[PDF]Money and its Alternatives & illustrations

MONEY AND ITS ALTERNATIVES

How money controls the world and the alternatives to change it

By Henk van Arkel and Guus Peterse

Translated by Gerard van der Rijst and Edited by Stephen DeMeulenaere

Original title: VOOR HETZELFDE GELD, Hoe geld de wereld stuurt en welke altematieven erzijn.
©1998 Stichting Aktie Strohalm, Utrecht, the Netherlands

A publication of Strohalm/Publishing Company Jan van Arkel

No part of this book may be reproduced without preceding permission of the publisher.

ISBN 90 70 334 73 9

Keywords: environment, economy and development, money and alternatives, local economy.

Cover design: Annelies Vlasblom

General design: Annelies Vlasblom

Corrector (Dutch): Relinde Baeten

Translator (English): Gerard van der Rijst, © 14 April, 2003 Strohalm Foundation

Editor (English): Stephen DeMeulenaere

Printer: Haasbeek, Alphen aan de Rijn

Publication of Strohalm/Publishing Company Jan van Arkel

Translation: Gerard van der Rijst

Strohalm, Oude Gracht 42, 3511 AR Utrecht, the Netherlands, tel. +31(0)30-2314314

fax +31 (0)30-2343986 e-mail: info@strohalm.nl

Publishing Company Jan van Arkel, Alexander Numankade 17, 3572 KP Utrecht, tel. +31(0)30-
2731840



CONTENTS



Introduction



PART I: THE WORLD VIEWED THROUGH MONEY SPECTACLES

By placing the problems we see around us in the framework of money and interest
we hope to come to new insights and solutions.



Chapter I:
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7



A new view on old problems

The money system and growth

Poverty and the money system

Co-operative saving: saving without interest

About money and interest

Money, interest and alternatives in history

Free money



PART II: THE ECONOMY VIEWED THROUGH MONEY SPECTACLES

In which we go deeper into the economic theory and try to explain further the
signalized phenomena, so that we will get a better sight on possible solutions.



Chapter 8:
Chapter 9:
Chapter 10
Chapter 1 1
Chapter 12



The Circulation of Money

Money Leakage: a further elaboration

The growth or crisis dilemma

The balloon economy

Employment, government and social benefits



PART III: FROM THEORY TO PRACTICE

In which, by means of various concrete examples, we show that already much can
be done and much is happening and so that there is every reason to put our
shoulders to the wheel.



Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20



LETS: exchanging in one's own neighborhood

LETS and change

The Noppes experiment

The Community-Supported Agriculture (CSA) associations

How local authorities can strengthen the local economy

A competitive banking method without interest

Further plans for the future

Prologue - towards an economy of enough



APPENDICES



Appendix 1
Appendix 2
Appendix 3



What else is possible?
Who is Strohalm?
Literature



This book consists of three parts

These three parts can also be read separately from each other.

Part I shows a number of problems, shows which role money and interest play in
this and shows already a glimpse of how we might bring about improvements.

Part II gives a theoretical frame: it gives an analysis of how the problems arise and
in doing so an impulse of how they can be solved.

Part III shows various ideas, initiatives and possibilities that exist in this field and
that make concrete the perspective that we see gradually getting shape.

In this book you will regularly find frames with remarks, summaries and illustrations that
touch on the main points of the accompanying pages



MONEY AND ITS ALTERNATIVES

Introduction

We can think of many reasons why we would like to change the world. You just
have to look at the condition of nature and the environment, the gap between the
rich and the poor, to the hunger in the world, to the growing loneliness of many
people or to the cultural unification and you would, in fact, not wait a day longer. The
Western economic system has pervaded every corner of the world. Everywhere it
subjects the cultural identity of people and region to the global 'stuffing, working and
pinching match that we call economic order'. These are the words of Piet de Visser,
former Member of Parliament for the PvdA (the Dutch Labor Party). It is an economy
that has been determining our lives gradually and completely and that has subjected
man. This is what we would like to change.

