Dear Monetary Apologists
Listening to our ancestors and nurturing communal wealth
Imagine a Healthy Human Society where individuals can pull fairly on commitments of resources of the population. Let's be just a little bit romantic about the state of civilization before we needed to ‘convince’ people with interventions to change their behavior with religion, humanitarian or monetary incentives.
Let’s suspend our disbelief for a moment and imagine - what if people – when in a nurturing environment DO work well with each other and resist inequality and imbalances and naturally build healthy assets (social, physical, political, human/spiritual, financial, natural).
What if systems like rotational labor and mutual service provision are simply our natural state as humans? I often wonder why all the villages and clans I have seen, speak of, or even practice a form of commitment pooling. How could that have been originally developed? How did it start? We may never know – as these traditions appear to be pre-lingual due to their ubiquity. But the question of how did and still do - these practices erode - Is certainly answerable within living history.
Let’s begin with the introduction of sugar. Those living near the coast found that refined sugar, salt, and other spices brought by traders – were really tasty. A taste and eventually an addiction formed. Even today, Kenya, which is a net importer of foodstuff, spends Sh23.92 billion to bring the sugar home. The average household spends as much as 20% of their income on sugar alone, and it is not uncommon to see 4 spoons of sugar in each cup of chai - three times a day per adult and child! Diabetes and obesity are not uncommon even in remote areas – because of this diet.
And how would people get sugar from the traders?
Slaves: They would round up people they didn’t like and sell them.
Money: They were taught that they could always buy sugar with coins and colonial script.
The introduction of spices – especially sugar and its addiction eroded the communities' ability to maintain health and balance. Inequality of this new form spices, and money imbalanced social infrastructures and health. Resistance to this invasion was sadly futile at that time and, adding insult to injury, the British colonists pressed deeply into the social wound as a much more infections parasite.
When the British imposed the Hut Tax here in Kenya – they employed a network of their local servants (chiefs and those easily controlled with money) to round up all the men in each village and collect colonial scrip (money). If you didn’t have money – you would be beaten and forced into a labor camp (aka plantations developed by missionaries). The only way you might get some of the ‘precious’ money was to work at a labor camp. So in either case, you must work for the colonists – either willingly for money – or as punishment for not having it (aka wage slavery) which continues around the world today in many forms.
There are no if-or-buts about it. The introduction of money across the world was violent. Nowadays, ironically as a humanitarian intervention - we often inject $ money (cash transfer) into societies that were raped by using money as a control device. Disasters and continuous crises are used to excuse our sloppy supposed empowerment of people using the same tool (money) used to enslave their ancestors.
Economists and even activists will defend monetary theory and money itself as something that is just improperly implemented – and if you did it right then it would all be great (UBI, Mutual Credit, Community Currency etc.). I was once such a monetary apologists and am slowly learning there is something outside the 'monetary’ frame of mind.
Of course, there is a large crowd of no-money advocates; Who see money of all sorts as evil and unnecessary. What if instead of being pro or anti-money, we break free of the monetary frame altogether and look back again to pre-monetary, indigenous rotational labor and how value signaling was contained for community health.
The community members, part of these associations would signal informally and formally their willingness to take part in the commons. People and families and even whole groups would signal their intentions as commitments to resources. The power of these systems is that a single person, family, or group can pull fairly on the collective, curated, commitments of the community around them in exchange for their own commitments.
Let’s let go for a moment of the idea of money and currency (aka colonial scrip) and just focus on forms of value signaling – let's imagine each autonomous and sovereign individual, family, groups able to express their intention in the form of a commitment toward their resources. With all that shared information about our available assets, we can form coalitions and chart a path toward our visions of a healthy community. We can build farms that survive and regenerate soil long term, we can help our neighbors build beautiful homes – if we manage our resources well, fairly, in cooperation.
What is the container that allowed our ancestors to fairly coordinate their resources? What kind of social agreements and practices were there? At Grassroots Economics we’ve been studying Commitment Pooling: The curation and exchange of formalized commitments. Breaking this down into a, technology-independent, protocol there are a few simple steps:
For people and groups to express their intentions in formalized commitments (like Community Asset Vouchers). Explain what you have to offer, and how much you value it. (A diversity of grassroots value signals)
For people and groups to curate those commitments into pools that enable exchange and flow and balance. (Polycentric networks of Commitment Pools)
When this practice was confined to the ledger of neighbor’s memories there wasn’t enough resilience to fight the virus of colonialism. How could we unlock the power of community action to be able to withstand domination and addiction? How can we connect beyond one group of neighbors and into connected ledgers distributed across the planet and use them to broadcast our value signals and develop pools that bring them into utility and balance?
Blockchains are f*#king amazing. Celo blockchain that Grassroots Economics is a validation service provider of, is a small network of servers that enables people to broadcast their commitments and develop contractual agreements at the cost of cents on a dollar. It is absolutely astounding that that right now at almost no cost you can develop such agreements on a public ledger (see https://sarafu.network). Not only that, but tens of thousands of businesses and community groups do this daily across Kenya using nothing but simple feature phones. (Yes other decentralized ledger technology may replace blockchain someday - but wow it really does something amazing and should be appreciated).
Using a shared ledger like Celo - two neighboring villages CAN have an internal agreement AND extend that agreement to all the villages around them – combining the power of the their traditional practices to build assets together. I CAN’T EVENT BELIEVE THIS IS POSSIBLE!
How could the ancestors have combined and coordinated their efforts across the coast of Kenya, to be resilient and drive off addiction, slavery, and colonization? They would have to have at least been able to know and communicate their commitments on a larger scale. Without any digital technology to communicate or formalize commitments regionally, they were vulnerable to being isolated and picked off one by one.
National Currencies like the USD and the Pound Sterling and the Euro – are simply value signals that have spread via domination to cover the entire world. Instead of meeting those gross signals with currencies and monies of our own, the key is in curating gardens of our commitments.
Let us not be against or for ‘money’ but understand the signals being propogated.
Our ancestors knew the commitment pooling protocol but didn’t have the means to spread it far enough to withstand insidious and aggressive parasites – without commitment pooling our value signals simply are shouting in an overly crowded room of howling ghosts. Lets build gardens with the resources we have and stop propagating addiction to any singular value signal or any particular money of any kind.
🫡