References and Links

On global warming, see, http://www.carbonequity.info/

Pierre Vilar gives a fascinating account of the inter-relationship between gold and money, i.e. precious metal developments in the context of the rise of capitalist money, in A History of Gold and Money 1450–1920 (1976, NLB, London).

A critique of the measure/indicator approach to sustainability appears in Alan Fricker, ‘Measuring up to sustainability’, Ch. 18 in A Reader in Ecology, Culture and Sustainable Living edited by Nora Haenn and Richard Wilk (2006, New York University Press, New York).

Inequity in use of the world’s resources is a special concern of the New Internationalist magazine, http://newint.org/

We use the contested term ‘the left’ loosely, to refer to progressive social activists, a heterogeneous conglomeration of people with values emphasising social fairness and broad democratic participation in organising society.

For information on the LETSystem (Labour/Local Exchange Trading System), see Michael Linton’s and Angus Soutar’s design manual at, http://www.gmlets.u-net.com/ and the UK LETS site, http://www.letslinkuk.net

A summary Marxian approach to social analysis, is offered by Fredy Perlman in ‘The reproduction of daily life’, Chapter 4 of a collection edited by Jesse Schwartz, The Subtle Anatomy of Capitalism (1977, Goodyear, Santa Monica: 51–65). Another good basic introduction is ‘Our obsolete market mentality’ by Karl Polanyi, reprinted in Economic Sociology edited by R Swedberg (1996, Edward Elgar, Cheltenham: 146–54). Marx’s Capital by Ben Fine and Alfredo Saad-Filho (2004, 4^th edition, Pluto Press, London/Sterling, Virginia) is a succinct and classic pocketbook that is especially useful for introducing economic aspects such as Marx’s labour theory of value.

Karl Marx’s works, including the best introductory work, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (also known as the Paris Manuscripts), his three volumes of Capital and the Grundrisse, have been translated into English and published widely. Versions published by Penguin, Harmondsworth, the Collected Works series from Lawrence & Wishart, London, are generally available along with second hand copies initially printed by Foreign Languages Publishing, Moscow.

Suzanne de Brunhoff offers a contemporary Marxian analysis of money, government and finance in ‘State management of money’, Chapter 2 of The State, Capital and Economic Policy (1978, Pluto Press, London: 37–60). The French Greens Party politician Alain Lipietz presents a creative Marxian reinterpretation of monetary developments in The Enchanted World: Inflation, Credit and the World Crisis (1983, Verso, London). Riccardo Bellofiore’s work, such as ‘Marx After Schumpeter’ (1985, Capital and Class 24: 60–74), unconsciously lends itself to the anthropological interpretation presented in Money. The final chapter of Anitra Nelson’s Marx’s Concept of Money: the God of Commodities (1999, Routledge, London) reviews other significant twentieth century works on Marx and money. The Limits to Capital by David Harvey (1982, Oxford, Blackwell) incorporates contemporary spatial insights.

Non-market Socialism in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, is a significant work edited by M Rubel and J Crump (1987, Macmillan Press, London). Also Charles Bettleheim has theorised over money and socialism in ‘Planification et rapports de production’, in La Transition Vers L’Économie Socialiste (1968, Maspero, Paris). Anitra Nelson’s ‘The poverty of money: Marxian insights for ecological economists’ (2001, Ecological Economics, 36: 499–511) puts a brief case for a transition to communism without money, based on the Russian and Cuban cases, and Marx’s logic associated with alienation, commodity fetishism, price and money.

Works by economic anthropologists on non-monetary exchange include the classic by the French scholar Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Function of Exchange in Archaic Societies (1925, reprinted in 1974 by Routledge & Kegan Paul, London). C Gregory provides a useful introduction in Gifts and Commodities (1982, Academic Press, London) and shows more holistic, ethnographic, ways of studying economies than in mainstream economics in Observing the Economy, co-written with J Altman (1989, Routledge, London/New York).

Bill Mollison and David Holmgren co-originated the now international movement known as permaculture in the mid-1970s as presented in Permaculture One: A Perennial Agricultural System for Human Settlements (1978, Corgi, Ealing/Melbourne). The best recent reference is Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability (2002, Holmgren Design Services, Hepburn). See too the Holmgren Design Services site, http://www.holmgren.com.au, which includes links to international permaculture organisations.

‘What if I’m wrong’, Chapter 6 of Dr Paul R. Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb (1971, Ballantine/Friends of the Earth/Pan, London), is a neat indication of rebuffs one might make to anyone who thinks things are not so serious as to dispense with money, even though these arguments were initially created as responses to population control sceptics. The book itself is a classic; many of its points remain central in confronting environmental crises today. In a cruel and insecure world families remain idealised and children blessed, whereas a concerted, collective compact addressing our environmental situation would encourage voluntary population, short of wiping out our species of course. By the end of the twentieth century the population of our planet had multiplied four times from 1.5 billion to 6.2 billion and in the second half of the century our economic activities multiplied 15 times over, (see Cities People Planet: Liveable Cities for a Sustainable World by Herbert Girardet 2004, Wiley-Academy, Chichester: 86, 195).

Practical examples of alternative living can be found at the International Communities site, http://www.ic.org and include the long-established Twin Oaks Intentional Community, http://www.twinoaks.org Practical examples of alternative non-monetary exchange networks include, http://www.freecycle.org

Private property is a fundamental capitalist category referring to a claim to the profits of a unit, or units, of productive capital, for example a farm, factory or café. Sometimes the productive unit is wholly owned and managed by a sole operator. More often a few or lots of people have an interest in the business, for example in the case of companies shares. ‘Private property’ is sometimes confused with personal property, i.e. something that belongs to an individual person, like a toy or a book or clothes or a house, which is not applied to capitalist production but consumed or used by someone for their own purposes. Personal property endures in all societies. Despite the misconception that all property is shared in communism and no-one has anything of their own, only private property is dissolved under communism.