But Strohalm does not want in the first place to publish a book on why we would like
to change the world, but on how we could. So we hope that this book offers a
perspective, arouses enthusiasm, and offers a prospect on alternatives, maybe on
real change. For this is what we have in mind with this book, this is why we have
written it: to show that changes are possible, and to show which initiatives are taken
worldwide that can help to bring about change. We are of course not the only ones
working on fundamental change in order to build a new world. A lot is taking place
already.

Let us not think at all that it is not possible, that we cannot change the world. Isn't
everything changing already? What is still the same as, for instance, forty years
ago? Social relations have changed, culture has changed and technology has
changed.

Fashion has changed at least forty times and even the centers of power have
moved. In the mean time we have been on the moon, information flies around the



world with the speed of light, almost all of us are driving a car and we don't need to
travel more than one day to reach the other side of the world. Just to mention
something. Our horizon has broadened enormously in many aspects. Much of what
was then impossible and unthinkable, is ordinary now, common and within reach for
everyone.

That provides us with a splendid starting-point. For is it not much easier to change
the direction of something that is moving than to move something that stands still?

Compare it with a river that is flowing from a mountain. We had better not try to stop
the water, but by making small changes in the upper course we can make the river
flowing down somewhere else. This way we are also able to change the switches in
an early stage, to put society in an other track. We should not try to stop
developments, we should not row against the flow, but we should give space to new
ways along which the water can run down.

How can we change the switches?

To change the world, you change the minds of people. The mentality and actions of
people are the beginning of all problems and of all solutions. So let us first change
the conditions in which we become what we are, in which we come to our actions.
Let us change the factors that control our actions. For we are to a high extent a
product of the environment from which we originate, and by changing that
environment we can also change society.

How can we change the environment?

A society is just like a landscape and a country. The situation in the Netherlands is
the consequence of innumerable activities, investments, decisions, deliberations,
policy considerations and so on. But the geographical situation, relief, condition of
the soil and the climate have heavily influenced each of those decisions, policy
consideration etc. We can bring about nothing that is not allowed by these
circumstances. Winter sports are hardly developed in the Netherlands and we
import pineapples and bananas from far regions, but we did develop a flourishing
port business and accompanying industries in the delta of some large European
rivers, for they were there already. These seem absolute, unchangeable basis
conditions, but they are not always fixed and certainly not for always. This way we
have constructed dykes to bridle the sea and the rivers. This has enabled us to
cultivate large plots of land that were once part of the sea bed before and to use
them for food production. This way the dykes themselves have become a part of the
conditions. They have become a strong steering element in the scenery.

Society is exactly like this. A society is a complicated play of forces of innumerable
mechanisms, patterns, causes and consequences. Wishes, desires, possibilities
and impossibilities of people of all kinds and those of businesses, institutes and
authorities, all play a role in this. Add to this all possible interactions,
incomprehensible relations, feedback and other mechanisms and then the image of
a rudderless society arises. A society in which almost none of the measures that an



authority takes to turn the tide, causes the expected effect and in which we cannot
bring about any focused change either.

But is that the right image? Are patterns like individualization and economic
globalization coincidental? Or do underlying prior conditions bring them about?

Society may be a complicated play of forces, a number of prior conditions indicate
the borders within which it can develop itself, prior conditions that stimulate certain
developments and resist other ones. These prior conditions are often so much
interwoven with the developments that we can easily overlook them and forget to
discuss them. But to a large extent they determine which developments are possible
and which are not. Suppose that we could change one of these prior conditions.
That could have enormous consequences. New developments come into view.
Before we built dykes, we had accepted that the sea shaped the scenery. After this
we didn't any longer. Today we can't even imagine what the Netherlands would look
like if there had never been any dykes. Exactly like this we can create in this society
prior conditions that make possible those developments that are now regarded as
Utopian and impracticable.

