The Past & Present Reading Group is discussing, in the first half of 2024, Karl Marx’s Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft) written during 1857–1858. This work is often considered a crucial read to grasp Marx’s methods of analysis, with Marx diving off Hegel as one might a springboard. Yet our group has immediately plunged into deep swirling waters of postcapitalist debates over money. This is hardly surprising given that Notebook I of Grundrisse centres on money.

Money and Marx

In his ‘Chapter on Money’, Marx critiques certain thinking on money by economists and the positioning of money by his political opponents in radical socialist transformation. He draws on ideas from both of the two main trains of monetary thought, a commodity theory of money and a credit theory of money. We see glimpses of his developing what will become a unique theory of the money commodity and links to earlier work characterised as an alienation theory of money (Nelson 1999).

In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 Marx pointed out that ‘the extension of products and needs becomes a contriving and ever-calculating subservience to inhuman, sophisticated, unnatural and imaginary appetites’. Moreover, money and prices resulted in a ‘distorting and confounding of all human and natural qualities, the fraternisation of impossibilities’. But it is even more sinister – ‘the divine power of money – lies in its character as men’s estranged, alienating and self-disposing species-nature’ so that ‘[m]oney is the alienated ability of mankind’. (Italics as in the source.)

Opposing familiar interpretations of Marx’s vision and theories of change that sweep aside money and circulation as if secondary to production, we read in Grundrisse that ‘the money relation is itself a relation of production if production is looked at in its totality’ (Marx, 1993: 214). Moreover, withdrawn from circulation ‘accumulated to form a treasure … as a result of circulation’, money ‘closes the circle with itself’. In other words, consolidated as a measure, medium and potential investment, ‘[t]his aspect [of money] already latently contains its quality as capital’ (Marx, 1993: 216). Money defines capital: capital is money making more money. Once money exists, payment of labour is not only possible but also probable. Money is the connective tissue, language, and unit of calculations driving the everyday productive practices of capitalists in their production for trade.

In Grundrisse, Marx even seems to position himself as what has become known as a ‘nonmarket socialist’ –  socialism is impossible without attending to abolishing class, state, market, waged labour and money immediately in the transformational process:

Strike out money, and one would thereby either be thrown back to a lower stage of production (corresponding to that of auxiliary barter), or one would proceed to a higher stage, in which exchange value would no longer be the principal aspect of the commodity, because social labour, whose representative it is, would no longer appear merely as socially mediated private labour. (Marx, 1993: 214)

This line of thought was never lost. A year before Marx died, in their ‘Preface to the 1882 Russian edition’ of the Communist Manifesto (reprinted in Miéville, 2022: 239), he and Engels speculated whether ‘the present Russian common ownership of land may serve as the starting point for a communist development’. After all ‘more than half the land [was] owned in common by the peasants’ there while in North America small and middle-sized famers were being out-competed by ‘giant farms’ alongside ‘a mass industrial proletariat and a fabulous concentration of capital funds’.

Marx held money in contempt as the seed and regenerative tool of capital, and sought transformation to realise a world resplendent in real, social and ecological values. Such values reverberate through his work and provide the material of his standpoint against money. Money, which is at one and the same time ‘the existing and active concept of value’ and ‘the general confounding and confusing of all things – the world upside down – the confounding and confusing of all natural and human qualities’. In contrast, socialism ‘proceeds from the theoretically and practically sensuous consciousness of man and of nature as the essence’ and realises ‘a new manifestation of the forces of human nature and a new enrichment of human nature’. (Italics as in the source.)

A postcapitalism beyond money

Marx’s work inspired and reinforced my thinking on postcapitalism without money. A value-based abolition | revolution in which real values are the essential bases of both postcapitalist transformative strategies and end-point visions has become an enduring focus of mine. Notable among associated works is a doctoral study on Marx’s concept of money, resulting in Marx’s Concept of Money: The God of Commodities (1999/2014) and Life Without Money: Building Fair and Sustainable Economies, a non-market socialist collection published in 2011 that I co-edited (with Frans Timmerman). The latter is akin to a twenty-first century sequel to Non-Market Socialism in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century (1987) edited by Maximilien Rubel and John Crump. Capitalism Nature Socialism published my article ‘“Your money or your life”: Money and socialist transformation’ (2016), subsequently shortlisted for the 2017 AIPEN Richard Higgot Journal Article Prize.