E F Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered first appeared in 1973 (Blond & Briggs, London) but the 25-year-anniversary edition in 1999 (Hartley & Marks, Point Roberts/Vancouver) is complemented by quotes and commentaries from other creative thinkers in its margins. George McRobie’s Small is Possible (1981, Jonathan Cape, London), promoted as a sequel to Schumacher’s classic, reported on the results of Schumacher’s call to develop ‘small, simple and non-violent’ ‘technology for a democratic society’ (1) describing applications of alternative, intermediate technologies, i.e. what have become known as appropriate technologies, throughout the world at that point in history. See also the Intermediate Technology Development Group (ITDG) site, http://www.itdgpublishing.org.uk

Many present-day visionaries and activists discuss how socially just and environmentally sustainable practices might work in movements such as ecocommunalism and social ecology (see Murray Bookchin, 2005, The Ecology of Freedom: the Emergence and Dissolution of Heirarchy, AK Press, Oakland). Participatory economics (Parecon) has been elaborated on by Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel in works such as The Political Economy of Participatory Economics (1991, Princeton University Press, Princeton), Looking Forward: Participatory Economics for the Twenty First Century (1991, South End Press, Boston) and on the ZNET site, http://www.zmag.org/parecon/intro.htm The Tellus Institute site, http://www.tellus.org initiated the Great Transition Initiative, http://www.gtinitiative.org David Suzuki has been a prominent humanist campaigner for new ways of living that take account of our complex ecological environment, http://www.davidsuzuki.org

John Eaton’s Political Economy: a Marxist Textbook (1949, revised 1952, Lawrence & Wishart, London) shows how certain British Marxians viewed Soviet socialist planning, including the continued (temporary) use of money and prices (Ch. XI), as well as the role of Marx’s law of value, socially necessary labour-time and how ‘value’ excludes nature (as in a price for land, Ch. VII).

Ted Trainer is a well-known Australian environmental activist who has published on sustainability economics, such as The Conserver Society: Alternatives for Sustainability (1995, Zed Books, London) in which Ted argues for a steady-state economy, which he admits is ‘a death sentence for capitalism’ but ‘not necessarily for free enterprise and the market, both of which could still play a role’ (80). See Ch.8 of The Conserver Society for his economic prescriptions, a discussion of LETS, issuing your own local money and interest-free loans. Trainer’s work offers numbers of ideas for local self-sufficiency associated with housing, energy, technologies, resources, eco-villages and cooperative models in Australia and elsewhere.

On the environmental costs of trade, of long distance transport of goods instead of local exchange, see Ripe for Change: Rethinking California’s Economy (2004, International Society for Ecology and Culture, Berkeley CA) and available in summary and complete forms at their site, http://www.isec.org.uk/

The concept of underdevelopment was originally elaborated by Andre Gunder Frank in Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America (1967, Monthly Review Press, New York). The roles of trade and money were examined by Rosa Luxemburg in The Accumulation of Capital (1951, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London) and The Accumulation of Capital — An Anti-critique, which was published along with Nichol Bukharin’s Imperialism and the Accumulation of Capital (1972, Monthly Review Press, New York) and later by Samir Amin in Unequal Development (1976 Monthly Review Press, New York) and by Arghiri Emmanuel (1972, Unequal Exchange: a Study of the Imperialism of Trade, New Left Books, London).

A use-value is not an intrinsic property of a thing but rather a human-imputed purpose, its use or quality, for example if an apple is bought to eat, its use-value is as food. If you don’t use a thing but rather give it to someone else in exchange for money then you receive exchange-value instead. In a market society the exchange-value shows itself immediately and directly in the price as money.

The Union of Concerned Scientists site contains the World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity, http://www.schoolofwisdom.com/environment/science.html

Certain ways of analysing capitalism make it more understandable and easier to analyse. One approach is to follow Marx in framing practices and processes in terms of the universal or general, the particular and the individual. In other words, to reflect and analyse the implications of a development from a holistic, whole-ofsociety perspective (the universal), as well as from the partial point of view of a sector or industry (the particular) and in terms of the consequences for and activities of selected firms or persons (the individual). As an example, think of the ways that capitalism has been perceived of as the most efficient form of production, which begs the question, why would you want to change it? Claims of efficiency depend on the distinct lens adopted, that of individual capitalists, a particular sector or capital in general.

In Reading Capital Politically (1979, The Harvester Press, Brighton) Harry Cleaver traces Marx’s elaboration of economic categories such as ‘money’ in terms of the dynamics between workers and capitalists. Cleaver’s activities include being a Zero Work activist opposing the practice of work, i.e. waged labour in capitalism, see his site, http://www.eco.utexas.edu/~hmcleave/ The environmental benefits of work-time reduction, as pursued by various groups including the shorter working week movement, is eloquently argued by Anders Hayden in Sharing the Work, Sparing the Planet: Work Time, Consumption and Ecology (1999, Between the Lines/Pluto/Zed Books, Toronto/Annandale/New York).

Nonviolence is a strategy and philosophy involving particular forms of politics and economics: see the bibliography at the Civil Resistance site, http://www.civilresistance.info, and R Powers and W Vogele (eds) Protest, Power, and Change: Encyclopedia of Nonviolence from ACT-UP to Women's Suffrage (1997, Garland, New York). Mahatma Gandhi suggested that nonviolent economics would focus on small, decentralised, local and human-powered activities, emphasising self-reliance (similar to bioregionalism).

Anitra Nelson, 10 April 2008: www.moneyfreezone.info