Money on the Left
Money on the Left is a monthly, interdisciplinary podcast that reclaims money’s public powers for intersectional politics. Staging critical conversations with leading historians, theorists, organizers, and activists, the show draws upon Modern Monetary Theory and constitutional approaches to money to advance new forms of left critique and practice. It is hosted by William Saas and Scott Ferguson and presented in partnership with Monthly Review magazine. Check out our website: https://moneyontheleft.org Follow us on Bluesky
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Money on the Left
Community Currencies with Jens Martignoni
Money on the Left speaks with Dr. Jens Martignoni, lecturer at the Zurich University of Applied Sciences and chief editor of the International Journal of Community Currency Research (IJCCR). Community or complementary currencies are phenomena of great interest to monetary scholars and activists. We’ve spoken often about them on this show–whether about the Benjamins classroom currency at SUNY Cortland, the DVDs currency at Denison, or our recurring work on the Uni Currency Project. During our conversation with Martignoni, the appeal of such projects becomes clear. Community currencies not only lay bare the false claims of prevailing monetary orthodoxy–and in so doing make powerful teaching tools, as Jakob Feinig has argued. They also permit and even compel us to imagine a world that is otherwise–a world figured first in terms of abundance rather than primarily or exclusively in terms of scarcity. In our dialog, we focus on Martignoni’s provocative essay for the IJCCR, titled “Money is Not a Medium of Exchange.” In doing so, we reflect upon the limits of “exchange” as a framework for understanding money, while simultaneously experimenting with more generative linguistic and conceptual tools to help us re-imagine monetary provisioning.
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Jens Martignoni, welcome to Money on the Left.
Jens Martignoni:Thank you. I'm happy to be here.
Scott:We're happy to have you. So to start us off, we'd like you to tell our listeners a little bit about your background, your personal background, if you'd like to tell us about it, your professional background, and also how you came to take up a heterodox approach to questions of money and political economy.
Jens Martignoni:Yeah, thank you. It's a kind of a long story, but I started in the northeast of Switzerland quite a time ago when I was born in a rural region. My first idea was then--when I was a little bit older--to go to US and to start as a rocket engineer and do space travels to the moon. Because I thought, yeah, we have some major problems and issues on this earth with our civilization. But this was maybe something from the gods. But I took this track and went for becoming an engineer, mechanical engineer. But when I was there, when I approached, even in the study then in the university, I found out that maybe it's not a good idea to leave Earth, but maybe better to see that we have and find a better solution for our society. And therefore, I started as an engineer then in different jobs, but was always thinking how we could improve or change our society, let's say, or our behavior. That was then in the 1990s, a time when I moved to Zurich. This is the biggest city in Switzerland. And there I found out that it would be a good thing to work differently, not as in a regular job or as an engineer, but more independently. And with a couple of friends, we founded an association to help us--self-help, let's say--and kind of cooperative in a form of association. And then we started our own businesses, but together and tried to have an exchange and tried to build up a network. So like startup, kind of startup platform before startups were born as a word, maybe. Very soon we arrived at the point where we found out that, OK, it's nice to exchange or to have projects together or something like that. But it's also very important to get the money inside our circle. And so we found out that we have to establish a known monetary system in our association. And that was the first step, like from a very practical point of view, how we can keep the resources inside and not flowing away and leaving us faster than they arrived. So we founded a kind of currency, a kind of local currency in today's term, which was quite unique. Somehow we had some ingenuity, not only me, but others together. Before, we didn't find much about such systems. LETS was already on the market then. It's from the Canada local exchange and trade system, that kind of exchange. But we had a different approach, more like a common approach. And however this worked, this was fun also for some years. But after a while, it turned out that it was not really working. It was helping us. It was fun. But we would have to invest a lot more energy, time and knowledge to really find it and also to have many more members, for example, to get it on a certain level. And so it disappeared slowly. And that was my first really experiment with such a system, a little bit out of the blue. We made many mistakes also, if you look backwards. But it was just really a good thing. From then on, I was a little bit hooked and always thought how to keep on in this topic. Professionally, I was then leaving this self-employment because I had I found a big project, which then was like covered by the state. And so I became an employee again of this project and so on. But after a while, I was convinced that I have to add to my engineering degree, more economic knowledge to get along with this story. And so I went, I did a master's in an university here in Switzerland. And later on, I also did a PhD in an university in Germany. And there, on both occasions, I took this topic of money or different monies or local currencies or whatever as a master thesis or a PhD thesis was included in that. So I started to become more kind of researcher in this topic and then went on to be involved in some European research projects where I also did some parts concerning such monetary systems or such local exchange things. And yeah, that was a bit the thread about the money. And from my personal, as a person, I stayed the whole time in Switzerland, except my visits in Germany, in the German University of Köln. But yeah, I was here and getting into contact with the worldwide networks of other people working on this local community or complementary currency. And so, yeah, that was still until today. It's a big issue. But of course, as your question also was, why did I come to the heterodox approach? Because it's not necessarily needed if you try to start a local currency. The orthodox or the classical approach does not really cover local currencies. It just says nothing about it. So you can live together without bothering maybe. But for me, it was very clear that something in this conventional orthodox or classical theories cannot be true or has to be some flares or whatever. So I was always looking for how could money be seen or this famous question, what is money? And there are many books written about this. Money is, you name it, money is, what's the, yeah, I don't know at the moment.
