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15 - Complementary Currencies as Weapons in Times of Financial Instability

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 February 2018

Jocelyn Pixley
Affiliation:
Macquarie University, Sydney
Helena Flam
Affiliation:
Universität Leipzig
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Summary

Sardex also has similar positive effects if differently. From the ECB’s original aim to club the Eurozone economy (in Pixley chapter 3), we see the vitality of money’s ‘light’ role in the complementary legal currency of Sardex (also the Swiss WIR). A dearth of ‘heavy’ money or dear money spells economic death. Laura Sartori shows Sardinia’s local less impersonal Exchange Network, just for business to business, is a resistance to deflation. Non-convertible to the Euro (the unit of account), Sardex is a medium of exchange (with no interest on negative balances), only spent and earned via the balanced Network. As she says, Weber’s dramatic rendering of the struggle between creditors and debtors puts paid to orthodoxy’s objectification of money. Examples of alternatives show the fruitful, generative if fragile aspects of the money as a mutual promise (of trust), with a third party that at best, inspires and defends people and their livelihoods. When the third party (for the serious unit of account) is taken over by mobile capital, money’s fictitious commodification merely masks money’s social struggles. Sardex is not about purely economic benefits but widens social values, unmasks the ‘struggle’ and broadens local community needs and desires.
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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2018

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