Introduction
This book is based on intensive interviews with thirty-seven men and women who are actively doing business using local money. They come from six different cities in Ontario and New York State, and are involved in two different types of community currencies, known as LETS and HOURS. The themes that emerged in the interviews were already part of my own experience as a member of LETS in Toronto. For four years, I advertised in the LETS directory, attended trading fairs as buyer and seller, and belonged to a women's skills-exchange circle in my east end Toronto neighbourhood. Finding items I wanted to buy in LETS was not difficult. My purchases included cards and gifts, earrings, voice lessons, organic vegetables, graphic design, assistance with a bibliographical database and car rentals. The greater challenge for me was in knowing what to offer in exchange. Unconvinced that there would be much demand in LETS for the skills of a sociology graduate student, I advertised a specialty product for gardeners that is something of a household hobby: vermi-compost, a high quality soil conditioner that is the product of composting with worms. Not surprisingly, I had only one regular customer for this item. With not enough income to balance my LETS account, I turned to my domestic skills, which I would not have considered marketing for dollars, even if they were marketable. As one member later said in an interview: "LETS certainly gives you a chance to use those skills that are a woman's skills anyhow." My jobs included child care, baking, deliveries, kitchen service at special events, and gardening. The work was occasional and came about though personal contacts. There were enough requests that I did not have to advertise my availability for casual labour, but on one occasion I extended a special offer to women's circle members. I had just done some spring cleaning and, with squeegee and bucket out of the closet, I offered a window-washing service to those in my immediate neighbourhood. These experiences in monetizing what is regularly, for me, unpaid domestic work raised issues of valuation and pricing, which later became key themes in my interviews with women.
A second experience that is reflected in the book occurred within the women's trading circle. One of the main purposes of the women's circle was to create opportunities for networking and marketing of our products, and generally to support each other in our self-employment within and beyond LETS, whether we were engaged in full time businesses, secondary income-generating strategies, or, in my case, casual and occasional work. We wanted to see what we could do as a group of women to counter the undervaluation of "women's" work in the conventional economy. By trading with each other through LETS, we had the chance to test our products and prices, and strengthen our own sense of fairness before selling more widely so that our network, in effect, served as an incubator for re-valuation.
The more we traded with each other, however, the more we encountered an unexpected pressure to lower our prices: the dynamics of our growing friendships. In some price negotiations I began to notice a pattern of reverse bargaining, when the buyer would suggest the seller raise the price, and the seller would protest or offer to lower it. For some of us, accustomed to signifying friendship and neighbourliness through an ongoing exchange of favours, the balanced reciprocity and record-keeping of LETS exchange seemed inadequate to express feelings between friends of gratitude and affection and the desire that the relationship continue, and even deepen, through increasing cycles of generosity. To hold the tension between the gift impulse and our commitment to revaluation, we had to re-think the local currency as compatible with our norms of friendship and standards of equality. One LETS group in the UK addressed the issue by naming its currency unit "favours." When the matter arose in my interviews it was closely tied to the particulars of the relationship. Ultimately, I came to see the ambiguity of LETS exchange as a creative resource for challenging limiting assumptions about whether something is a payment or a gift.
A prominent set of themes in my interviews had to do with desires, especially desires for bettering one's quality of life and quality of relationships in community. Members spoke to me of their wish to create a world in which a range of personal desires--to be equal, to give and to enjoy others' gifts, to be recognized, to be self-sufficient and secure, to be fulfilled in one's work, to belong--could be realized on deeper levels. This book is loosely organized around themes of desire. After setting the context in the first two chapters, each latter chapter explores the complex ways desires are bound up with the social organization of gender, money and livelihood. Significantly, not all desires are shared or experienced the same way, but all members spoke of some personal and political desires in relation to community currency and how they tried to resolve felt contradictions among desires.
The theme of desire is apropos to a book on money. "Money becomes money only at the instant it incorporates a wish," writes James Buchan in his philosophical inquiry into the meaning of money (1997, p. 13). Another Philosophy of Money, the classic by Georg Simmel (1991), written at the turn of the previous century, also considers modern money as symbolic of desire. Because modern money has no inherent purposes, it represents pure potentiality:
Since money is not related at all to a specific purpose, it acquires a relation to the totality of purposes…The mere possibility of unlimited uses that money has, or represents, on account of its lack of any content of its own, is manifested in a positive way by the restlessness of money, by its urge to be used, so to speak… In the last analysis, the whole vast range of commodities can only be exchanged for one value, namely money; but money can be exchanged for any one of the range of commodities. By contrast with labour, which can rarely change its application…capital in the form of money can almost always be transferred from one use to another (pp. 212-213).
Unlike modern money, community currencies cannot represent the "possibility of unlimited uses" because they are intentionally limited to a specific place or group of users. Community currency projects are attempts to moderate the social-psychological consequences of the modern money system: the situation of boundless material desires and scarce means.
As I set out to trace how narratives of desire are gendered, the psychological and symbolic came strongly to the fore--all the more so because the topic is money. I took the view that money is a "symbolic medium," (Dodd 1994, p. 154), but that its symbolism is not fixed. On the level of the individual, it is a commonplace among psychologists that money is one of the psyche's most effective carriers of projection, and so the whole range of human feelings, desires and defences can be connected with money (Guggenbuhl-Craig 1982). On the level of culture, anthropological studies affirm the variability of what money can symbolize: the same physical tokens can circulate within different economies and serve quite different political functions (Lambek 2001). Money's substance, properties and rules are indeterminate of its meanings, except insofar as these are co-constructed.