Billy:Social construction.
Jens Martignoni:Yeah, money is a social construction. This is harder to find, but you can find it. But yeah, money to become rich or money is psychological things about money or many things what money is. And after a while, I came to the conclusion that maybe this question is not right. This is a kind of trick question. Because if you ask "what is money?" you presuppose money as existing entity. It is already here. It's like a kind of plant species or a kind of rock formation. And you start to look at it and now you know what money is. Usually it's done by the history of coins that, "ah, this is money," all the coins and developed like this and like that. And for me, then this was like a key moment maybe when I thought, okay, maybe this question is not good because money is made by men. And so if you ask what is money, then also we should first ask who has made money and why and other questions. And what exactly is it for? Was it for? And is it really the same all the time? And so on and so on. It becomes more interesting if you look at it that way.
Billy:That's a fascinating story. And as somebody who very recently completed a class, I'm working with students all semester on complementary currencies. And in fact, each student was tasked with developing their own. I've talked about it a lot on the show. But I'm really curious to know what that initial in your co-op, what was the name of your currency? Because I think ultimately that becomes a vexing question for students. What did you call it? And was there any debate about what to call it?
Jens Martignoni:Yeah, we had some debates then. This association or this co-op was called, we called us Flexibles. Then, even the English name, it was very fancy in that time in Europe or in Switzerland. And because the name of the association was flexible, we thought we named the currency after flexible and then existing predecessor of the Euro, it was the FLECU. So it was called Flexibles-Ecu and yeah it was a paper money and a little bit--I don't have one here unfortunately but there are still some I can send you an image how do you spell Eku Yes, we did in the, this is a French, ECU, but because in German, the U is with two points.
Scott:Umlaut.
Jens Martignoni:So it is, yeah, so it's F L E C U umlaut. And it was funny, we had one important issue then was it was for us very important to find out how the money was traveling, where it's going. So we had, it was like a list on each bill where you had to fill in when you gave it to, when you bought something, when you gave it to the next. And you have to fill in when and for what and whom, from whom. And so after a while you had the whole list, you could see where this and for what this bill was, this note was spent. And this was for us a very important idea, somehow to track this.
Billy:It's an engineering problem. Did you see it from the engineer's lens?
Jens Martignoni:Maybe. Yeah, of course. In the end, then you have like, you pay 100 FLECU and you have 10 bills and then you have to write it 10 times on each of these 10 things. And then the next would give it to different sorts. So you have a big mixture of things, this one from here, this one from there. But I think it was a good exercise to point towards the use of money, that each transaction really changes somehow the money or prints some new kind of color on it or kind of value. And so you could enforce, the idea was, of course, we wouldn't like to travel it by like--"bought some cocaine" or whatever, or horrible environmental things, or I don't know, "nuclear power plants- I bought one." But I think this brought us a bit towards this idea of, okay, money is changing from each transaction, is changing money somehow. And yeah, there were some interesting insights from this experiment.
Scott:It makes me think of library books on the one hand. So you can see, you check out a library book, you can see who has checked it out, you know, sometimes decades of people checking it out. And it also makes me think of what is actually now standard in private payment platforms, like Venmo, right, where you can record what it was for, include emojis, so all of this ends up shaping and creating different kinds of values that are certainly not the kinds of notions of value they could talk about in classical or neoclassical economics.
Billy:With the FLECU you yeah did you have did you go into that with any kind of theoretical framing background or were you, you said it was a practical project, did you draw on any pre-existing complementary local or community currencies?As examples?
Jens Martignoni:Yes, very little. Interestingly enough, we have just more an idea of how we would work. So like how our economy should be. And then this, we had, I think, one or two books from not really very theoretical approaches of about different aspects of money like yeah the or this let's example for it was a little bit known but not really and we we did we weren't really happy with how they did it so we did another it's right no and interestingly enough and I think this is it's always I still hang on to this method to really start without knowledge in the monetary field, because money and the currency and all this stuff is so overloaded with weird and wrong ideas. And if you start to dig into, you lose, you're lost. And then you load yourself with a lot of wrong stuff, wrong premises and so on. And if you start from nothing, it's much likelier that you get to some interesting or useful solution. So a pity for all the theorists, of course, if I say that.
Billy:Babylonian madness, I think Keynes called it.
Jens Martignoni:Yes, course, then later on, for me, it was important also to study all this or a lot of such theories and so on. But it was a good thing. And I think it somehow, to a certain degree, it worked without any theory at all.
Scott:Could you tell us a little bit about your graduate-level thesis about money and currency?
