clare
status. The creation of money was a condition for the ‘extension of individual personality’, and he believed that it was the principal catalyst for the transformation of social life, allowing previously restricted individuals a vehicle for expression. In contrast to others, Simmel recognized the way in which money can be seen as a constructive ‘instrument of freedom’ and outlined its intrinsic power to revolutionise society and culture; because an abstract good, such as money, is demanded in exchange for goods that one needs, the people are then free to earn that good in which ever way they see fit. This liberation allegedly promotes a wider, more diffuse type of social integration. Simmel’s view of money seems particularly ironic today, when money is widely seen to be controlled by governments in the interest of reckless bankers and footloose multinational companies. While Simmel valued the freedom gained in the loosening of ties from production to payment, Marx saw the 16 use of money as the severing of the relationship between producer and his product; he felt that the arbitrary application of price to a good through the process of quantification meant that the labour involved in the production was now lost from sight. Marxist theory purports that money encourages fetishism, and money of itself is seen as an ‘acid’ that attacks the very fabric of kinship-based moral society, operating through the impersonal relationships it introduces. In fact, both Simmel and Marx may be correct, depending on the specific culture to which they refer. Our perception of money and its materialistic tendencies on society are endogenously determined by the society in which we live, and in which that money has developed (Toren, 1989: 145). Money can thus only challenge social relations to the extent that our culture allows it to do so.
Community currencies the reassertion of the local against the global Globalisation of the financial sphere has generated conflict between the value domains of the local versus the global with globally accumulated finance vying with locally generated capital. As a consequence, local capital is dwarfed by its global contemporary - making it subservient to remotely determined decisions to an even greater extent than before. Conventional money thus no longer holds the symbolic value that it once did. In response to the theoretical flaws underlying the contemporary monetary system, and as a reaction to the economic instability generated by the issue of credit displacing production, local complementary currencies are being created. Formalised, complementary currencies are not new - they have manifested themselves in various forms over the course of human history (see Douthwaite, 2006) - but it is their contemporary resurgence in response to modern pressures that makes the study of them more pertinent. Peter North describes complementary currencies as ‘trading networks’ that are created when a community faces a lack of liquidity, when the community is unhappy with the ideological basis of the existing monetary system or as a means to support local independent businesses. These complementary currencies develop and co-exist with the national currency, allowing the conventional economy to function more smoothly. Complementary currencies of this sort come in many forms that develop according to the needs of the community that creates them. The most prevalent community currency system is the Local Exchange and Trading System (LETS), which operates as a pure accounting system of exchange without an initial stock of cash, and is a ‘self-regulating economic