Modelling alternative economiesat the grass roots

Non-market socialism means a money-less,market-less, wage-less, class-less and state-less society that also aims to satisfy everyone’sbasic needs while power and resources areshared in just and ‘equal’ ways.

Anitra Nelson and Frans Timmerman, Life Without Money: Building

Fair and Sustainable Economies

Until I became a permaculturalist and a keenstudent of traditional Aboriginal economics, Iprobably would have dismissed the sentimentsexpressed in the quote above as utopianwishfulness. In a highly urbanised and prosperouscountry with so many expressions of materialentitlement life without money seems a flaky ideal.It is, however, little wonder that despite itsAustralian editors and focus, Anitra Nelson andFrans Timmerman’s international anthology,which features strongly the Australian concept ofpermaculture, found a willing publisher inLondon. In the United Kingdom over the lastdecade numerous towns and cities have beenmodelling new socioeconomic alternatives,including new forms of currency (the Totnespound is the most celebrated example) and non-monetary exchange. Having driven the industrialrevolution full steam from the outset, ignoringMalthusian logic, that country now finds itself aneconomic basket case. Within just 300 years ithas overextended and overpopulated its land baseto such an extent that it is now dependent onglobal imports for almost every resource, mostnotably food, making the mastermind ofindustrialised countries extremely vulnerable toglobal economic and climate crises, especially inan era that marks the end of cheap fossil fuels.

As a result of the United Kingdom’s poor economicstatus, the Transitions Towns movement has beenpromoting the idea of resource relocalisation,which necessarily includes ecological restoration,community food systems, community-ownedrenewable energy and the slow dismantling of thedominant economic hegemony. In developing theTransition Towns concept in the 1990s, sustain -ability pioneer Rob Hopkins was influenced bypermaculture co-originator David Holmgren’s

work, namely his text Permaculture: Principles andPathways beyond Sustainability (2002). Hopkinsunderstood from Holmgren that it was in thehousehold and community economies thatresilience to global crises could be found.Holmgren’s work has been published in manycountries and has influenced ecological and socialsustainability practices across every continent. InAustralia, however, it remains largely self-published and undervalued. Despite permaculturebeing arguably one of Australia’s most significantintellectual ‘exports’ of the past forty years, thereis almost no understanding or acknowledgementof it in Australian mainstream publishing ormedia. Again, this is due in part to materialentitlement!a never-before-seen and never-to-have-again comfort zone!and what I callhypertechnocivility: the total investment intechnology at the expense of ecologicalknowledge.

My household has been practising what Holmgrencalls ‘voluntarily living within a depressioneconomy’ for many years, reducing waste andspending, applying permaculture principles andliving a form of creative frugality on less than ataxable income. I therefore find the main premiseof Life Without Money!building fair andsustainable economies!not at all wishful in apejorative sense, but manageable, achievable andcritically necessary in preparing for theunavoidable and ensuing crises: economiccontraction, climate change, energy descent,greater social division and aggregating ecological‘overshoot’ and estrangement: in short, theresults of hypertechnocivility, or progress-capitalism, peaking.

It is important to note that in Life Without Moneythe editors give equal weight to theory andpractice. The first half of the book is dedicated tomore theoretical works and the second to morepractical responses and experimentation. Theeditors stress, ‘All of the theoretical discussionsare quite practical. Scholars who are also activistshave written them’. As a movement of boththeory and practice seeded at the time of1973–74 global oil crisis, permaculture featuresstrongly throughout the book. In a recentdiscussion with Holmgren I asked him whether aremarriage of theory and practice is necessary.

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08 2012–09 2012Nº 119

‘Facebook as God’

Mark Furlong

Mark Furlonglectures in socialwork at DeakinUniversity.

Gifting Economies

Patrick Jones

Patrick Jones is anartist, poet and

essayist, food andwater activist and

assistant under 11ssoccer coach. He is

currentlyundertaking

doctoral work onpoetics and ecologyat the University of

Western Sydney. Helives in Daylesford,

Victoria.

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FEATURE

Gifting Economies

Patrick Jones........................................

There has certainly been a lot of talk about this sincethe 1970s, but since then limits to growth warningshave been abjectly ignored, anthropogenic waste hasdramatically increased, and so too social division. Iasked Holmgren whether he felt that in order for ourculture to prepare for financial collapse, energydescent (a term Holmgren coined) and climate chaos(a term coined by Vandana Shiva), there is still aplace for the specialisation that is so central tomonetary economics.

