Index

Book review

He devotes 22 pages to ‘Marxisms’, indicating both that Marx held different, sometimes contradictory views at different stages, and that many of his followers held/hold still others – but with little analysis of them, or their relevance to present concerns.

He covers briefly the ‘psychopathy’ of Corporations, but does not offer any ideas to effect change. A point he reiterates is the distinction between ‘use value’ and ‘exchange value’, but he offers little by way of promoting or encouraging this distinction.

He argues for the importance of ‘the commons’, pointing out that, contra Garret Hardin, it is enclosure, privatisation, that gives rise to exploitation, while commons are generally valued, fairly shared and preserved by their commoners. The possibility of sharing of the value of the ‘commons’ – the land and all natural resources – by means of Land Value Tax and other resource and pollution taxes, redistributed in part as Citizens’ Incomes and in part as spending on infrastructure and public services, gets no mention. He argues the merits of sharing; cooperation, not competition; open-source software; but regards markets, rather than Corporations, Limited Liability, stock- and currency-market gambling and debt-pressures, as the essence of capitalism.

My major criticism of the book is in its treatment of the issue of monetary reform, in its Chapter 5, titled Planet Earth Money Martyred: Social Credit and Monetary Reform. Its fundamental failure is in ignoring the cause and effect of the remorseless growth of debt due to the present method of creation of money-in-circulation, as issued by banks together with matching amounts of interest-bearing debt. Throughout the chapter and the book the importance of monetary reform is downplayed.

The author implies that monetary reform advocates see it as a ‘panacea’, despite their argument that, rather, it is a ‘key’ issue, impacting on virtually all the other issues of concern to Greens, socialists and environmentalists. Douglas, for instance, argued for ‘National Dividends’ – Citizens’ Incomes – as an essential requirement to remove the ‘need’ for ‘economic growth’ (way back in the 1920s!) and ‘job creation’, freeing people from the domination of employers to engage in whatever worthwhile pursuit they chose – ‘economic democracy’. He describes Douglas as ‘utopian’, and gratuitously smears him with accus-ations of anti-semitism, also claiming that ‘the social credit movement … split into various warring factions’.

While acknowledging that banks create money (which is even now sometime denied by some bankers and their apologists!), he fails to follow through the logic of this fact, remarking for instance that Arthur Kitson ‘claimed’ that ‘debt money … was produced by self-enriching bankers’ – a self-evident point!

His superficial grasp of the nature of money is instanced by his description of LETS systems as ‘barter’, not as alternative money systems.

In claiming ‘Money is socially constructed and has no objective source of value other than collective sentiment’ he fails to recognise the importance for national money systems of their legal status, as valid for payment of taxes and discharge of debts – which gives their creators and other creditors a dominant position in the control of events.¹

Further, in claiming ‘Simply printing money does not create wealth as some monetary reformers seem to suggest. Money, even if it is made in a debt-free form, will fuel either growth or inflation’, he not only misrepresents the views of most reformers and fails to distinguish between ‘money’ and ‘an increase in the supply of money’, but ignores the possibility of replacing current ‘debt-money’ with an equal amount of ‘debt-free’ money – and the potential effects of doing just that!

Claiming that ‘money’ ‘has long been a source of destruction’, he continues to describe the faults of ‘a money-based economy’, ignoring the need, in a complex society, for money, but also the need to end its position of dominance, e.g. by the issuing of Citizens Incomes, as well as making creation of national money a function of the government on behalf of its population, instead of a matter of private wealth, manipulation and power.

In the following chapter, discussing Marxism, he writes that ‘it might be said that capitalism demands, unlike a bicycle, that we peddle faster and faster for ever’, but he fails to see the cause, as well as the cause of its instability, in the interest-bearing debt-money system.

He sees ‘the growth of vast capital markets producing credit’ as ‘allowing consumption to expand’, apparently unaware that these markets are gambling, not productive, and are extracting wealth from ordinary producers and consumers, leading to the growing divide of extreme wealth and poverty; though he does recognise that ‘debt creation leads to new problems’ – but does not recognise that prime among those problems is the mathematically provable ‘need for growth’ to avoid collapse of the system – or for reform of the financial system driving it.

Nowhere does he recognise the development of ‘planned obsolescence’, dreamed-up by American economists during the Second World War and applied after it to avoid the abundance which would otherwise quickly arrive and destroy finance-capitalism, given the expansion of productive capacity during that war. As well as this policy being obscenely wasteful and polluting, an important part of it was and continues to be the growth of the armaments industry, paid for by growing national debts. Derek dismisses ‘conspiracy theorists’, and in doing so chooses to ignore the increasingly blatant manipulation of governments by the ‘military-industrial complex’ that Eisenhower so prophetically warned the world against. (He should have added ‘financial-’.)

The growth of the Global Justice movement, and of the individual and small group efforts to opt-out, are to be applauded, and recent developments in South America, defying US/corporate power, give hope for the future; but again and again in Derek’s analysis, I find it valid as far as it goes, but always missing that essential link to the debt-financial system, or actually dismissing it.

1. See especially The Lost Science of Money: The Mythology of Money – the Story of Power, by Stephen Zarlenga. American Monetary Institute, 2002 ISBN 1-930748-03-5

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