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Books and documents:
Agustí Chalaux de Subirà, Brauli Tamarit Tamarit.
Agustí Chalaux de Subirà.
Agustí Chalaux de Subirà.
Agustí Chalaux de Subirà.
Magdalena Grau, Agustí Chalaux.
Martí Olivella.
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Summary: the twenty theses.
- Money has become, whether we like it or not, a key piece in human relations
in many contemporary cultures.
- Relationships among individuals, nations and societies grow or dwindle,
are balanced or unbalanced, become just or are perverted, with, in and
for currency.
- This ambivalence of currency is caused by its application: instrument of
control, of power, of corruption... or instrument of exchange, of responsibility,
of shared information.
- Another «responsibilizing-informative» use of currency does
not depend, however, only from the good will and the morality of the people,
but it depends also on the type of currency, that is from the features
of the monetary instrument.
- An biased viewpoint of the history of currency has made the Aristotelian
vision of currency (third merchandise with intrinsic value) predominant
over the Platonic vision (abstract monetary sign with which to make a rule
of three.
- Monetary transformations have shown that the «metallist» Aristotelian
vision is not in a position to allow a balance between growing merchandises
and a limiting material currency. The «nominalist» Platonic
vision becomes stronger through the practice of the growing abstraction
of today's monetary systems.
- The features of the different forms of historic (metallist) currency are:
anonymity, uniformity and mobility.
- The instrumental features (anonymity, uniformity, mobility) of this sort
of historic currency bring about all sorts of crimes with, in or for it;
they make a metric and informative system (multicaptor) of all the significant
facts of each sale-purchase operation impossible; and therefore, they prevent
the experimental verification of any of the economic theories and policies.
- The features of anonymous currency foster also monetization, mercantilization
and prostitution of many human features, even of the most immaterial ones
(training, information, research, health, law, politics, art, sex, spirit..),
while, paradoxically, they do not help to solve satisfactorily the most
basic functions of currency which would be to foster the exchange of goods
(not evils) and services (not disservices) and to allow the equilibrium
between production and consumption-investment in complex societies which
cannot use bartering.
- But currency can be, and probably has been during 7,000 years, at the dawn
of the civilizations of Western Asia- an instrument with radically different
features: personalization, diversification and immobility.
- The features of a personalized and informative currency (cheque-invoice)
provide: the responsibilization of all the free exchange acts (they leave
traces); the development of a multicaptor system of all the features of
every sales-purchase operation; and therefore, the possibility to experimentally
compare most of the economic theories.
- The clay civilizations used clay for a personalized and informative accounting-monetary
system (perhaps an element of a wide pacification among townships). The
metal civilizations used it to help and improve the exchanges and the warlike,
corrupting imperialism. The paper civilization has used clay to control
the markets and peoples. The electronics civilization is using it for monetary
speculation on a planetary level and to ensure the control of populations.
- But while the informative-scriptural-clay currency became slow, and the
uninformative-paper-gold currencies became agile, the electronic currency
allows for better information than the first currency and much more agility
than the second ones.
- Anonymous currency is a fact embedded in most civilizations, especially
in the Western civilization and the cultures which have been colonized
by it. Any proposal of a change of civilization has, with respect to currency,
three options:
- First. Immediate and total demonetization -with the subsequent suppression
of productive specialization and with the almost total self-sufficiency,
combined with a bartering of goods and services.
- Second. The modification of the monetary system (substitution of the present
anonymous and uninformative currency through a personalized and informative
one, thereby demythicizing currency and reducing the area of responsible
monetization to the exchange of measurable goods and services).
- Third. The consideration that currency is not a key subject, and therefore
it must be left as it is.
- The most feasible and positive hypothesis is the second one: this option,
that is the modification of the monetary system, becomes a possibility
and an immediate need (to go beyond «official history» which
started with anonymous currency, writing, corruption and imperialism) hoping
that it will help to walk towards the first option (demonetization and
getting out of the trading system) in another historic state, which we
do not feel probable in the middle term.
- The key issue in favour of the second hypothesis -modifying the monetary
system- is to see if its practical application is feasible, and to value
its dangers and possibilities.
- The use of electronic money, here and now, is becoming also an instrument
of authority and control on people (lack of protection of privacy, risk
of police repression, factually arbitrary taxation...). There are three
options available:
- First. To radically reject any use of electronic money;
- Second. To suggest a use of it with guarantees;
- Third. To ignore the issue.
- The second hypothesis is the one which seems to us as the most suitable,
namely, a guarantee of a democratic use of electronic money. In order to
work it out we suggest:
- First. The suppression of all anonymous currency (to be substituted by
a single system of electronic currency for all: wealthy and poor, rulers
and subjects).
- Second. The protection of personal data (only accessible to the interested
party and to an independent Justice, when a sentence must be documented).
- Third. The socialization of accounting data in order to go beyond the centralist
planning and mercantilist chaos; to balance the monetary mass while avoiding
inflation-deflation; to re-distribute surpluses in a solidal way and to
improve/outdo present fiscal systems.
- Electronic money, duly controlled, may become an instrument to try to solve
conflicts which up to now were unsurmontable: between documented liability
and freedom of action; between social solidarity (socialism) and personal
freedom (democracy); between creation of wealth and redistribution of surpluses.
It may bring about the separation and the free personal choice between
trade activities (profit motive) and communal-liberal activities (non-profit
motive). It may help to complement the information centralization (global
viewpoint) and decentralization of action (individuals, communities, districts,
townships, regions, nations, companies, organizations... freely confederated
according to the subsidiarity principle). It may help the quantification
of materials and energies dispersed or degraded and the collection of funds
for their protection or substitution.
- While the change of values, customs and behaviours is sually slow and it
becomes dangerous to practice from outside the persons because of ideological
or religious pressures, the instrumental change, today technically feasible,
of a hypothetically key-tool, according to tragical historic results, may
help to state, cleaner, freeer, more solidary and liable new rules of the
game than up to now. The central hypothesis is that the lawful State and
the economic equity formally proclaimed by Western culture are impossible
to reach under the present monetary system. With a new type of currency
we shall be able to find out if this is really a key piece which favours
the emergency of a new civilization or if, on the contrary, it is an unimportant
element.
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