Jens Martignoni: Yes, I did a study about then existing or a bunch of existing local currencies in Switzerland, Germany, or in the German speaking part. And the idea, there were two things:First, I found out that I should do a kind of classification typology because it was difficult to compare, there are so many systems like these LETS or time banks or maybe a regional currency-- all kind of different approaches because they mostly were started by local groups. As myself, they did not know much and they took some system and changed it. And so it was very diverse. And so one thing was this typology. And the other was to find out some success factors. If there are some really some points where these local, these small currencies are successful or how they fail or could have found and find out some some thing about that. The typology was also published in English in 2012, I think, later on translated. Interestingly enough, the typologies of money are quite an open field. Until today, there are some, but not really many, because the reason is very simple, because a long time it was believed that money is money. It's one thing. So there's no typology at all necessary. And then there were a lot of discussions about is that or this money or the checks money or are the vouchers money or not. But always compared to that money that we have today or then the same. But as you go into deeper, of course, you find out that money, that you have to have a typology because it's just one option or one possibility how to do it. Like we have it today in the dollar, for example, or very closely the same in the pound or in the francs or in the euro zone. Yeah. And the other thing is how such local system would be successful. Well, it was a small sample. So I found out some things like, of course, you should have quite some resources, money to start up a new money, because it's really hard work and it needs a lot. We forget it a little bit in our very, very, very big monetary system that we have today that there is like an operation, systems operation tax. Somehow we have to pay the banks and the computers are running and the vending machines and so on and so on. But this is like this appears in our very big economy. But if you have a very small one, like in this local currency, then, of course, the costs can be high or the work you have to do to keep it running and or to get towards a certain number of members to have a stable situation. So the resource situation was very crucial. Then the design, of course, and then some other points like, do you have some initial working circles where money is flowing? Like it can be recycled, let's say. If not, then it will become difficult after a while. Yeah, there was this study. It was interesting, but not really well read afterwards.
Billy:Sounds like, if it was translated and published in 2012 it would have been pretty useful in the context of the Greek discussion of leaving the Eurozone, where I think the startup costs of considering returning to the lira with ATMs, with actually designing, printing, rebranding essentially was prohibitive. So I appreciate that point very much.
Jens Martignoni:Yeah, by the way, at that time, together with my colleague Christian Gellerich, he's the founder of the Chiemgauer. This is such a regional currency in Bavaria, Germany.
Billy:My students studied it.
Jens Martignoni:Yeah, it's somehow successful. It's really 20 years now, more than 20 years. And then at that time with the Greek troubles, he made some suggestion of parallel currency. So not really going back to the lira or something, but have a parallel currency. And we tried to suggest quite an option to do that. But yeah, it was not heard by the politicians.
Billy:Well, in that case, you had a semi-pseudo-heterodox finance minister who had very strong ideas about what ought to happen as well.
Jens Martignoni:You mean Varoufakis or no?
Billy:I do.
Jens Martignoni:Yeah, he was not. He was from his side. It was good. But of course, he was then dismissed. Or he left. I don't remember. And so he left.
Billy:We put together a small proposal that was definitely not very closely considered in, for Spain around the same time.
Jens Martignoni:Oh, wow. Nice. Yeah, such ideas are too far away from these politicians, and unfortunately, at least to be considered, even to do some experiments.
Billy:You mentioned it's good to have zero knowledge of money, but one of the things that I've come to appreciate more dearly over time is how it's not, most people don't have zero knowledge of money. They have lots and lots of knowledge, wrong knowledge, right? And misconceptions that to get to that zero point, there's a lot of chaff you have to pull away to just have the discussion.
Scott:And meanwhile, people's lives are on the line and they're fire selling public state infrastructure in Greece to low bidders on the private marketplace. I mean, we're tearing our hair out. The world is burning, but nobody can expand their imaginations to think this way. And of course, it's in many people's interest to not do so.
Jens Martignoni:Yes, very true. However, back to my study, maybe, or shall we continue with the politics?
Scott:No, that's fine. We can go back to your study.
Jens Martignoni:Yeah, no. And yeah, that was this study about these local currencies. But as you maybe know, the failure rate is very, very, very high. And some have survived, just like the Chimgauer, or some even thrive. as like the Sartex or so, or in the Berkshire, what's it called?
Billy:The Berkshires.
Scott:The Berkshires.
Jens Martignoni:The Berkshires, yeah, okay, something like this. And yeah, but still, and then that was, of course, also one of my conclusions that somehow this theory behind everything is also a major reason for failure. Because if there is a wrong theory and you still talk about exchange money as a medium of exchange, for example, then you get somehow on a wrong track. And then, of course, it becomes even more difficult to build up such an alternative in small scale. And so that was also a point to continue and think and read more and go back in time also to older scholars, especially in Germany, who had done quite amazing things 100 years ago. But then because of this Nazi time, everything was like buried or, yeah, sometimes discredited or, yeah, however difficult to reach. And so I was also looking there and took other assumptions and options and talked to people and find that these regional and complementary currencies are a good test bed for monetary theory because everything is much smaller. You really see direct effects you can think it much easier and and then yeah that's a that was an approach there still today.