What’s wrong with money? Isn’t production for trade with market exchange more efficient and effective than any other system? Such questions need framing in the here and now of burgeoning socio-political inequities and apocalyptic ecological unsustainabilities. Global to local consumption patterns vary widely so we need to transform our practices to enable us all to live within one-planet footprints while satisfying our basic needs, neither more nor less. The needy must increase consumption to get ‘enough’ while others must significantly cut consumption and change their life styles radically to just consume ‘enough.’ No novel technologies or practical discoveries are necessary but the capitalist system (indeed any market-based system) is inadequate and inappropriate to this task. Why is this so?

Prices, monetary exchange and monetary relations evolve in an anthropocentric game that we play every day. Rather than alleviate inequity, monetary dynamics and relations engender and reproduce inequities. Practically everyone’s security relies on their monetary income or worth. Monetary exchange is all about gain and loss. We live in a world of privatised, competitive and secret production for trade, where monetary incomes – whether wages, welfare payments, dividends from shares and securities, or guaranteed minimum incomes – do not necessarily facilitate the satisfaction of the real needs of diverse householders. Market-based production does not plan or aim to produce for all people’s needs in either qualitative or quantitative ways. Prices do not, and cannot, embody the costs of ecological regeneration to conserve and preserve the needs of Earth (nature).

In short, production for trade does not and cannot satisfy either people’s or Earth’s needs. So, what kind of system might? In designing transformational strategies we need clear visions. I have applied ecosocialist, postcapitalist, ecofeminist and degrowth perspectives on nonmarket socialism in Beyond Money: A Postcapitalist Strategy (2022). An eight-minute video made for educational and activist screenings, Beyond Money: Yenomon (2022), is based on Chapter 3 of the book. It briefly sketches a nonprescriptive grassroots equivalent-free imaginary designed to give content to discussions of a postcapitalist nonmonetary economy that many find difficult to visualise. This is a world based on real values, social and ecological values, where local to global (glocal) co-governance replaces money as the organising principle of a society.

A glocal model of collective sufficiency

In this glocal model neither autonomy nor local collective sufficiency equal autarky. Relationships within a world of locally collectively sufficient cells would be as interdependent and independent as cells of a body. Organic and grassroots – rather than market-based, hierarchical or bureaucratic organisation – enables efficiency and effectiveness. The imaginary is of a global network of collectively sufficient, cell-like communities each responsible for the sustainability of the local environs off which they benefit in order to live. Such communities would have variable settlement patterns and sizes appropriate to each sub-sub-bioregion capable of sustaining them.

Direct and local satisfaction of essentials is ecologically and socially efficient. Of course certain needs are only satisfied by collaborating with people outside the neighbourhood community. Each cell intentionally and accidentally develops surpluses to share with other communities. Interrelationships coordinating the storage and transfers of such would occur continuously. In short, every community would be relatively autonomous and seamlessly networked globally. Universal principals of satisfying Earth’s and people’s needs would be shared, so production and exchange is more organic, complex and flexible. Cogovernors would accept and deal in customising ways with incomparable ecological and social values, contingencies and circumstances that prices and monetary calculations disavow.

There is no private property, no public property; the entire Earth is commons with clear and universal principles for commoning, sharing land, waters and so on. Secure and fair use-rights oblige users to respect and support the regeneration of Earth as well as humanity. Using horizontalist forms of governance – such as assemblies and accountable working parties from sub-community through to global spheres – communities decide what they need to grow, do and make to ensure that the needs of all residents and local ecosystems are met.

Responsibilities for numerous and various ecological and social aspects are delegated to criss-crossing and interrelating nodes, meaning that networks of power are decentralised and highly distributed. The working group responsible for a mountain range is different from the working group/s associated with co-governance of the water supplies in an associated catchment. Communities form joint approaches to similar or common challenges and share responsibilities and outputs from conjoined nodes of production. They share knowledge, skills and productive responsibilities within their ecological locale, but maintain strong concerns, relations and interactions with those beyond, especially neighbouring communities. Patents and intellectual property do not exist. A globally shared open access internet enables sharing of ideas, designs, techniques, and technologies and organisational innovations. Most education and training occurs on the job with peer support.

