Abstract
Although there is a growing social scientific literature on alternative currency movements, much of it tends to be evangelical in tone and of limited value to monetary theory. Peter North's book is rather different. One of its professed strengths is the way he seeks to link an analytical enquiry into the nature of money with a series of normative questions about capitalism, markets and community. North's treatment of alternative currency schemes is rigorous and balanced. His focus is explicitly political: he describes alternative currency movements as ‘liberatory forms of politics’ (p. xv), and explores the various rationales underlying these movements, as well as the grounds on which they can be viewed as successes or failures. His central question is whether these forms of money can lead to ‘new, more liberated noncapitalist practices based on money and markets created and regulated from below’, or alternatively, whether money is essentially ‘part of the structure that enforces capitalist domination’ (p. xxvii). North is well aware that alternative currencies are not new. Nineteenth-century projects such as those pursued by Owen and Proudhon (chapter 3), as well as early twentieth-century schemes such as Social Credit (chapter 4), largely ended in tears, justifying Marx's critique of such piecemeal attempts to develop alternatives to capitalism as hopelessly utopian. But North's question is whether anything has changed that might provide grounds for challenging Marx's view. His conclusion is cautious: alternative currencies are ‘not for everyone’ and are unlikely to exist on a large scale, but do offer one of a diverse range of alternatives to capitalism – a ‘low-impact, ecological lifestyle’ (p. 182). As for what might have changed, North's view appears to hinge on the resources now available to those seeking to create their own money (see p. 179).
The most valuable contribution of the book consists of detailed analyses of four very different alternative currency schemes: Manchester LETS (chapter 5), the largely unsuccessful attempt to develop green money during the negotiated transition to post-communism in Hungary (chapter 6), the green dollar movement in New Zealand which spans over two decades (chapter 7), and the so-called barter networks that exploded in Argentina when in the grip of financial meltdown (chapter 8). North's survey of these schemes draws on interviews he conducted himself with participants in and founders of these schemes. Each case is properly contextualised, and North takes care not to force unwarranted generalisations from his analysis of schemes which are diverse even within themselves. Nevertheless, a number of themes stand out. A significant part of the appeal of alternative currencies to their users seems to have been in offering an economic haven at times of crisis or disruption: Manchester LETS grew out of the economic recession of the 1980s, the various Hungarian schemes were promoted as a means of coping with the stresses and strains of regime change, the New Zealand schemes were partly a response to the consequences of rampant neoliberalism (‘Rogernomics’ and ‘Ruthenasia’), and the Argentine schemes – by some distance the largest in scale – flourished in the face of acute monetary crisis. But as North convincingly shows, no alternative scheme will survive for negative reasons alone. Participants must have positive grounds, too, for using alternative currencies if they are to succeed even in the short term: material benefits, a stronger sense of community and solidarity, ecological benefits, and so on. The attractions of these currencies appear to have varied quite widely among North's interviewees, and to his credit he allows such variation to emerge.
North's analysis is at its best when conveying the different rhythms of alternative currencies when compared to ‘mainstream’ money, as well as the tensions between them. Alternative currencies appear to operate at a slower pace, and are likely to be corrupted if they intermingle too freely with state-issued currencies. Each appears to operate within its own sphere of value and on a specific register of time. Hence many of the assumptions we make when using money – about credit and debt, reciprocity and wealth, for example – need to be revised when using alternative currencies, and such schemes are more likely to survive and even thrive when mental and behavioural adjustments have been made. For the most part, North's interviewees appear to regard alternative currency schemes as no more than a partial alternative to ‘normal’ money and economic activity, and sometimes as barely even that. Most of the schemes relied on a small core of activists to keep them going, and failure was often a direct consequence of scale. Much larger in size, the Argentinian schemes are perhaps the most fascinating: competing ideologies, mismanagement, corruption, and in the end an inflationary spiral to rival that of the peso itself. Nonetheless, North is in no doubt that the Argentinian crisis may have had even more serious social and political consequences had it not been for the alternative currency schemes: a paradoxical outcome, as far as some of their founders were concerned (see p. 169).
Out of all this, North's message is reasonably clear. Alternative currencies are viable under certain circumstances: not as wholesale utopian alternatives to capitalism as some would like to imagine, but rather as a piecemeal and often short-term means of opting out of certain aspects of mainstream economic life – either of necessity during hard times, or out of positive choice where people prefer to do at least some of their buying and selling with local people they know and whose values their broadly share. According to North, this is justification enough for regarding money along Foucauldian lines, as a ‘structuring discourse, a system of domination that operates through its own logic’ (p. 27). According to this reasoning, ‘mainstream’ money acts as a disciplinary force, while alternative currencies serve as myriad points of resistance to it. This is an intriguing approach to take, but North leaves it underdeveloped, barely returning to it during the empirical chapters and referring to it only fleetingly in his conclusion. I have my doubts about it, because one all too easily lapses into a simplistic dichotomy between ‘uniform capitalist money’ versus ‘the rest’. If, as I suspect, this was not North's intention, it is a point that he might want to clarify in future.
This quibble reflects what I would suggest is the main weakness of the book. North spends the first two chapters providing surveys of extant monetary theory, mainly in economics and sociology. Although as he rightly says, these theories yield different views about both the desirability and feasibility of alternative currencies, North's treatment of them tends to fall back into well-worn grooves which suggest a lack of genuine engagement with the theoretical literature discussed. Throughout the book, for example, Simmel's analysis is caricatured – much as Zelizer has done – as a thesis about the homogenising function of money in modern society: the hackneyed ‘money as acid’ thesis. It is regrettable that a text that is as complex and multi-faceted as that of Simmel continues to be misrepresented in this way, above all when so much of what he has to say about our ambivalent relationship with money could have been used to enrich the empirical material with which North's book deals. This, though, should not detract from the fact that Money and Liberation is a fascinating and rewarding read.