Scott:So you've hit the nerve that I see at the center of our conversation. And before we start messing around with this nerve I want to tell our listeners a little bit about how we found you. So we at Money on the Left are always thinking about, you know, who can we communicate with? Who can we talk to? Who can teach us? Who can we teach? And I would say in general, our foundations are in kind of macro political economy, but we are also interested in smaller scale or multi-level or nested levels of money and currency. But not all of us have spent a lot of time reading the literature about complementary and community currency--some of us more than others. I think Billy has, for examplel I think I've read less--and somebody among us mentioned your journal, the International Journal of Community Currency Research, which we should plug. And I would invite you to say some things about where it came from and what it is and what its mission is. But we'll hold off on that question for now.
So I found this journal and I'm just looking around as one does. I'm exploring. I'm clicking on links. And all of a sudden, I get to a fairly recent piece by you called Ideas for Debate, Elementary Monetary Concepts and Ideas Part 2. And here's the doozy:"Money is not a medium of exchange." And my jaw dropped. And my jaw dropped because we at Money on the Left feel like we're the only ones out here saying "money is not a medium of exchange--stop talking about it as a medium of exchange."
We're very influenced by modern monetary theory. This is often referred to as neo-chartalism. We're also influenced by certain kind of critical legal work, especially associated with Christine Desan at Harvard University, who thinks of money as a constitutional project. But I would say that even in those discourses, which really reject the barter origin story that money comes from bilateral barter exchanges between individuals, I would say that the trope of exchange still circulates. It's still used. And maybe this is me above all else. I personally think that this is such a toxic trope. It's such a toxic frame. It's a toxic topology. And it really eradicates larger systemic design questions and political questions and value questions from the get-go and just sort of wishes them away. Whether you're an apologist for neoclassical economics or you are a critic along Marxist lines or any other school. So I often feel like I'm screaming into the void:"Money is not exchange! Money is not exchange!" And instead it is...
Billy:I pat him on the head and I say, it's okay, Scott.
Scott:Yeah, it's okay. Calm down. Calm down. And for me, this cuts to the heart of everything we're trying to argue, that money is a public system. It's a public utility. It's inexhaustible. You can always afford to do whatever you can mobilize your community to do. Money is a system of public obligations and capacities. And exchange just eliminates all those possibilities from an ontology of money. Anyway, so I get to your relatively small provocation, sorry, money is not a medium of exchange. My jaw drops and I think to myself, oh my God, there's another strange alien out there in the universe who also seems to think that we should not be talking about money as exchange, which is really hard to do. It's really hard to do. And not only that, when I opened your short provocation, I saw that you are influenced, as you were suggesting, by German writers that we are equally influenced by, probably above all, Georg Knapp. Maybe e you can tell us--take this on in whatever order you wish-- you can talk about the journal, where it came from and what it is and what its mission is and how it's doing; and then eventually, I would really like to just hear you talk about this provocation of yours.
Jens Martignoni:Yeah let's talk about that first because energy is going through the ceiling. This idea that money is a medium of exchange is for me I think it's a kind of methodological error but very, very, it's not a bad error. It was like in the times of in the 19th century, maybe, that the people started to use this research methods of the natural sciences towards also to the economy. And so you go into the economy, you look, you're the spectator, you're the subject, so you have to cut you off from the object. And then you look and you see there is something, there's a coin going from here to here and there is some whatever bought going back. And so you see, ah, you see, this is an exchange. And so money, because then you cannot, you start the next point where you say, okay, now the other has the money and this has the good. And what's now with this money? What does he do? And okay, he doesn't have anything he wanted somehow, but he has something he can find another thing he wanted. And so then, of course, you can say, okay, money is not really a good in this exchange. So it must be something else. It must be like a medium of exchange. And then you start this story from there. And the other myth you already mentioned from how money was then invented, I think that followed. Because you found out that money is a medium of exchange. They took it back to this village approach where everybody is trying to get cows against eggs and so on. However, then you see, okay, it's a kind of observation. It's okay. And it's also real. There is something like it's a kind of medium in that moment, in that situation, but it's absolutely not useful to define or even see money as a whole. Because especially because this exchange theory also has like two people, one on the other. And money is absolutely impossible with two people. You need at least three, otherwise it's not money so you have to you give another person money and then he or she can find someone else who takes the money instead of to give whatever some goods to the other person. So you need at least three people for a monetary system and then this exchange thing starts to become more complicated and then, yeah, it starts, it complicates and complicates. And so it's better to leave it out and say, no, no, we cannot define money at all through this function. It's even maybe not even really a function. It's kind of observation, kind of something happens there, but we have to go somewhere completely somewhere else. And of course, the main point in this transaction is that the other person, because the person who has the money and gives it to someone else, let's say could be really happy. Finally, he gets rid of this paper, of this nothing, and he gets some real stuff. And the other person who gets this only paper, this promise, then, of course, has to be really sure that others are willing to give something against this sheer nothing paper. And so you can see that there is really the others are appearing. So the whole community of people accepting this money, this is the most important part. It must be a community or a bunch, a group of people accepting this money. And then it's money. That's the point. And of course, now how you get these people together, You can also do it by force, like the king says, this is money. Everybody has to accept it. I put the tax on you, whatever. Or you also have the option to say everybody likes joining. I am willing to do it. I'm part of it. That's why I accept it. You have different options how this community comes into life. Knapp then of course derived it from the other side. He said okay there is the state and the state because it's a community, because it has the option of the king or whoever or of the government to say we are now accepting this money. This is now our money. Everybody should take it. Then it's working. Then to put this obligation on everybody to have to take the money. And of course, there are some more technical and other clues you have to include that it really works. But this is the main point to start from there. And then you also see that this obligation is a kind of credit. You can then also go to the credit theory or maybe think more about that point and then start from there. Yes. So these were my ideas. I'm still not finished and that's also why I put this provocation into the journal to start a discussion and it worked. The hook went to you. you took it and yeah we can from there i think we can can discuss it more and maybe frame it better or and find other ways and to to strengthen this this approach yeah well i'd like to i'd like to get into some of the messy and complicated details especially about the relationship between what we typically just refer to as a currency or a national currency or a supernational currency and something more like a community or local currency i i've been really fascinated by troubling that binary and to see where that takes us but before we do that I'd like you to talk about your journal and maybe explain what the mission is and whatever else you'd like to say about it.