The variability and indeterminacy of money's meanings pertain also to my questions about gender associations. Sometimes money is associated with "masculine" attributes of virility, power, mastery and dominance (Vaughan 1997). Nigel Dodd, in The Sociology of Money (1994), argues that money represents "unfettered empowerment," a "masculine" ideal:
The ideal of unfettered empowerment, of complete freedom to act and assimilate at will, is…at the heart of the conceptualization of money in general as a transparent symbolic medium. This is the basis of the desire to possess money, of the very concept of money which is essential to any decision to accept it as payment, to work for it, to save or hoard it, and to be both repelled and fascinated by what money seems to enable people and institutions to do. Other economic instruments are associated with these ideas and activities. But only money is synonymous with them, co-extensive with the very idea of economic empowerment itself (p. 154).
Other writers have begun to explore money's origins in, and associations with, the "feminine" (Crawford 1994). For Helen Luke, money represents the "feminine principle of relatedness." The values of exchange, practised in our everyday paying and earning, are a vital expression of human interconnectedness and interdependence (Luke 1995). Clearly money can have various associations linked to gender. As my examples would suggest, the "gender of money" is most likely related to the gender of the one ascribing gender. This is Valerie Wilson's theme in The Secret Life of Money (1999). Her own research findings and those of others "tend to show that for men, money is power whereas women relate to money in different ways, connected with personal and social relationships" (p. 152). These gender differences in the meanings of conventional money derive from the gendered structure of the economy. I became interested in how far community currencies can go towards reducing gender divisions by expanding the ways empowerment and relatedness can be experienced by women and men.
In the end, the importance of psychological and symbolic perspectives is not only that they show money's variability, but that whatever money does symbolize individually or collectively in a given context is highly significant to personal storylines and larger cultural narratives. James Hillman sums up my perspective on the symbolism of money when he argues that money represents no single idea: "exchange, energy, value, reality, evil, or whatever," but must be understood as plural: "moneys." He defines money as "that which possibilizes the imagination" (1982, p. 36). Its "possibilizing" effects are what suit money for utopian projects and why participants spoke of LETS and HOURS as potential means of self-fulfilment and as tools for achieving collective political aspirations. At the same time, however, individual and collective strategies with experimental money are shaped by psychological limits to how freely people can acknowledge desires, structural constraints on how far desires can be realized, and conflict over how best to realize them. Political desires and strategies, as well as sticking points, contradictions and points of strain are all of interest in the book because of the ways they reveal the larger structures of economy and gender relations and the current scope for change.
Chapter Overview
The first chapter introduces LETS and HOURS, how they work, their origins as a movement, their closest parallels and precedents. In Chapter Two, I present the rationale for community currencies through a critique of the conventional monetary system. Earmarking the national currency for local spending does not go far enough towards renewing the local economy, I argue, because dollars easily leak from local circulation, whereas community currencies are earned in the community where they are spent. In Chapter Two I also introduce the main theoretical positions I take up concerning the gendered economy. "Gendering" in this study refers to the processes through which the male/female dichotomy becomes an ordering principle within the major social institutions, including the processes by which we create gendered identities and make ourselves accountable as women or men within a given context. Economic innovations such as community currencies potentially challenge gendered structures. Not only do they provide opportunities for individuals to "do gender" somewhat differently, their viability as an economic alternative depends on shifts in gender patterns, such as divisions of labour. Effective implementation of community currencies is constrained by the degree that specialization in wage earning is considered "masculine" and "productive," and is differentiated from "feminine" specializations in reproductive activity, including caring work, the gift work of maintaining group ties, and the extensive consumption work of converting the wage into the means of life.
In Chapter Three I discuss the potentials of community currencies to revalue such "women's" work that is undervalued in the market or unpaid in the household. Focusing in particular on HOURS, I show that the attempt to equalize wages by encouraging valuation with the "labour hour" standard is limited by the perception that many men would not agree to cooperate with a programme to promote gender equality by levelling wages. Some all-women exchange networks set out to equalize payment for all types of labour as a principle, but in HOURS and LETS, which aim to create broad-based networks with men's involvement, hour-for-hour equivalences are less strongly encouraged.
In the fourth chapter I focus on LETS and consider the idea of the community currency network as a gift economy. I argue that, although the principles of reciprocity and cooperation underlying gift exchange are considered "feminine" in western culture, enlarging and formalizing those principles through LETS is not necessarily advantageous to women so long as women continue to be held to a higher standard of giving.
Next, in Chapter Five, I examine related issues that arise for some women LETS members in negotiating prices and setting monetary values on their work. Contrary to appearances that women in LETS simply "undervalue" their labour, I argue that price negotiations are also negotiations of the meanings of paid and unpaid work that define women's place in class and gender hierarchies. I identify examples of women attempting to redefine relationships by changing the way they would usually approach price negotiations, and discuss where these negotiations meet their limits.
In Chapter Six, I consider the extent to which LETS and HOURS can be characterized as a consumption-based movement. I argue that gendered divisions of consumption and production create imbalances that limit trading, particularly as the work of shopping in the local money network falls primarily to women.
I conclude the book with stories of those practitioners who are most successfully engaged in the movement. A slogan of Paul Glover's captures their central endeavour: HOURS are a strategy for "making community while making a living." Community currencies "make community" by reconnecting producers and consumers in more personal, visible and balanced relationships of earning and paying. For these members, new livelihood strategies become possible partly because of how they achieve a balance of gender attributes in their approach to work and exchange. Their experience provides evidence for community currencies' potential to reduce gender divisions, and support meaningful work and secure livelihoods embedded in place-based communities.