Everyone contributes time to collective production and, in return, has their basic needs met. Every household guesstimates their basic needs for one year. Working groups report on the ecological capacity of the local area and capability of locals to fulfil these various needs. Plans are revised and adjusted. All community members plan how to create and care for things and decide who gets what in assemblies and other horizontally organised processes. All year round, they work and monitor and tweak how to fulfil these orders, reporting back to the community at assemblies and through other processes to revise as necessary.

Once established, planning for everyone’s basic needs incorporates past and experiential knowledge of local area and cultural preferences. Producing food, providing health and energy services, clothing and housing, water and so on for particular, already specified, people means production for demand. Money or markets are unnecessary, superfluous. Every service or thing created goes to those who ordered them.

At the same time, community members discuss and negotiate ‘compacts’ to produce for and to receive from neighbouring (or more distant) communities those goods and services that they cannot find or make locally. In these ways they prevent overconsumption, scarcity and waste. Things that are not needed by certain residents are passed onto others to use, to repair, to reconstitute or recycle. Collective stores for emergencies can also fill unforeseen gaps. Goods and active contributions are shared with neighbouring and further flung communities. Production for markets and money is replaced by local decision-making, direct production for demand and distributed on the basis of need.

In all these ways decision-making focuses on diverse real, biophysical, ecological and social measures and values – ‘real values’. Such values, qualities and characteristics go far beyond simple use-values related to the needs of consumers and users. By way of an example, trees would be understood in ways much more akin to the practices and perspectives of ecologically alert Indigenous people, each and every type, size and age of a tree being seen as the source and beneficiary of multiple qualities of its surrounds full of ecological beings and relationships.

If a tree bears fruit, such as apples, they can be quantified by number or weight and such quantities might be comparable with certain other fruit, such as pears in terms of their contribution to the community’s and local environment’s well-being. But an apple has so many other potential qualities for humans and Earth. Such qualities must be weighed, quantified and balanced appropriately and differentially. No false and simplistic general equivalent – such as money in prices reflecting supply and demand (among other factors), or time chits (associated with labour time) or energy equivalence – can compare the incomparable complex of values that every single thing or service means in context. Experienced people who directly interact with their environs are capable of such evaluations.

This sketch of a community mode of production draws from Chapter 3 in Beyond Money. In this model the reward for contributing to collective daily tasks is lifelong security of communally meeting not only all people’s but also Earth’s basic needs. Real, social and ecological, values offer the democratic and materialist terms and perspectives for replacing money as the organising principle of society. Co-governance is practised in horizontal direct ways on the basis of subsidiarity as such power is highly distributed and continuously held in check through accountability and rotating roles. I see this in Marxian terms as offering a context within which people can fulfil their real human potential as creative, active beings freely and powerfully, living convivially with other humans and the more-than-human world.

Strategic issues

Further questions for activists and researchers cluster around strategic issues of how to get there. Chapters in Beyond Money show how the women’s movement, diverse environmental movements and certain Indigenous movements have applied and critiqued money and argue why and how they would benefit from taking explicit anti-money and post-monetary stances. There are similar treatments with respect to degrowth (Exner et al, 2020; Nelson, 2024). Here we argue that emancipatory movements advocating for justice, democratic power, and ecological sustainability will keep treading water or losing ground unless they advocate abolishing the monetary-cum-market system so that they can exclusively promote real social and ecological values in their demands and solutions.

Abolition | revolution approaches not only deny capitalists their material and ideological power but also accept that an economy based on markets is irrational in both social and ecological terms because it is not, and cannot be, designed to address real needs of all humans and Earth. Difficulties with seeing money in fatal terms at the heart of an irrational system as outlined by Marx in Grundrisse – for instance in his critiques of money substitutes such as the labour schemes proposed by Proudhon, Bray and Gray – are replicated today in the many and various reformist options to address monetary challenges.

Typical reforms are monetary alternatives rather than an alternative to money. They vary in how they might be applied. On the one hand, grassroots initiatives include localised (place-limited) currency systems, credit-based LETS (labour exchange trading schemes), and community-oriented banks. On the other hand, more bureaucratic and top-down versions include Odum’s ‘emergy’ equivalent and labour-time equivalence/tickets. All assume that simply replacing the form of equivalence will be constitutive of a better oiled economy.