Scott:Well I'd like to get into some of the messy and complicated details, especially about the relationship between what we typically just refer to as a currency or a national currency or a supernational currency and something more like a community or local currency. I've been really fascinated by troubling that binary, and to see where that takes us. But before we do that I'd like you to talk about your journal and explain what the mission is and whatever else you'd like to say about it.
Jens Martignoni:Yeah, exactly. The International Journal of Community Currency Research was funded, I think, 20, 2, 3, 4 years ago by some, I think in Australia even, and then went to England. It was from some scholars in like private initiative, I think. And they started to collect articles about this phenomenon of community currencies that started somehow in or restarted. There have been other examples before, even script money and other things longer before, but like restarted with maybe around in the 90s or less of the last century. And so this journal was able already then to collect some articles of some exotic scholars doing such work in their universities. And yes, after a while, it was passed over to the then-founded RAMICS. This is a research association for community currencies of academics who were in this field or tried to be in this field. and the journal was passed over to them because the original founders did not continue. And now it's a part of this RAMICS and it continues to publish articles about all kinds of alternative monetary systems or ideas, also practical approaches or things like that. We tried for quite a while to become more academic and to be ranked and so on, but it's a little bit difficult. And in the last two or three years, it came even into a little bit of crisis because of lacking resources. So we had very few articles only. And then I took over about two or three years ago and now try to rebuild it a little bit to make it a little bit stronger. And again, for example, I have a better platform also to publish. So everything is a bit old-fashioned. But I think it's still very valuable and there's really a good, more than 140 articles already where this phenomenon of alternative money or different monetary approaches or whatever is collected in a very good way. And I try to do more and also to improve. Also in this scene of complementary currency practitioners or community currency practitioners, it's very usual that they start with money as a kind of exchange system. And so we have to start there and improve the exchange. And then, of course, I also tried to be evangelized of this topic a little bit in the bubble itself. That was part of this provocation. Yes, and RAMICS also has a biannual congress. The last one was just held in Rome in November. The next one will be in Rio--yes, I think in two years--where the people of this community or the academics of this field come together. But there are very few real professorships on that topic, I think, maybe three or four on this planet. And the other academics are like on the side working on this topic or additional or somehow from another viewpoint. So it's a small, how do you say, island still. But I think it's very important to keep it and to rebuild it even and go forward, because the other side is not really delivering good results or better results in their research. So I think we can go to the front and present our results maybe also in a bit higher ranks. That's about it.
Billy:We have our own humble, relatively new journal, and we can i think identify on the level of the editorial policy being our editorial position being a little bit different because so many people have ideas about money they come with yeah exchange-based or neoclassically informed or funded ideas, and it becomes a process of education in the editorial space, but not trying to shape. I guess where do you land if a neoclassical straight-up or orthodox proposal comes in? Maybe we can edit this out if we don't want to include it, but what's the position? What do you do in that moment? Tell us, please.
Jens Martignoni:Yeah. Yeah, nice to hear, by the way, that your journal, I also have to have a look in Twitter and maybe, yeah, the more the better, I think. However, yeah, what can you do? We don't have so many of these papers because, of course, this community currency is already a kind of barrier.
Billy:It's a niche.
Jens Martignoni:Yeah, it's a niche. But I think, of course, I would try to talk to the people or send some first kind of editors review. If I find enough interesting ideas that could be confronted with the other ideas or with expanded or something, then I would encourage the author or try to convince him to add or to change a little bit or so on. And in the other, if it's really completely going to another direction, I really send some polite instruction of how money could maybe be seen differently in the hope that he or she will at least be a little bit waken up.
Billy:Well, in your position as chief editor, are there any pieces that stand out to you over the last couple of years as particularly compelling or where you would suggest new readers go to first when they visit your website and look at the journal?
Jens Martignoni:Yeah, well...
Billy:Standout articles.
Jens Martignoni:Yes, we have some...
Billy:Not a favorite, because they're all great.
