by Summary:
The Individual Anyone can create their own credit notes – it’s getting them accepted that is the problem. As individuals we can only back credit issued with our own personal capabilities to create. So a note from an artisan baker who lives nearby is probably a good bet. But in late stage capitalism most of our personal contributions to value-added are selected/ combined/ subsumed into the capitalist value-creation function. In fact this selection and combination is the core rationale for capitalism – the ability to create something bigger than the sum of its parts and cash in the resulting surplus value [extraction of economic rent]. The appeal of this person-as-primary-credit-creator ideology derives to a large extent from the cult of the heroic individual. It represents an atomistic
Topics:
Mike Norman considers the following as important: community credit, mutual credit
This could be interesting, too:
The Individual Anyone can create their own credit notes – it’s getting them accepted that is the problem. As individuals we can only back credit issued with our own personal capabilities to create. So a note from an artisan baker who lives nearby is probably a good bet. But in late stage capitalism most of our personal contributions to value-added are selected/ combined/ subsumed into the capitalist value-creation function. In fact this selection and combination is the core rationale for capitalism – the ability to create something bigger than the sum of its parts and cash in the resulting surplus value [extraction of economic rent]. The appeal of this person-as-primary-credit-creator ideology derives to a large extent from the cult of the heroic individual. It represents an atomistic
Topics:
Mike Norman considers the following as important: community credit, mutual credit
This could be interesting, too:
The Individual
Anyone can create their own credit notes – it’s getting them accepted that is the problem. As individuals we can only back credit issued with our own personal capabilities to create. So a note from an artisan baker who lives nearby is probably a good bet. But in late stage capitalism most of our personal contributions to value-added are selected/ combined/ subsumed into the capitalist value-creation function. In fact this selection and combination is the core rationale for capitalism – the ability to create something bigger than the sum of its parts and cash in the resulting surplus value [extraction of economic rent].
The appeal of this person-as-primary-credit-creator ideology derives to a large extent from the cult of the heroic individual. It represents an atomistic view of society informed by the rampant competition/ evolutionary school of economic thought. It is interesting only in the sense that all value creation is grounded in individual contributions and that recognising those contributions in some way is important.
Community/ Mutual Credit
Here the ideology is one of communal support. No man is an island ; we all need support at different stages of our lives and careers. So the community manages in some way its collective resources in order to smooth the path. Note that this may be more or less socialist in its nature; and the community may be of individuals or of businesses or both.
We can characterise this approach as a credit commons [3]. And for a sustainable commons a key success factor is to specify boundaries – who is in and who is out (and thus under what circumstances a party can join or be asked to leave). This turns out to be a non-trivial governance task and leads into consideration of wider ‘digital democracy’ issues.
Much of the thinking behind mutual credit dates back centuries but more recent instantiations have been reinvigorated by emerging seductive digital ‘solutions’. At their best they can facilitate information and experience sharing; at their worst they relegate decision making to algorithms with no room for flexibility or judgement as circumstances change.
Mutual credit however remains the purest form of credit creation because it satisfies the core test set out by Douthwaite in The Ecology of Money – that a currency should be controlled by its users [4]
FEASTA
Ideologies of credit creation
Graham Barnes