The strategic importance of provoking all people, not just economists, to think about the role of money within a market economy, and to think about how planning might operate more democratically and deal with the organic essence of our and other beings in terms of values and reproduction, cannot be underestimated. Prefigurative experiments abound at the grass roots as younger generations take the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin for Atomic Scientists Doomsday Clock seriously, set as it is to ‘A moment of historic danger: It is still 90 seconds to midnight’.

Activists engaged in prefiguration in relevant movements either set out knowing or find out along the way all the impracticalities and unsustainabilities of production for trade, of money as a medium of exchange, and propagator of growth dynamics. Examples of such prefigurative experiments include the degrowth formations Cargonomia (Budapest) and Haus des Wandels (peri-urban Berlin) as in Nelson (2024) and exchange-logic-free communities in Germany (Kothari, 2023). Working with real values, seasons, local Earth and people they loosen monetary ties between contributions and output, arranging themselves and their activities on the rational basis of needs at both ends and re Earth.

Set in late capitalism where the ongoing intensification as well as expansion of monetary values and relation continues, many prefigurative activists resist and transform in familiar ways – minimising monetary arrangements, including their own paid work, in favour of arrangements made in real values. Many younger generations of activists are also scholars part-time. They analyse, reflect on and critique their experiences and write up their findings to share. Collectives run on the basis of one purse and/or giving monetary payments on the basis of ability. They rely on voluntary donations, including auctions where collectives proceed in rounds of collections, as in face-to-face crowd funding. They dethrone money.

There is a lot of criticism of these kinds of activities from certain leftist theorists who challenge and deride small scale activities. In working towards a horizontalist endpoint, they do not see that experimenting in concrete ways and scaling out is much more important than designing top down policies and scaling up. Learning and refining so transformative strategies can multiply, prefiguration involves exercising everyday skills of co-governance, of caring and sharing. We need to develop confidence in a range of ways of supporting ourselves sustainably and securely as late capitalist both booms and busts around us. The more that such activities can demonstrate that another world is possible, the more support this line of action will attract.

As we embody our arguments and embolden ourselves, we know that we face the same challenge of all anti-capitalists – to reappropriate our powers to decide how we live. We must create strategies not only to recover control of the means of production but also to heal one another and Earth from the ravages of capitalism. We must occupy and establish money-free commons.

References

Exner, Andreas; Morgan, Justin; Nahrada, Franz; Nelson, Anitra; Siefkes, Christian (2020) ‘Demonetize: The problem is money’ in Burkhart Corinna, Schmelzer, Matthias and Treu, Nina (eds) Degrowth in Movement(s): Exploring Pathways for Transformation. London: Zero Books: 159–70.

Kothari, Ashish (2023) ‘Living beyond capitalism: The commune movement in Germany’, 13 October, Meer (Economy and Politics), accessed 15 March 2024 – https://www.meer.com/en/76457-living-beyond-capitalism

Marx, Karl (1959 [1932]) Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. Moscow: Progress Publishers as revised and reprinted by the Marxists.org archive, accessed 15 March 2024 – https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/preface.htm

Marx, Karl (1993) [1957–1958]) Grundrisse. London: Penguin Books (and New Left Review).

Miéville, China (2023) A Spectre, Haunting: On The Communist Manifesto. [Specifically, Appendix C: Preface to the 1883 German Edition by Karl marx and Frederick Engels (1882).] London: Head of Zeus (Apollo Book)/Bloomsbury Publishing.

Nelson, Anitra (1999/2014) Marx’s Concept of Money: The God of Commodities. Abingdon: Routledge.

Nelson, Anitra (2011) Life Without Money: Building Fair and Sustainable Economies. London: Pluto Press.

Nelson, Anitra (2016) ‘“Your money or your life”: Money and socialist transformation’ Capitalism Nature Socialism 27(4): 40–60.

Nelson, Anitra (2022a) Beyond Money: A Postcapitalist Strategy. London: Pluto Press.

Nelson, Anitra (2022b) Beyond Money: Yenomon. Eight-minute educational video, accessed 15 March 2024 – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOTAvryFjO4 or https://vimeo.com/722765718

Nelson, Anitra (2024, forthcoming May) ‘Pre-figurative Hybrids for Post-carbon Inclusion’, in Horne, Ralph; Ambrose, Aimee; Walker, Gordon and Nelson, Anitra (eds) Post-Carbon Inclusion: Transitions Built on Justice. Bristol: Bristol University Press.

Rubel, Maximilien and Crump, John (1987) Non-Market Socialism in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

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