Compeerism can create and maintain alternative money systems to divest from state and capital

Hannes, Professor of Geography at the University of West Georgia. “Coping With Money’s Monopoly on Value.” From Capital to Commons: Exploring the Promise of a World Beyond Capitalism. University of Bristol. Pp 150-154. /LJS

In this sense, the more formal ‘alternative’ banking arrangements available today still demonstrate some significant limitations from a compeerist point of view. To unleash their full potential would require moving them even further away from their revenue-generating focus, essentially making them more akin to upscaled forms of the cooperative accumulation covered earlier, as in the Swedish JAK banks. To achieve such upscaling, however, also requires more access to savings, meaning commoners of all stripes must themselves rise to the occasion and pursue an exit from their own investment mentality. In other words, a mass divestment is required from the capital-controlled financial institutions peddling returns sourced from extractive/exploitative activities, with savings funnelled, instead, into more solidaristic, boundary-commoning initiatives that offer low or no monetary growth. Only in this way would it be possible to establish a more robust and expansive, commons-oriented circulation of money, at least within the standard dynamics of our current monetary/financial arrangements. Alternative forms of money The just noted ‘standard dynamics’ referenced in relation to our current organization of money highlights the potential of finding additional, nonconventional ways with which to grease the wheels of the commons and commoning, particularly through alternative forms of tender. The use of currencies that exist alongside official, state-based money has long been a tool used to stimulate economic exchange, mobilize resources, and incentivize certain activities. In some instances, where such currencies are widely adopted, they can also bestow a significant level of financial power to the issuing entity and establish a degree of protection from any negative developments within the broader economy. The most heralded, affirming case of the economic potential of a complementary currency can be found in the experimental issuing of so called ‘freigeld’ (free money) during the Great Depression by the mayor of the small Bavarian town of Wörgl (after which the currency was named). As is often the case with freigeld, the Wörgl was linked to a demurrage function, meaning that the money had a built-in expiration to prevent hoarding and encourage circulation. As a result of the Wörgl’s introduction the town was able to sustain robust economic growth and employment while the rest of the country was experiencing deep decline. A more recent, pioneering example of a complimentary currency, focused particularly on boosting commoning and not just economic activity, is the Toreke currency issued by the city of Ghent. Toreke money can be earned by contributing labour to various service projects in the impoverished Rabot neighbourhood. The value of the currency, in turn, which incentivizes such labour, is rooted in the fact that it can be used to rent coveted, municipally owned gardening space in the neighbourhood (Telalbasic, 2017). With the advent of blockchain-enabled cryptocurrencies, there is now a growing interest in how the commoning potential of alternate forms of money can be expanded and deepened. Some of the most ambitious efforts have even set their sights on offering a commons-based money that could provide a viable alternative to state-based tender, that is, one that can function as a widely-adopted means of exchange and currency of account (for the actual buying and selling of goods and services within a broader economy). We will consider the steep uphill climb facing such initiatives in the next chapter, which deals with the more far-reaching aim of actually replacing the existing monetary-banking apparatus with a commons-friendly substitute. Most commons-based cryptocurrency efforts, however, are more limited in scope, but also more immediately achievable. Their potential and the challenges they face are worth considering. The Toreke concept, for instance, has been embraced and furthered in a number of cities with the help of blockchain-based ledgers. One example is the English city of Hull, where certain community-centred volunteer work is paid in HullCoin, which can then be redeemed at participating retailers (Sylvester-Bradley, 2019). Blockchain capabilities here work to maintain a record of rewarded activities and currency issuance and use, thus allowing for user-friendliness, transparency, and security within a commons crediting system that is significantly more complex than the Ghent example. We can note that the reliance on participating retailers in this case, however, ultimately makes this currency dependent on a form of capital-linked gifting. A further locality-focused currency is that of city-cryptos, where the issued crypto coins can be used to pay for specifically designed digital processes and smart-contracts, as Ether is used to run Ethereum-based ‘DApps’. Yet, being a cryptocurrency that depends on proof-of-work ‘mining’, as Bitcoin is, some of the earnings of this mining activity are shared with the sponsoring city. As such, while city cryptos are generally capital owned and initiated projects, they still maintain a promising B-Corp component to them due to their commitment to the municipality. MiamiCoin, established in the summer of 2021, was the first large scale city-crypto implemented, with 30 per cent of mining revenue (issued in tradable MiamiCoin) going directly to the municipal government (Volpecelli, 2022). In this way the city of Miami garnered over $7 million in just the first few months, and while MiamiCoin’s value has plunged since its inception, there are many who still believe the promise of such city cryptos is just beginning (Brown, 2021; Volpecelli, 2022). Still, from a compeerist perspective, to truly work in support of commons-based aims, city-cryptos would preferably be organized along cooperative or non-profit lines, where there would be direct buy-in from the municipality and civil society, and where most revenue was earmarked to support the urban commons. While certainly conceivable, however, such a commons-based city-crypto has yet to be executed. Another crypto-based initiative pursued by compeerists is the creation of an alternative form of money that can help generate funds and incentivize behaviour to achieve a specific, usually trans-local aim. Arthur Brock (2018), mentioned in Chapter 4 as the co-founder of the Holochain project, has argued there is room for a large number of such crypto-based currencies; the key to their viability, however, is that they actually denote something of value. Consider, for instance, the Fishcoin project which seeks to incentivize fisherfolk in Southeast Asia to record essential data from their catch for the purposes of sustainable resource management. The fisherfolk are awarded Fishcoin crypto tokens for providing the data and uploading it to a database. The data itself, which is of interest to a wide range of stakeholders, including environmental NGOs, governments, and users/consumers, can only be bought with Fishcoin, which provides its foundational value (Gerhardt, 2020). Due to this value the currency maintains a certain level of worth in exchange markets, which is also why the fisherfolk view it as an adequate reward for participating. Not least, by being linked to an actual value generating endeavour (and hence representing more than just crowd-based speculation), Fishcoin was able to generate significant funds from the getgo through an ‘initial coin offering’, hence garnering critical capital for its early stages. In the absence of any foundational, undergirding value, however, incentiveoriented cryptocurrencies remain mostly speculative with little prospect for growth. SolarCoin, for instance, seeks to incentivize solar investments by awarding anyone producing solar energy with their crypto token. Yet, these tokens maintain limited appeal as there is very little of value they can be used for. Thus, to significantly improve the prospects of SolarCoin, the issuers could, hypothetically, follow Fishcoin’s example by selling energy data collected from project participants, where SolarCoin would be required for the purchase. Alternatively, the currency could seek to become an accepted form of payment within participating electricity cooperatives. Unlike the gifting noted in the HullCoin example earlier, in this case the gift would not be directly dependent on capital, but rather it would come from a commons oriented enterprise offering an alternative mode of operation. Boundary commoning synergies such as this will likely be critical if cryptocurrencies are to play a significant role in boosting commoning incentivizations. Based on the various examples just offered, we can see how commons oriented, crypto-monies have the potential, if well-designed, to help fund and foster the commons and commoning with very little initial capital. Yet there are also noteworthy challenges. Apart from issues related to finding willing partners to build the value of a commons-based cryptocurrency, not to mention the volatility and speculation associated with crypto markets, we should lastly also emphasize the inherent challenge of working with blockchain technology. This code, which was born out of and designed for the libertarian principles of independence and a lack of trust, is not conducive to the types of money compeerists seek to create. As such, alternative currency projects are tasked with not only hacking blockchain’s intended application, but also, especially in the longer term, with fundamentally redesigning, repurposing, and re-governing its underlying code to ensure that the compeerist-aligned functions being pursued can be effectively performed. While no easy task, we have, nonetheless, already seen some promising executions of such abstract hacktivist thinking, for instance how Holochain has completely reworked the fundamental structure of blockchain to create a more expansive digital ledger optimized for collaborative, commonsoriented transactions. In terms of governance, furthermore, where many cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin are characterized by top-down, opaque, and highly guarded decision-making structures, commons-based efforts have pursued an intentional balance between an emphasis on technical skill, on the one hand, and open, inclusive decision making, on the other. A good illustration of this is the ambitious, means-of-exchange FairCoin cryptocurrency (covered in more detail in the next chapter); while FairCoin is maintained by a limited number of code administrators, the overall intentions and strategies associated with the project are determined democratically in a ‘general assembly’ of stakeholders (König et al, 2018). In the end, however, and looking back to the entirety of efforts reviewed in this chapter that seek to address the commons’ fraught dependency on money, we would do well to remember that these are all essentially coping strategies. They are intended to help commons-oriented actors find the means to swim in the taken-for-granted water of exchange-value monopolization. Yet compeerism is critically aware of this assumption and has begun to actively question it, just as the mature tadpole begins to see the possibilities that lie beyond the water’s embrace. More precisely, compeerism acknowledges that the longue-durée goal is not simply creating better conditions for the commons to contend with the dominant monetary-banking apparatus in place, rather it is to fully usurp and replace it. Only in this way can the compeerist vision of a world beyond capitalism have any chance of coming to fruition.