Jens Martignoni:Absolutely. Well, there are some classics like, for example, the articles of James Stoddard, who researched the Swiss franc against the WIR system. This is a very large-scale complementary currency in Switzerland, and found that it has some really economic impact already on the Swiss economy and some contrast cyclical impacts. So this is some interesting message for many people to start already and say, and also to see that if such a currency has a certain, how to say, issues big enough, the impact starts to be visible because these very, very small currencies. You have also research on impact of such currencies with 200 people. So it's very difficult to find really impact things, except the social side there you can find clearly an impact. But we'd like to have the economic impact. And this is very difficult. But this is one, or I think even two of him and co-authors. And then we have quite a new article of Will Raddick. This is not completely an academic article, but he's a kind of ethnographic study about--I cannot say exchange systems-- in Africa and also in other countries, he started to detect mechanisms how to manage the commons and to common labor and to work together and how this works. And I think it's a very basic thing also to understand money without money. If it's how this system of participation, of obligations, of capacities, of how do you provide your work? What do you get from the others and so on? What are the possibilities and options that the people use or used or still use in some rural areas. And he has done very good, very nice work there, still continuing. And what else? Yeah, there are some articles about typologies. Also mine was, then I sent it to this journal. What a coincidence. No, but others also to see a bit these typological approaches, which enable us to see a bit more across monies and to recognize that it's, yeah, to get easier to this more systemic or design perspective where you can really see, ah, it's different, ah, this one, this one, what happens? And I think these articles are more like from Chéron Blanc or others. There are some in this field which are really interesting and also well cited.
Scott:So I'd like to bring it back to the topic I raised earlier about maybe getting into the weeds of some of the complications that at least I've found when thinking about, when thinking about complementary currencies but also moving back and forth between sort of larger macroeconomic currencies so to speak and community or local forms and I guess I found that maybe I began with a more with a more naive way of talking about these different types of currencies but but over the years largely because of a lot of anxiety and pushback that i get from the world in response to talking about these things it's forced me and i think us to begin to to complicate things more one is to recognize that really money and currency you can't think about it as an atomized entity not only can you not think about it as like an individual euro or an individual pound but you can't think of a money system as somehow just hermetically sealed it it is designed in relationship to other systems that it participates in and relies on in reciprocal and very often asymmetrical ways so there's already a kind of leakage, I think, between any currency systems. They're mutually interdependent in all kinds of ways, which is not to say that a local complementary currency in one city is going to have the same kind of power or capacity that a national or a supranational currency. Which is not to say that a local currency is not going to have the same power and reach as a national or supernatural currency. But it is to say that it's important not to get so locked in the idea that every currency kind of sinks and swims alone. And then, so then, you know, we've thought both kind of theoretically, historically, but also in terms of contemporary examples of, well, what are some examples of where things get messier. So one example has been taken up by a former colleague of ours, Maximilian Seijo. He really, at a certain point, started thinking about Knapp's example in his well-known book, The State Theory of Money, of the cloakroom. And the cloakroom, you could call a complementary currency. It's not denominated in Deutschmarks, right? It's not denominated in dollars, right? A cloakroom has its own redemption system, its own obligation and capacities, you know? But it also doesn't exist in a vacuum, right? It doesn't exist in a state of nature. It's not in a desert and people just randomly come by and decide willingly whether they want to dump their coats or not.
It's part of entertainment. It's part of a whole economy that uses other units. Another example is, you know, I get and I guess this is where maybe one more pointed question I could I could lob to you to begin the conversation:what counts as a local currency or a complementary currency? Does a cloakroom count? Do airline miles count? Do Starbucks gift cards count? Because they don't have the same liquidity that the macro unit has, but they're still being kind of relatively priced in relationship, independent relationship with the macro currency. And I guess one of the reasons why this is really important to me is that there's a tendency, as you know, to dismiss local currency projects as if they're just weird or freakish or like, that's not how money works or, oh, that's weak. It's not, it's not going to work. And of course it ends up not working very often, but nobody says that about video game currencies. Nobody says that about credits for private businesses. Nobody says that about cloakrooms. And I wonder to what extent that's just a kind of ideological blockage that we have that, you know, no one's saying, "ah, you know, the cloakroom, that'll never work!" Well, why not? Why won't it work? So I don't know if you have any response to this kind of spewing forth that I've offered.
