Guillaume’s blog

Keith Hart on sectarianism in the community currency movement

June 23rd, 2009

This 4 year old video from Keith Hart is “on the money”.

Many people in the community currency business are very keen to put more distance between the forms of money that they devise, the forms of association they are inventing, and the ones with which we are the most familiar and that leads often to quite sectarian struggles over the definition of the relation between the currency and the national currency, whether it should be multiple issuer/member/subscription supplied or supplied from a central fund, whether it should take the form of hours or some kind of currency, whether it should take a scrip form or be entire virtual, and so on, and these things often become a matter of intense debate leading to a kind of sectarian struggle in the movement, which is comparable only in my experience, with that of Trotskyist movement, or the early christians, or the puritans, people who are willing to break up an organization on a matter of principle. And as we learnt in the last session, the problem is less how can new community currency organizations generate themselves on a standalone basis, but how can they be coordinated as part of a wide movement and integrated more effectively into commerce more generally.

Posted by Guillaume Lebleu Filed in Uncategorized

Comments

KingofthePaupers

"problem is less how can new community currency organizations generate themselves on a standalone basis, but how can they be coordinated as part of a wide movement and integrated more effectively into commerce more generally."

Jct: Absolutely. Which is why the UNILETS resolution is so important.

Heather

Thanks Guillaume! Very true indeed! We should try to connect even across currency types: paper hours, LETS, Timebanks, commodity-backed currencies, etc.

Joshua Zeidner

Keith Hart is greatly oversimplifying the issue. There are differences in theory because there still lacks a cogent Grand Unifying theory of Community Currency. One could write a hundred pages of prose on why zero balance LETS are preferable to small scale fiat currencies. This divisiveness is somewhat fueled by lack of reliable data on how these trading communities formed and are perpetuated.