Forms of money power and measure of economic value. The alternative currencies coping with care of commons
Maurizio Ruzzene
Associazione Decrescita; RetiCS (www.retics.org); Email: ruzzene@gmail.com
Abstract
Among the main causes of the current crisis, there is certainly a lack of adequate criteria to measure economic value, and this is linked to the way official currency value is designed, imbued with intrinsic and anonymous economic value. Official currencies perform their function of economic accounting only because they offer a general equivalent of all value (Marx), i.e. because they have an abstract and internal value, but this prevents them from being effective instruments of economic measure, making them unstable and relatively inexpressive of any concrete value.
Despite its importance in the current systemic crisis, the lack of instruments for measuring economic value has not warranted special attention in prevailing alternative currency schemes. This is partly related to a prevalence of approaches that limit attention to the social integration functions of alternative currencies and/or the exchange functions for reviving economic growth and full employment of resources. However, in order to restore the wider emancipative potential of alternative currencies and better address the current systemic crisis, we have to reconsider the economic measure problems mainly from the viewpoint of the links between human activities and the common conditions of existence, or life contexts, in which the flow of time has a fundamental influence.
Keywords
Sustainable development; measure of economic value; Time Units; Care Economies; Commons
To cite this article: Ruzzene, M. (2018) ‘Forms of money power and measure of economic value. Time based credit for care and commons economies’ International Journal of Community Currency Research 2018 Volume 22 (Summer) 39-55 <www.ijccr.net> ISSN 1325-9547. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.15133/j.ijccr.2018.015
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