Hi there!
I found out about mutual credit and credit clearing over the past month or two and super surprised I've never read about it.
I worked with a non-profit worker cooperative incubator from 2017-2020 and over the years studying history and social philosophy came to realize that trying to build a new economy is unrealistic without building a new finance system. Throughout history there have been movements of shared land, communes and worker cooperatives - at much higher proportions than we have today.
Once we moved from industrial capitalism to financialization and globalization, many Left, union and cooperative movements in West were destroyed by exporting industry to exploitation in the Global South, highly competitive financialization where capital markets can finance their investments in companies to operate at a loss to outdo potentially more effective companies - this has gotten worse with companies like Amazon or Tesla operating without profitability for close to a decade and major propaganda movements during the cold war and international and domestic operations by the CIA or FBI to take out, sabotage any kind of economic experimentation.
Most mainstream alt finance in the crypto scene that aims to be more liberatory doesn't really seem to be that usable and most of it has become an investment scheme.
The environment has looked quite bleak. Since I started to realize some of these constraints more seriously, among others not mentioned. I started to think about more pragmatic mutual aid network approaches - not simply random anarchist support in cities but reciprocal networks.
Not simply from an idealist standpoint but from the pragmatic standpoint of building labor systems that can compete based on relationships and compete on costs based on FREEly exchanged labor. I experimented with various homesteading networks with varying degrees of success.
Recently I came across mutual credit and it was like a spark to see the possibility of a happy medium between mutual aid reciprocal trust and modern finance that can be immediately useful to people now, existing businesses to help build a new finance system to help build a new economy.
I'm curious for people more experienced with mutual credit, what are your thoughts on how we could actually transition to a new economy with it and related things? I see how it's possible to build more robust local economies but how would we grow it and other related things to replace our current financial systems?
It's one thing to explain an ideal system bo one has ever truly come up with an adequate explanation of how to go about a transition to a new economy outside of mostly authoritarian communist style transitions and seeing these systems is starting to give me some hope of building things in a decentralized or democratic manor.
So thoughts on transition with alt finance?
