Adventures in mutual credit

Does cooperativism work? Since 'political economy' became a subject in the 18th century, the predominant political dichotomy has been framed as labour versus capital. Marx talked about 'control of the means of production' as the essential political power that the workers needed to wrest from the capitalists. A great deal of activism and political theory continues in that vein: Gar Alpowitz work What then must we do? is all about rebuilding worker-owned coops and similar institutions. We have 150 years of history testifying to their effectiveness. The movement has waxed and waned, but...

In the complementary currency movement most of us have been so preoccupied with our software platforms that we haven't had the capacity to build apps; when apps are built, they are tightly coupled to one platform, making them difficult to share. Building a mobile phone app means defining an API in which all the objects to be manipulated are described field by field. The app and the server send these objects back and forth, and, knowing the fields, the app can apply the data objects to built in templates to display them. In fact the whole user experience is determined by the javascript css...

I just spent rather longer than I care to admit completely revamping the wikipedia article on mutual credit. This seemed valuable to me because that idea has been the focal point of my work, and source of much inspiration, since starting this blog in 2008, and I feel it is a simple yet profound idea which is appreciated only by a few money geeks. In addition I've never seen a definition which satisfied me, rather, people assume what it means, so maybe this article will help some future scholar to better move towards a satisfactory definition!

My last post was read with alarm by some fans of Community Forge, but they shouldn't worry I wouldn't close one door without opening another! While many projects enter and exit the community currency field, the major players move very slowly - since I started meddling in 2004, only a few mild achievements seem worth mentioning. the actors know each other better, in part because we are using the internet better and in part because of a biannual academic conference, and I think those actors have collectively learned a fair bit, though almost nothing of that learning crossed...