Jens Martignoni:Yeah, it's really, yeah, an important, or important points, a lot of points to think about what exactly, or how do we define currency, or where is it exactly? And I think it's in the systemic approach, it gets a bit easier if you see there are systems, and then there are borders, and then their interactions between different systems. And so, yeah, then you have a small cloakroom system working for exactly one purpose. And then you have a large system, which is a multipurpose system, but wouldn't work in a cloakroom, interestingly enough, if you give a dollar instead. Because you give your cloak, then you will not get back a dollar. And it would also be very complicated. You go back with a dollar, and then where is your cloak? It doesn't work. The number, there is no number. So it's interesting that the money or such valuation areas maybe or are defined by some issues and some borders. And very interesting as in nature, the borders are the most interesting part to look at what happens in the systems come together. And I think this will be a future very interesting research field. But the situation now is, of course, a bit difficult, as you said, because we have one system, which is not really true, but it looks like one system of money worldwide. You can buy everything from the whole world. It works. Maybe some small exchange rates between, but nothing more. And then you have the smaller systems like, yeah, they are not really money or what do you do there? And if you have the point is this false idea of this, that is one system or that is no system at all. Usually they don't say it's a system. It's like money. Money is money. That's a hard thing. For my opinion, it's true. We can have a really large definition or a very weak definition of money, like everything that is used from a certain bunch of people to regulate their economic relations, what we call money or something like that, in this direction. And the air miles, yes, of course. Any vouchers are kind of, I would say, a pre-state of money because as soon as you just buy the voucher, go to the business and get it, and the business gets it back, it's a kind of, well, it's usually, maybe it's a triangle, but maybe it's even like an exchange. But as soon as you make a gift with a voucher to your nephew, you and then it becomes more the character of money because it's transferred and somebody else then will be responsible for receiving or getting the benefit or whatever. However, I think these borders, to come back to these borders, This is an idea which I would like to research more, because the transfer to the border crossing of such a value is a very interesting moment. Because then a kind of economy one and economy two do interfere. So and then if you take away this border, as it was done, for example, by this trade, different free trade things and so on, then you change a lot also. And if you have a border--Trump is maybe now reinstalling borders, like doing them. And how do you say them? What's the English word for?
Scott:Tariffs.
Jens Martignoni:Yeah, he will put up tariffs. But I think it's more interesting to see the exchange of the money, exchange rates, This is much more interesting. You could somehow avoid all tariffs and just in a future world, you could do everything by the exchange rate of the different monies to value different economic areas against another economic area. And to balance the world better, you would install different currencies and in a more or less homogeneous area economically. And then you would have transfers between different areas by adjusting the exchange rates to regulate the worldwide traffic or trade. I think that that would be an idea to go towards this instead of tariffs and so on. But however, now I was moving a little bit far away from your question. Sorry.
Billy:That's a really good one, Scott. On my campus, as on many other campuses, we have several complementary currency systems or parallel currency systems through meal plans and other sort of, you know, esoteric campus-driven or campus-based currency programs. So it's interesting to sort of start a conversation in the context of a classroom. It's like, we're going to make a complementary currency and then to take inventory about just how many similar sorts of systems exist around us. And that question of, you know, what separates, I think returns us to a question that was posed, but not pursued earlier in the conversation in the context of talking about the tax obligation. And I know Scott and many in our collective are, myself included, are uncomfortable with the concept and reject it maybe outright that that the system of like a successful monetary system is contingent on. That there has to be a force in the form of the state that can compel people, can coerce, can force violently to use the currency in one shape or form. And so I guess I'm generally interested in your perspective on that question, Because when I think about it in the context of the complementary currencies that we've been talking about, like that may not normally read as complementary, but as you say, have their own use cases, the cloakroom. To a certain extent, on that view, that money is kind of inherently got a coercive element to it, all currencies sort of complementary, secondary, parallel exist at the pleasure or at the discretion of the sovereign. If the berkshire was truly successful or too successful it would probably be regulated out of existence. It exists in the united states in a sort of gray area right and another same with other collaborative contemporary or sorry other complementary currencies. So, yeah, whether in the scholarship, in your journal, or in your own work, I think we have some of our answers to that question. But I'd be interested to hear where you land on that question, sovereignty, coercion, violence, and money.
Jens Martignoni:Money and power. Yeah, it's true. This is, as I explained before, if you have this viewpoint of that money is a kind of collective agreement, let's say in a neutral way, then, of course, it also means that the collective can force some individuals to behave differently. That's very difficult to avoid. But as we have invented democracy and other instruments to handle this a little bit more intelligently, I think the money of the future would include very strong input from the users. So I could kind of participate in decisions or maybe let's say it better. It would make my decisions more clear to me and to the system. For example, the purchasing decisions could be translated directly into systems behavior and the kind of feedback. For example if in one system everybody would like to buy from the neighboring system some very nice stuff, all go there and buy it and there is an exchange and they can do it and then of course what's going to happen is there will be a trade imbalance and the neighboring system sooner or later will ask back to them and say hey listen You buy and buy, but what can you offer? Because we work a lot and deliver. So what can you offer? And if you don't offer anything, then it will get more expensive for you. The exchange rate will change. So you could have a kind of direct feedback if you start for your purchasing decisions. And, for example, also you could implement some kind of ordering system. You could pre-order things to be made for you later or they need a manufacturing time. And by this pre-ordering, the whole price could be calculated. And if everybody pre-orders and we have a lot of people can work on that and then it will be cheap price and so on. And that will be, so you decide directly and your influence really directly and you can see your direct influence in the system by your economical behavior. That would be one thing to make it more transparent. And also, of course, you're working in today's system. The money is not used in that way, that it's really a direct feedback. It goes to the brick, or it's trying out somewhere else. And on the other side, also, a very important part is to decide about the future. All investments, if you invest something, it means you prepare something for the future. A real investment, not a financial investment. And a real investment, for example, you build a plant, it will be able to produce whatever in the future. And now you invest and then in the future you have that plant and it will produce and you will not have another plant. It's that plant. So you decide about the future. And I think that's a very important part to implement also in the monetary system that investing is done by democratic, measures, you will decide where do we want to go really? So I think I started to answer your questions by the kind of solutions, but of course the problems are now there because still the simplest way of a monetary system is to impose it on the people and to use the credit system to suppress the people. If you get credit, you have to pay it back and the interest you have to pay additionally. So you have to get more money back than you get. And all these things should, of course, should be reduced because otherwise you land where we are. It's a power game. It's good to hoard as much money as possible and so on and so on. And the more money you have, the more power you have. And in the design of new currencies, this must be as far as possible prevented. Yeah, for example, if you hoard money, you're a systemic parasite. All the other people have an obligation to work for that money that is in the system. So they have to wait until you spend it. And if you don't spend it, maybe they die from hunger because they never could get your money. And so this is a kind of parasitic behavior and you can, yeah, that should be very transparent in a new system, in the existing system. It's the opposite, of course.