Certainly the lack of connection between theoryand practice has been one of the major symptomsof cultural breakdown and a collective loss ofintelligence, effectively, because there [aren’t] thefeedback loops directly back to theory frompractice. And practice has become more hypnotic;a machine-like behaviour because there’s not anythinking going on associated with it. The more itbecomes mechanised and under speed andpressure within a monetary economic model, thenthere’s no place for any of that musing associatedwith theory. This separation of theory andpractice is a primary form of specialisationpursued in the name of efficiency. It has now gotto a point where it has created blindness, becausethere are not the feedback loops that createinterplay.

Despite all the experimentation in the last fortyyears, permaculture is one of the few movements orconcepts to come out of the 1970s that activelyworks towards creating non-polluting social systemsby taking a generalist approach to life contiguouswith Indigenous knowledges and patterns ofexperience. Of course specialisation (division oflabour) and the advent of money have sharedhistories. Permaculture, on the other hand, movesaway from that particular relationship of knowledgeto economy and argues that being skilled and havingknowledge across a wide range of fields, especiallyrelating to land, strengthens household andcommunity economies. In other words permaculturedemands we foreground ecological knowledges likeour ancestors once did, and thus reclaim, as DavidFleming puts it, a ‘lean logic’.

Permaculture is thus a natural critic of the capitalistprinciple of fabricating demand (and thus fabricatingunnecessary supply) as it bases its systems onecological functioning ahead of human desire. It istrue that money’s exactly calculated value isefficient, but then constructing the illusion ofdemand and therefore debt, capitalism’s other greatagenda, instantly negates this efficiency creatinginstead aggregating waste. By mixing human desirewith capital ideology and fossil fuels we have enabledtremendous complexity, which has in turn accrued anecological debt for which subsequent generationswill pay dearly. In Life Without Money Nelson andTimmerman ask: ‘How many contemporarydevelopments and proposals actually make littlesocial, cultural or environmental sense but areassessed as sensible money-making ventures?’Contrary to its own propaganda, there is nothing leanor efficient about progress-capitalism. Holmgren hassuggested many times that instead of endlesslybuilding barely occupied houses we need to retrofit

the suburbs and turn them from settlementsof pollution into ecological systems. The homemortgage (debt until death, or life sentence,taken from the Latin meaning ‘contract tildeath’) or the debt we owe to the landlordeach week is at the heart of our monetarysystem. Waste, debt and private property aresynonymous with capital systems and all threework relentlessly against the agency ofhumans to function ecologically.

Anthropologist and debt-activist DavidGraeber, in his book Debt: The First 5000Years, suggests that the moral and culturalchallenges of debt are equally important for usto focus on if we are to understand how themonetary economy works: ‘Consumer debt isthe lifeblood of our economy. All modernnation-states are built on deficit spending’.Exorcising debt lies at the heart of riddingsociety of the prime place of money, but thisnotion is often disabled by the strange butnonetheless common view that we have to payoff our debts regardless of the immoral waysthey have come to burden us. This isespecially true when it comes to property.Graeber recounts the popular myth aboutmoney’s origins as presented by economistssince Adam Smith:

We teach it to children in schoolbooks andmuseums. Everybody knows it. ‘Once upona time, there was barter. It was difficult. Sopeople invented money. Then came thedevelopment of banking and credit.’ It allforms a perfectly simple, straightforwardprogression, a process of increasingsophistication and abstraction that has

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Gifting Economies

Patrick Jones

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Permaculture is oneof the few move -ments to come outof the 1970s thatac tive ly workstowards cre atingnon-pollutingsocial systems bytaking a generalistapproach to lifecontigu ous withIndigenous know -ledges and patternsof experience.

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carried humanity, logically and inexorably, from theStone Age exchange of mastodon tusks to stockmarkets, hedge funds, and securitized derivatives.

Graeber goes on to debunk this myth of pre-monetaryexchange, observing how in many cultures exchange wasnuanced and calibrated to local resource availability,local skills and ceremony. In chapter six of Life WithoutMoney, simply called ‘The Gift Economy’, sociologistTerry Leahy presents a case for why a gifting economymight move from ‘crazy anarchist delusion’ to pragmaticreality. He begins by making a defence of utopia:‘Currently, utopian schemes have a tenuous legitimacyin the social sciences. [But] I defend utopian writing asno more fantastical than ideas underpinning every othersocial order’. In my recent discussion with Holmgren Iasked him what relationships he saw betweenpermaculture and utopian thought:

[Bill] Mollison said we might be searching for theGarden of Eden, and why not? There’s always been anelement in permaculture of utopian thinking. Youcould say it is even quite strong. I suppose for me theimportant thing that would distinguish it is livinghere now, reacting to whatever the situation is,wherever we find ourselves, and yet acting as thoughthe world we imagine as functional, viable, possible,desirable, is actually happening.

