Alternative economies: a letter from Brazil

[tliouk]

Ref: http://www.pgaconference.org/_postconference_/fo_alteconomies.htm
author: Camilo Ramada - 05.09.2002 10:26

Camilo, memeber of the Ducth organization Stichting Strohalm, is 
working in Brazil to create alternative Monetary Methods in 
cooperation with oa. the MST, the movement of landless peasants. A 
eyewitness account. 

Dear friends at the PGA-conference, 

Here a letter from Brazil, all the way from the deep-South, Porto 
Alegre that is, that's getting even warmer now. Yeah, the winter is 
fading out and the temperature is rising. In contrast to the 
situation in Leiden, I assume, where "and I really want to rub it in 
with a smile" the summer must have come to an end and the winter is 
tapping on your door.

Perhaps this is a metaphor for the economic developments we are 
seeing today. While in Europe chilly capitalism is corroding at a 
fundamental level, here, in Porto Alegre, a lot of very exciting NEW 
developments can be witnessed. People and organizations, but also 
local governments, are exploring new ways to build up society, the 
economy and their political foundations. 

The local council here in the big city, as in other cities and small 
villages – and even the government of this district itself as well – 
are being run for approximately 10 years by the "Partido dos 
Trabalhadores", The Brazilian Labor Party. This party, a collusion of 
about eight different political movements, varying from radical left 
to social-religious people, has given opportunities for communities 
to organize themselves at a social-political level. They even have 
contributed to this grass-roots uprising by sustaining communication, 
by helping to get into contact with the appropriate government 
agencies and by subsidizing as well
 
It looks a bit like Europe in the sixties and seventies, I guess, 
when at a lot of places alternative movements and initiatives rose 
and discussions and political innovations took place everywhere. But 
now: This is the year 2002, and the current developments are thriving 
in the middle of world-capitalism that's getting even more cynical by 
the day. 

One of the most peculiar and interesting initiatives is probably 
the "Economy of Solidarity", I think. This comprises all kinds of 
enterprises, co-operations, networks of small self-sustaining 
businesses, communal agencies to purchase products, people who are 
producing biologically, local unions and all kinds of initiatives in 
the neighborhoods in which people are producing in a human-friendly 
fashion. 
In all different ways you can imagine people are investigating new 
ways to achieve socially and environmentally sustainable economies. 
They are supported by a very dedicated part of the "intelligentsia", 
who are issuing really very interesting publications nowadays; For 
instance about theories in which the Materialism from Gramsci has 
been merged with the ideological energy from the more or less more 
feminine Gaia-Mother-Earth theories on sustainability. Okay, I know, 
this is really something which I favor personally, but nevertheless 
 

I first encountered the fervid enthusiasm of these – in the beginning 
still rather incoherent – initiatives, when Stichting Strohalm, the 
Dutch organization I work for, sent me to a meeting of the "Trueque"-
movement in Buenos Aires Argentina, November `99. In '95 this 
movement, which we accompanied as advisors for several years at the 
time, started issuing their own banknotes, so that people could use 
them for exchange in their communities. Swiftly, other neighborhoods 
joined in and started trading with each other, and after a serious 
Press-attendance, a large "Chaordic" network of these initiatives 
emerged at different levels. Some neighborhoods united their "Clubes 
del Trueque" until a vast network emerged, others preferred to 
operate rather autonomously; some trusted one another, others didn't; 
But, most important, suddenly there was a lot of trade going on, an 
uprising from the grassroots of society in the middle of a national 
crisis!! 

In the meantime several years have passed; Argentina is completely 
bankrupt while the Trueque has over 7 million participants, according 
to BBC-World News. Some criticists may think that these people aren't 
at all politically or socially mature, that this is a petty-bourgeois 
initiative or that the Trueque only works because there is a national 
crisis. And perhaps they are right. But what is happening in 
Argentina and what isn't happening elsewhere is that the people have 
grasped the "Mystery of Issuing Money" and claimed it for themselves. 
And that is really a very important revolutionary development, I 
think. 

Everybody knows that nowadays the most exploiting body is the ) 
foretold us?monetary system, exactly like Marx (for those who are 
interested about 150 years ago. The "Financial Capital" has, after a 
power struggle in the seventies and the beginning of the eighties, 
taken over command from the "Productive Capital". At first, plane 
human force was sufficient, then the appropriation of land and 
machines were needed to create the foundations for exploitation of 
fellow man and nature, but nowadays
: Money is the key to absolute 
control. 
Where in the days of colonialism brute force had to be present to 
enforce the colonized countries to hand over their raw materials, 
nowadays it suffices to sustain a perfectly anonymous and apparently 
non-violent structure, or
: "The International Monetary System". That 
system, with its endless interest-payments, compels countries to 
choose "voluntarily" to hand over not only their raw materials, but 
the soil, the people that are living on it, the factories that are 
standing on it and even the belonging animals and plants as well. 
They have to sell it all to the big companies of the North just to 
get their hands on money that is needed to redeem the debts they have 
to the same North. 