If we really wish to change society, we must change the prior conditions. And for
that reason we must trace those prior conditions for which we have a better
alternative. If we succeed in introducing new prior conditions, we create space for
an other kind of development and new changes will arise.

Which prior conditions can we get busy changing?

Some are imposed on us by natural causes. We have no influence whatsoever on
physical and biological limitations as the quantity of land, the quality of the soil,
climatological factors and the present raw materials. Other prior conditions we
ourselves have introduced them, like the state of technology and the many
agreements and laws that are controlling economic actions. They strongly determine
economic and social developments, but our means are just too few to influence
them. A prior condition that does offer opportunities is the present-day tax system.
We can very well opt for an other, more human and environment-friendly tax. For
that reason is that other tax system one of Strohalm main points. Yet this is not what
this book is about.

'Money and its alternatives' takes another point of view: the money system. That
seems an impassable road that we are normally encouraged to avoid as it is "too
complicated". At Strohalm we had also looked upon this matter this way, until one
day we heard a story. In Lignieres-en-Berry, a village in France, a number of people
had issued their own money. It was a totally different kind of money, with totally
different social consequences and it appeared to push the existing money out of the
market! What two people in France can do, we can do too! And with this we have a
very essential means of change in our hands. For everyone will agree that money is
one of the most important formative elements in today's world. Money has enabled
man to start a more complex economy and it has given an enormous stimulus to
social developments. Money, however, has become a lot more than only a medium



to facilitate trade. The money system forms a driving force behind innumerable
developments in the economy and society, both local and worldwide.

And what does the example of Lignieres-en-Berry show us? There is an alternative
for the present money system! For what appeared: after a relatively short time a
large part of the local trade occurred in the new money and it had spread itself
widely. It appears to be possible to introduce an alternative for the present
capitalistic money that is strong enough to push back that kind of money. Is it
subsequently not possible to fight the consequences of that capitalistic money and
to take another road as well?

Lignieres-en-Berry is not a case on its own. Everywhere in the world initiatives are
taken to deal differently with money in local economies. In a few years in the
Netherlands and Belgium have arisen tens of little local money systems in which
thousands of people experience that it is very well possible to arrive at an effective,
mutual exchange without the actual money.

Of course, money is not at all the cause of all evil, but it offers an excellent
opportunity to bring about change. For this reason the role of money is central in this
book, and in particular the opportunities for the changes that are offered by money.
We shall let you get acquainted with what knowledge and experience there is and
what is already taking place. We shall let you experience the preparation of
experiments that could lead to a breakthrough. And we shall let you experience the
discovery that examples of how it can be done differently are arising all over the
world. We are making progress step by step, that bit for bit we are building on an
economy that has a future, an economy that offers a perspective to each individual
in the North and in the South, now and in the future, an economy that has to offer
more than the present one to everyone, to enterprising people and to companies as
well. And an economy that has not the disrupting effect on our lives and our
environment that is characteristic of the current economic system.

THE WORLD VIEWED THROUGH MONEY SPECTACLES

"Money makes the world go round" the well-known saying says. If money is such a
determining factor then, why don't we look how we can force changes with that
money?

If we want to organize the world in a different way, does money not offer us the
possibility to do so?

We are fully aware that this point of view is unilateral. Mentality, history, technical
developments, they all have a great influence. But the nice thing about this point of
view is that it offers us starting-points to change matters. And that is what we want.
We want to make structural steps forward.

For this reason we view in the first part of this book, as it were, through money
spectacles to the world and thus we discover the influence of the money system on
well-known phenomena such as haste, poverty and pollution. For many it is perhaps
a new view and it could well provide an entirely new perspective. It is just like when



you see a dilapidated, little house that looked picturesque at the fringe of a wood all
at sudden in the middle of a neglected city quarter. Or vice versa.



Chapter 1

A new view on old problems

Around 2500 BC the Sumerian civilization of Mesopotamia (approximately within the
country of Iraq today) was hit by enormous floods. Thousands of people died and
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