When I was speaking to Holmgren we were sitting in hisforest garden accompanied by chickens and goats andfood, medicine, fibre, fodder and fuel-producing plants.Leahy brings Holmgren into his chapter quite early andnotes some of the most crucial necessities for gifteconomies as they have worked in the past:

Holmgren discusses classless societies as typicallyreliant for subsistence on crops gathered in differentseasons from trees grown over a wide area.Wildernesses of classless societies are dominated bytree species useful to, and encouraged by, humans. Atypical tactic in breaking the resistance of thesesocieties has been to burn and fell these forests,forcing the population to depend on annual cerealcrops that are easily controlled by armies and givenand withheld by ruling classes and their enforcers.

At public talks and casual meetings in the twin towns inwhich we both live, Holmgren and I, as well as others,have spoken about the importance of reimaginingcommon land as community accessible and productiveearth, and we have expressed this in a number of waysover the years. Holmgren has worked with hisneighbouring community in Hepburn Springs to managea wild urban space known to locals as Spring Creek,developing non-monetary, non-chemical and low-mechanical land management systems. He has workedon fire reduction systems and developed small-scaleagro-forestry, food forestry and soil rebuilding strategiesfor an impoverished streamside ecology violated by thepursuit of gold in the nineteenth century. All this workover twenty years has been gifted and stands as asuccessful model in terms of non-monetarycommunity-managed land. Similarly, in Daylesford Ihave worked with local gardeners and permacultureactivists to establish the early stages of a communityfood system. We began with guerrilla gardening tacticson crown land to drive the democratic process until wehad established (with long-term leases) three networked

community gardens. Two more gardens are currently atdesign stage, including a ten-acre food forest at the localsecondary college. We are also lobbying council to plantpublic fruit and nut street trees throughout the shire. Thispublic food is not based on a private property model: thereare no individual plots, the food is for everyone with thesimple unpoliced ethic of ‘take food and return somethinglater’ in the form of seeds, compost, labour, organisation,teaching or any other material or skill needed for this self-interested, community-sufficiency system to function.

According to Leahy, self-interest is a key component of afunctioning gift economy, the term itself popularised by theSituationists who in turn borrowed it from Frenchsociologist Marcel Mauss. Leahy builds on Mauss’ work:

The gift economy is a reversal of key aspects of capitalismand class societies in general. A selfish interest operatesin the gift economy. Gifting can be a self-centred desirefor pleasure, a way to enjoy social prestige and affection.Producing focuses on use for oneself or known others,whether locals, kin or friends … The structure pays off asa total system to benefit all of us. Gifts are necessary foreveryone to live well. It is treasured as a system thatworks better than alternatives, which have already beentried with such calamitous effects.

Mauss’ essay The Gift (1923) has influenced thinkers ofalternative exchange models for nearly a century, but intruth his work really just makes what Indigenous peopleshave known all along more palatable, more Western. Thefirst inhabitants local to where Holmgren and I live, theJaara Jaara!the only demonstrably ecological culture tohave lived in the area!practised such a self-interested gifteconomy with neighbouring groups, temporarily givingaccess to their land’s resources for the exchange of gifts at aceremony known as the tanderrum, which translates as‘freedom of the bush’. The Gunwinggu people of WesternArnhem Land call their ceremonial barter dzamalag.However, it is fairly clear that gift or barter exchange withkin and within the tribe was not exercised as resourceswere simply shared without register. Graeber states thatbarter across most traditional societies only took place‘between strangers, even enemies’, which is backed up byescaped convict William Buckley’s ghost written account ofhis thirty plus years living with Kulin nation people in pre-colonial Victoria.

The models for non-monetary economies are ancient inthis country, having only had a short interruption in recentyears, since 1788. Within an Aboriginal economic system,tied to tribal law, the land is not poisoned, eroded, mined ordepleted. It was certainly not savaged to the point thatsalinity, rising temperatures, failing river ecologies,catastrophic bushfires, increased flooding or widespreadsocial dysfunction. Economic historian Tony Dingle writesthat Australian Aborigines:

... were knowledgeable and sophisticated managers ofresources who were able to live off the land with aminimum of effort. They possessed ample time to enjoya full and satisfying spiritual, ceremonial and social lifeonce their food needs were satisfied. Nevertheless, thepattern of their lives was so far removed from theexperience of anyone living in a modern industrialsociety that a considerable effort of imaginativeunderstanding is needed to bridge the gap.

