Abolishing Money E-Book

Eske Bockelmann

• Herausgeber: Conzett Verlag
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Seitenzahl: 41

Beschreibung

State socialism, neoliberalism - it's all the same! Thus one could put one's finger on the net result which is drawn in this publication. For it eloquently demonstrates that with one or the other economic and monetary concept of money too many people - and far too much humanity - fall by the wayside. The stirring plea for a world without money, however, does not stop at mere criticism, but makes such a world clear to us together with its advantages. A world without money: would it be at all possible? Would we make it possible? That is and remains the crucial question. Here it is asked and answered.

Leseprobe

Abolishing Money

By Eske Bockelmann

All rights reserved

Any form of reprint as well as the reproduction in television, radio, film, sound or picture storage media and the storage and dissemination in electronic media or use for talks, including extracts, are only permissible with formal written approval of the publisher.

1st edition 2012

© Conzett Verlag by Sunflower Foundation

(as a print edition issued by: MoneyMuseum by Sunflower Foundation)

Verena-Conzett-Strasse 7

PO Box

CH-8036 Zürich

Translated by Roy Greenspan

Cover by Sergeant AG, Zürich

As a print edition available for free at

MoneyMuseum

Hadlaubstrasse 106

CH-8006 Zürich

Phone: [phone], Bureau: [phone]

ISBN 978-3-03760-017-7

For further information, please go to

www.moneymuseum.com

and to the Media page of

www.sunflower.ch

eBook-Herstellung und Auslieferung: Brockhaus Commission, Kornwestheimwww.brocom.de

Content

Prologue

1. Things are not going well with money

2. Two ways to improve the world “with”

3. The mind doesn’t think “without”

4. Value as energy

5. The unthinkable thought

Prologue

When I realized, as a five-year-old, that like everyone else, I too would one day have to earn my own money, I was grimly certain, firstly, that I would fail and, secondly, that I really had to learn magic. Otherwise, it was painfully clear to me, that I would never manage to achieve all those things essential for life.

I could well imagine acquiring a profession and mastering various skills that I did not yet have. What I did find threatening however, was the fact that my profession would be invariably linked to the apportioning of that strange and alien material which seemed to come from an outside source and to which obviously, my parents and their professions were subject. Moreover the fact that my own very survival would depend on this substance left me no alternative but to resort to magic. Of course, I realized my prospects of learning magic were rather poor but since my intentions were only to secure the basics like food and shelter, if I would just limit myself to conjuring these necessities and not everything right away...

To this day, I have not learned any magic. And so I raised my hand when the question was finally asked, “... or would anyone want to abolish money?” It was during the closing session of a conference on the sociologist Alfred Sohn-Rethel. I was participating in a roundtable discussion on the podium and Jochen Hörisch was summing up: Despite sharply criticizing money and commerce, Sohn-Rethel was nonetheless an admirer of money. Thus, we should not conclude our conference by totally disparaging money but rather by recognizing its considerable achievements. After all, money facilitates society’s supply and production mechanisms, and, according to Sohn-Rethel, ultimately created rational thought itself. Our very language itself has been enriched by the sheer inexhaustible resource of metaphors pertaining to money. Indeed money deserves our admiration, a fact we should acknowledge, “... or would anyone want to abolish money?”

Well, I raised my hand: If it were up to me, I would. But wait a minute. I looked around the hall and saw no other hands in the air; mine was the only one. No one else, it seemed, cherished the wish or even the thought that one day things could work out without money. Astounded, I wondered then whether Sohn-Rethel’s insights were less about encouraging the wish to abolish money and more about explaining why no one actually wants to do so.

1. Things are not going well with money

Are things really working out with money? No, things are not going well with it. The most that can be said in this respect, is in fact that money enables one very small part of humanity to become rich and prosperous, whereas the greater part by far is, as a result of this wealth, subjected to torment, deprivation and famine. Is money to blame? Yes it is money’s fault, namely, in as far as money is the very first and most common foundation of exactly those social conditions that are in force today worldwide; money has caused this kind of division of humanity and exacerbated the plight of the ever-growing majority of the world’s population.

This should not be interpreted as if, before the age of money, there was no poverty, suffering or violence. And there is yet another misconception to be avoided, one that Sohn-Rethel long cultivated, namely that with the minting of the first coins early in Greek antiquity, money already formed the nexus rerum—in other words, that money already then had the power to support society entirely and produce the effects I’ve referred to. That stage was not reached until Europe entered the post-medieval period. Indeed, the transition to a money-based economy emerged in the course of the so-called “long” 16th