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A recurring theme in studying the commons is how to prevent the market economy from dictating what and how things get produced, how people will relate to each other, and how a given community will be organized. That's a big and complicated topic, but a good place to start exploring it is Demonetize.it!, an Austria-based website dedicated to exploring the possibilities of life beyond money, or at least, the money economy as we know it today.
This theme has far more currency, if you'll excuse the pun, in Germany and Austria than in most other parts of the world, yet it is the surging subtext for dozens of commons-based movements from food sovereignty to free software to free culture: How can commoners protect the value that they create from the coercive appropriations of markets?
Demonetize.it! explains its general philosophy this way:
The dynamic principle of the money economy is capital: money begetting more money. It turns human beings into sellers of labour time and consumers of commodities; it pits them against each other; it splits the world into value and non-value, enchaining, exploiting and deforming what it valorizes and destroying what it defines as worthless; it sorts people according to competitiveness and subordinates “the female” to “the male.” The economic and socio-ecological crisis of our times is its result.
Demonetization, by fostering conscious self-organization of producers, is the way out of it. Demonetization is the first prerequisite for a free society. Money is the means of generalized exchange of “equivalents” in terms of abstract economic value. To transcend money is to transcend commodity exchange, replacing exchange by contributions.
Not all of us aspire aspire to a money-less existence, and some of the projects featured on the website are on the visionary fringe. Still, Demonetize.it! does an admirable job of broadening the discussion about inalienability -- what should be "not for sale" and how do we assure that? Demonetize.it points visitors to a rich array of resources for exploring the topic further. For example, the site hosts a bibliography of books and articles, and projects that are exploring variious types of gift economies. There are links to the Freecycle movement, the BeWelcome website that is an alternative to CouchSurfing (which recently accepted venture capital money), the BookCrossing project that encourages the sharing of books worldwide, and a world map of moneyless initiatives.
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