Implementing change is extremely difficult while we areindebted to the global pool of money. This is where the

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mainstream environmental movement has largelyfailed; it brushes the edges of the problem withoutaddressing the centre. Change is more possible toimplement at a grass roots level if we live withoutdebt; have access to land for developing perennialfood systems; and many locals, friends and kin areleading similar lives close by. Within networks oflocal self-interest and gift exchange we don’tovershoot the resources of the land and we canactually help replenish it.

Transition to fair and sustainable economies isexpressing itself in many forms around the worldtoday, as capital ideology is further understood asbeing redundant for the centuries ahead. News itemslike this are becoming increasingly common:

Earlier this month, planners broke ground inSeattle’s Beacon Hill neighborhood for what willbe the nation’s largest free and open ediblelandscape, the Beacon Food Forest, a project threeyears in the making. Established on the notionthat permaculture infrastructure brings aboutmore sustainable communities and ways ofthinking, local agriculturists formed the groupFriends of the Food Forest to help realize thedream of creating a public space where food couldbe grown and shared.

The relationship between self-interest and sharing ina project such as this, and indeed the one my familyis involved in through our community foodnetworks, is interesting to study. Typically, ‘self-interest’ as a pejorative expression has belonged toanthropocentric capital systems!resources are nolonger shared but horded individualistically. Initiallyagriculture, as a precursor development to amonetary economy, created anxiety around foodsupply as people became sedentary and laterurbanised and food commons were eradicated. Workdominates agricultural settlements whereas forecologically nuanced cultures obtaining food is oftenrecreational and work plays a much less significantrole in life. Ill-health (bodily, psychological andenvironmental) is synonymous with ideologies orbehaviours that repress pleasure, devalue naturalsystems and foreground technology and labour. Foodand energy commodities become ensnaring devicesto lock people into stultifying work for monetaryexchange. A by-product of this unhappiness is oftendrug addiction, be that sugar, caffeine, cigarettes,alcohol and other less widespread drugs that havebeen made illegal. These drugs used to excess arecentral to the monetary economy. They are, in fact,what helps to drive it.

Progress capitalism is a monumental interruption tolife. It is designed to disempower the majority ofpeople in the world and ensnare an educatedminority with the promise that with hard(ecologically destructive) work, moderated withuppers and downers, one can ride with an elite, or atleast share in some of their spoils.

As capital ideologues see the threat of replace ment,harsh new laws that have the potential to shut downindependent food systems!com mu nity food gardens,food coops and farmer’s markets!are currentlybeing discussed or implemented in countries such as

New Zealand and various US states. Theproposed new food Bill in New Zealand, a newlaw replacing the Food Act 1981 that iscurrently before Parlia ment, ‘will apply toindividuals and businesses which sell orsupply food in exchange forpayment!including food that is bartered,donated or given as a trade sample in the courseof business’. Only food grown at home isexempt from this Bill, which evidently aims toattack non-monetary community food systemsmuch in the same way as the cost of insurancecoverage and risk assessment often cancelsout grassroots activities in local neighbour -hoods. It is another layer of bureaucracy thatcan disable the motivation for real change andthe motivation for people to work together todismantle forms of life that are polluting anddestructive. These laws have been proposed orengineered by neoliberal advocates formultinational seed and chemical companieslike Monsanto to make sure that seed-savinggift economy utopias can’t spread. While thisis disturbing, it also demonstrates the powerof such local movements around the world atpresent. Movements that are making significantsocial changes, becoming unindebted orrefusing to sign up for debt, and are re-establishing household and communityeconomies not only build greater resilience tocollapsing global money markets but, impor -tantly, attend to the crises of pollution whichprogress capitalist countries talk endlesslyabout but do nothing to seriously curb.

The opportunities for reclaiming widespreadecological common sense, long lost to capitaland colonising hegemonies, determine thatlife without money may not be the solution

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Gifting Economies

Patrick Jones

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By mixing humandesire with capitalideology and fossilfuels we haveenabled tremend -ous complexity,which has in turnaccrued an eco -logical debt forwhich subse quentgenerations willpay dearly.

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for our certain path of energy descent and climate chaos.Nevertheless it is a hardy response to compostingentitlement and regaining material resilience, which isbetter understood by those who have long practised alocavore economy based on gifts and ecologicalknowledges. In my conversation with Holmgren I askedhim whether he sees permaculture as a subtletransformation from or potentially a replacement ofcapitalism.