Where in the early days the "Proletariat" by their miserable 
conditions of life was forced to be merely extensions of the machines 
they had to work with, nowadays the same trick is being used in a 
more sophisticated fashion by enchaining them to mortgage-payments 
and so on
 Who dares to defy the notion that man doesn't know 
progress then??? 
Unfortunately, this very efficient and apparently painless mechanism 
of exploitation entails all kinds of nasty side-effects. The energy 
of the majority of the people is sucked into the center of 
accumulation and so cannot be employed to develop themselves. People 
have to fight each other for the poor leftovers the rich cannot use, 
a corrosion festers in the moral foundations of society, and we are 
witnessing the decay of Mother Earth, who's laying in the gutter, 
bleeding stench 
 

One of the most paradoxical features of this money-system may be the 
people who are cast aside, being unemployed, but staying inert 
instead of being glad not to have to join the Machine again and so 
being able to employ their energy for their own benefit. I guess that 
this emanates from the fact that in a complex society like ours, we 
need abstract tender for exchange and mediation of our relationships. 
For example, barter isn't possible, because it would mean that you 
have to clean the stage first before being permitted to get on the 
train. 

So, we have to conclude two things then with respect to the current 
money-system. In one way it is exploiting us at a vast scale, on the 
other hand we don't know how to live without it anymore. I think 
there's only one solution: We have to explore new kinds of money, 
money that is able to unchain us from exploitation and at the same 
time offers us a new, decentralized, democratic and non-accumulating 
structure for exchange. 

And that's precisely what my organization is doing, first by 
deploying the Local Exchange Trading Systems and Local Capital 
Circuits in the Netherlands, and now in other countries as well, like 
in Poland, The US, Eastern Timor, Uruguay, Argentina and, of course, 
Brazil. 
At the conference in Argentina in '95 I came into contact with a 
local government official from the district Porto Alegre. He invited 
us for a conference which would be held here, in this district, a 
year later. This was the first time the people from Strohalm had been 
invited by a government. Until then we stood at the other side, we 
thought 
 

At this conference in Porto Alegre we got to know a lot of very 
interesting movements, like the MST, the movements of landless 
peasants, who are – ironically – not at all landless, because they 
are squatting land that after long judicial battles has eventually 
been permitted for use. 
Also we got acquainted with people from the North East of Brazil, who 
are living on their own "micro-credit system". In the poor village of 
Fortaleza, for example, they have created their own bank, 
BancoPalmas, and a local creditcard as well, to stimulate consumption 
in their neighborhood. 

So it became clear to us that an enormous need, caused by the 
dramatic economic, political and social developments, had led to a 
very highly-motivated and well-organized social movement. We knew 
then that we could contribute something very substantial to these 
movements: our self-developed Monetary Methods, that were quite 
unknown in those places at the time. 

To spare you the details of the little and less little worries of 
Stichting Strohalm, I will disclose straightforward the topics we are 
working on right now. At this moment we are co-operating with the 
BancoPalmas to sustain a very solid local currency, of which 
approximately 50.000 units of account will be supplied at the end of 
the year, with an estimate total value of about 20.000 euro. 
With the MST we are working on plans to supply them with a currency 
that is to be used as a medium for exchange in their own movement. 
This project will start locally but, when it turns out to be a big 
success, it will be deployed in the whole country! 

Just imagine they will succeed to replace the "ordinary" money - 
money that now is circulating for exchange between their individual 
co-operative farming initiatives - with an internal "clearing-
facility" for clearance of mutual payments and debts! Then they will 
be able to put together all the "ordinary" money to purchase capital 
goods at the capitalist market and so probably it would be possible 
then to integrate these markets within the movement as well. At a 
later date they can sustain their money with their own productive 
capabilities and then issue as much of their own money as they need, 
to maximize the efficiency of their production. Without any interest-
payments, I must add! 

Also we are working on several other payment-clearing-networks for 
independent small business firms, so that those firms can use the 
same financial structures as the multinational companies deploy 
internally nowadays. 

To be short, as well as in Holland as in other countries we are 
working quite severely to convert money for the people's own use and 
appropriate the System of Money Supply. And we really think that our 
own system works much more effectively than capitalism, because we 
don't have to pay off interest or other usury, so in that way ALL 
value can be employed by the people themselves! At the same time this 
will mean an end to the dogma of economic growth, and that's a major 
improvement with respect to the sustainability of the economic 
system. 

So, good news from a very sunny Porto Alegre, and not only because of 
the weather! 

Yours sincerely, 

Camilo Ramada