Billy:We're modeling in these complementary currencies the kind of currency we'd like to have for the future, democratically driven, even if it's not that way today. I like that.
Jens Martignoni:Yes, not one answer. So you can have more democratic banking, for example. It's a good step because the banks should be the investing part.
Billy:They're deputized, right, by the government to sort of oversee that investment.
Jens Martignoni:Yes, yes. Yeah, and also this is, of course, a strange behavior, strange thing of our today's economy that the government, at least the government, all people, democratic, blah, blah, should take the future of the state into its hands. But it has sold it to the banks somehow. And of course, then if you do that, I think that's also a kind of secondary effect that the taxes become somehow meaningless or strange or kind of punishment. Because by the taxes, you don't pay into your future. You pay for something and the future is going somewhere else, and the banks are lending the money to other people than the ones that would be good for the home, for the state, for example. So I think the failure of the state is very closely knitted to this behavior to this money that is not issued by the state. I don't say it would be better in today's state to really issue the money by the state, but at least it's a big thing that it was separated from the state. I think you had such struggles in the US with the greenback and so on. And yeah, it's really a pity that it was not, at least have been clean by theory. And then we would have seen where we went.
Scott:Well, I have one more provocation for you. And it's something I wrestle with all the time. And the only word I can use to describe this sort of question that I pose for myself is topology, right? The way that we kind of spatialize money, the way we imagine money as a kind of spatial arrangement. And of course, money is temporal, as we've been talking about. It is spatial, but also we have different models and imaginaries of spatialization. And some might be more helpful than others. And in some of your answers to our questions, what I would say is that you were using a topology of what I might call adjacency, right? Where you have a system here and a system over there. And then the question is the border and where they interface. And I think that that is often the case. I mean, just like the way you talk about, you know, like looking at, in the 19th century, you look at people, there's a coin and it goes from here to there and somebody else gets a commodity. And so I, you say it's exchange. I definitely think that there is a lot of explanatory power in this adjacency model, but I also in my own work have found limits to this adjacency model. And I don't have the end all be all answer. I don't have the, we, we must only think about it in this other way, but I will say that I, I tend to, I, I tend to find that what adjacency leaves out a topology of nesting, of deputizing and nesting of small systems and big systems, opens up possibilities, both for analysis, but also for creative provisioning that adjacency will not. And I'm curious, how does that strike you? Does that make some sense? How would you respond to that?
Jens Martignoni:Absolutely. No, no, you're absolutely right. So maybe I went a bit too far because in the sense that to have a clear picture or a clearer picture, you could use this agency model and to separate first everything a little bit and you see, ah, this is going from here to here and from here to here. But of course, this is not really the reality. As you say, everything is nested. And where is the point of, what do you say, nestiness? The point where everything is nested, of course, it's me, it's you. It's the human. The human decision maker, the person who uses the money, is the multi-agent nester. So I have my emeralds, I have my Swiss francs, I have my dollars, I have my Berkshires. And of course, if you start to include the human itself in this picture, then you will go back. First, it becomes completely different again, but maybe you still can keep the systemic simplicity a little bit in the back. But you have to deal with other effects like psychological or every moment. For example, we have such stories that in like, I think even 200 years ago or 250 years ago, one person in Zurich had a purse with about 30 different currencies, coins. And so because it was always very small currencies like the canton had one the city had another one this and that and this and so if you want if you have to go to buy something you maybe had like okay I have now I have to pay in different currency for the same because I haven't enough from so it was like a dealing. Okay, I think if you would this silver coin, Austrian silver coin, and I have to Basel copper coins. No, no, no, the Basel ones I don't want. They are not good. So give me, give me this one from Paris. Yeah, okay, okay. So it was more like that. And I think this is, this is an important tier where we have to research too, or later on, maybe if we have a clear picture of the first, we can go to the second and look at there, maybe go back. I see it more like this. And that's very crucial, of course, also what's happening inside, because money is a kind of hybrid technique. It somehow exists as a paper or even a number, but it somehow is only in our heads. It's somehow a kind of mental. And it's like a hybrid thing. And so this is a big issue, how we could deal with that. Yes.
Billy:It seems like a good place to conclude our conversation. Jens Martignoni, thank you so much for joining us on Money on the Left.
Jens Martignoni:Thank you very much. It was a pleasure.