I think the problem that permaculture is attemptingto address is bigger than capitalism. I wouldn’t put iton the same level as Marxism trying to redress thedeep structural problems of capitalism. In Marxismthere is still this belief that humans create wealth,rather than nature creating wealth. So in that sense Iwould see both Marxist and capitalist ideologies stillcoming out of the Enlightenment project that says wecreate our own realities. Now, to an extent, that’strue. Humans have always done that. The power ofthe mind and the way we appreciate the environmentaround us, and the way we give meaning to things,and all of that has always been so central for humanityas a species. But the issue of the material basis forexistence is really a problem of limits to growth!soit makes little difference whether we are talking aboutcapitalist models of material growth or anotherideology. Until we understand the limits of the livingsystems that sustain us we have a serious problem.

Bearing Holmgren’s point in mind, it seems evident thatwithout addressing the systemic links between capitaland its offspring!over-supply, globalised pollution,social inequality and injustice, destruction ofIndigenous peoples, diversity loss, privatising theCommons, exploitation of workers andecologies!everything we do remains a band-aid.

One of the things permaculture aims to achieve is tomake economics a science again contiguous withAboriginal economics pre-colonisation, based on thelimits of the land. I recently spoke with a communityfriend who had just started working with theorganisation Beyond Zero Emissions and asked himwhether obtaining zero emissions within an economy ofcapital was at all achievable. He said that if we move to100 per cent renewables it would be possible, but Iargued that it is not possible to be non-polluters withincapital frameworks regardless of what energy systems weemploy because capital ideology demands unnecessarysupply, with which he agreed. Not surprisingly, there isnothing on the Beyond Zero Emissions website or in anyof their literature that talks about economics beyondcapital. As Terry Leahy puts it in his criticisms ofmainstream environmentalism, they ‘criticise capitalists’greed and ordinary peoples’ selfish ignorantconsumerism, believing the way forward is to spreadalternative economic structures within capitalism’.

In the final chapter of Life Without Money thecontributing editors finish with an outline of what analternative economy might look like:

To achieve local collective sufficiency, people wouldneed to take over the use rights and responsibilitiesfor the catchment landscapes that substantiallysupport them. Local, community-based forms ofliving, producing and exchanging that emphasisecommunal sufficiency are the most environmentally

friendly because they minimise energy and resourcesotherwise wasted on transport and economise throughproviding directly for most daily needs.

This suggests, in effect, a model similar to Indigenouseconomies and permaculture systems worldwide. There isthe ever-troubling issue of private property (which can inpart be addressed by reimagining a commons through theguerrilla tactics of land claiming for ecological food andenergy production), but we don’t have to wait to compostproperty relations in order to begin our transitions. If weare growing productive, biologically complex, mycorrhizal-rich soils through composting and non-till gardening,pissing into pineneedle-lined buckets and emptying theprecious nutrients mixed with water around the food plantsand trees that are growing in our household’s garden,balcony or community’s food forest; if we plant public nuttrees and keep chickens and take full accountability fortheir lives as ecological and ethical protein sources; if wehave access to renewable fuel such as gleaned firewood ormethane gas from our household’s excrement; if we havedug passive water harvesting swales to deep feed our soilsto get them through summer with minimal watering; if wehave stopped driving a car (the average cost of owning a carin Australia, including wear and tear, depreciation, petrol,fines and licenses, is over $12,000pa); if we have cleared thedebts we owe in the capital system; if we have given up thepolluting idea that the world’s our oyster and ceaseindulging in industrialised travel; if we give up the beliefthat having children requires us to get more paid work topay for endless polluting products including bigger cars; ifwe give up the bourgeois ideals of polluting gift products; ifwe give up trying to ‘manage’ environments with dieselmachines and glysophate chemicals; if we stop supportingsupermarkets which are anti-ecological food depositories,and replace all these things and much more step-by-stepover time with either nothing or a local non-polluting alter -native, then life without money, or with much less money,is slowly possible. And given the relationship money has to pollution—the less we earn, the less we pollute.

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ReferencesT. Dingle, Aboriginal Economy, 1st edn, Melbourne,McPhee Gribble, 1988; 2nd edn, Ringwood, PenguinBooks, 1991.

D. Graeber, Debt: The First 5000 Years, Brooklyn,Melville House, 2011.

S. Messenger, ‘Seattle to Create Nation’s LargestPublic Food Forest’, <http://www.treehugger.com/cultureseattle-build-nations-biggest-public-food-forest.html>.

J. Morgan, The Life and Adventures of William Buckley,1st edn, Hobart, Archibald MacDougal, 1852; 2ndedn, with an introduction and notes by C. E. Sayers,1967.

A. Nelson and F. Timmerman, Life Without Money:Building Fair and Sustainable Economies, London,Pluto Press, 2011.

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