE by which the ECB would directly finance, free of debt, public investments in the Eurozone or even distribute cash directly to citizens, basic income style.

There are many ways the ECB could technically operate such plan. We need to debate those alternative proposals and identify which ones are quickly legally doable and provide the more economic and social benefits to people while contributing to solve the euro crisis. In any case, such bold plan could constitute a gigantic precedent for unconditional cash transfers at a wide scale, and pave the way for further innovative kind of monetary policies.

Turning the scandal into opportunity

The QE program is one of the most scandalous ways the EU have been trying to solve the crisis in Europe. However, this can be turned into an opportunity, if only civil society and alternative political forces ally to push such plan as a strong demand of society to the EU policymakers, as part of a new progressive agenda for the EU.

For the past 5 years, an organisation called Positive Money in the UK has been campaigning for similar ideas by calling for a sovereign monetary system in the UK and inspired many similar groups who have launched abroad since then.

Now Positive Money wants to dedicate more efforts into making this an international cause. Obviously the eurozone is the first next stop.

This is why over the summer I have been recruited by Positive Money UK to serve as International Coordinator, working from London. My main mission (starting pretty much from now on) will consist in supervising the International Movement for Monetary Reform and launching a European campaign on ‘quantitative easing for the people’ which, on the medium term, shall be run as an independent campaign.

This campaign will aim at explaining to european citizens why the current QE is unfair, inefficient and foster the debate on different proposals for Quantitative Easing for People. We also aim at engaging with policymakers to explore how QEP could be technically implemented. Many more details will be announced in the next month (stay tuned here).

In order to completely focus on my new mission I will soon resign from UBI-Europe‘s board and withdrawn myself from most of my duties at the French Movement for Basic Income. Of course I remain fully supportive of those organisations and to the cause of basic income in general.

In fact both basic income and monetary reforms movements do contribute to the same struggle: abolishing the artificial scarcity of money in the age of abundance.

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