Decolonizing Money - Bangkok 2024

[Music] so I um thank you I originally had a talk about autonomous tees uh or trusted execution environments but given the context of the conference I decided to uh change it and talk about my book uh and then I can give you a bit of a connection on how that's related to um confidential computation and trusted uh execution environments but thank you so much can you hear me okay is the mic okay yeah cool sounds a bit weird from here um so um this is the first time I give this talk at a crypto conference or crypto related conference I'm very curious about your your opinions and how does this land on you um so a bit of background maybe on the book um this work uh started maybe about a bit more than two years ago and it's a lot coming from research and activism that I've been doing around money specifically around Universal basic income or unconditional basic income and also about debt cancellation and so this is work that I've been doing before prior with uh my friend and Mentor uh David Graver who is now uh passed uh but uh yeah this is kind of uh partly dedicated to to him this talk and also to my partner in crime Shang Ro Fe so this is the book or at least a version of it uh it's still in progress um so first I want to uh talk a little bit about uh a moment in time when money uh actually grew on threes uh and then I will go into the argument of the book which is about uh the abolition of the US dollar so that's the actual concrete proposal of the book as a way to then Implement what I called uh a money Commons or in this case a basic income and then also de cancellation system system and then the last chapter is a bit about methods so how do we actually abolish the do the dollar what are the methods to do that so um uh so who knows what plant that is Kaka okay nice um who has seen a cacao plant before okay not not all but some okay so uh H Cacao is the plant that gives us today this thing we call chocolate which is this mixture of sugar and cacao and many other things often grown in U Financial Centers like Switzerland um but um when the before let's say the rise of uh the colonization in the Americas in all of the region that is now considered Central America or meso America so from the south of Mexico to Nicaragua um there were uh many civilizations that use caca as a money as a as a currency and so this was a time when money actually grew on trees there were cacao Fields uh that people would grow uh ferment use and then exchange for imports of other regions so for example um uh the sort of in the the Mayan civilization would use caca for rituals relating to death and also relating to sex so kacao um was often used as a way to build kingship relations between people so say you know you go to a new town uh you want to trade some things then you know or you or you there is a wedding and you want to uh you know give a gift to someone so caca was often used as a as a way to build BNS but also to enjoy the sort of uh this the social ritual together also in moments of grief um when someone died when an ancestor passed cacao was drunk together as a way to like deal with this sort of making and breaking of of different kingship relations no so in a way it shows you how money had a sort of an an element of it that was H in this in this situation erotic in the sense of um it allowed people to to really feel uh and you know the whatever Sensations that they were going through but in in practice make new social ties and social relations that you know permeated the the world of meso America for like about 4,000 years or so so from the old mix all the way to the to the what's called now the Mexico or the azcs um so the other interesting thing about it is that this was a living currency so you cannot accumulate caca forever it lasts probably stored around like two two years there there are buildings for a specific caca storage so it was a money that rots so it was a living money so therefore it was also a money that would die so you know it you had to eat it effectively right so who can imagine today eating uh money right it's unimaginable in our Curran civilization right so uh I say this also to think about um like to reflect back on our civilization and think about you know the type of money that we have created and and how does that reflect sort of our our current situation um so this the mer the merchants of exra exra was actually uh the god of merchants but also the god of cacao specifically for the Mayan uh civilization and it was interesting because many of these Merchants will travel all around the region there are caca uh vessels that have been found all the way up up to uh what is now New Mexico um and also South all the way to uh like Nicaragua Costa Rica so in so many ways uh these these Merchants will travel around through it was what what is called the the snake uh roads so roads where uh people would uh you know meet each other have exchange and really um sort of bring more richness to their social ties by actually saying hey I brought these things from this land that don't exist here I will exchange for you with this caca so we can make relations we can make alliances between different kingdoms between Confederation social forms that were not just uh like one thing like today we have only nation states um and another interesting thing about this story is that um if you if you zoom into the moment when the Spanish colonizers came to uh came to what is now called the Americas um there was this moment when the colonizers figured out the value system that C upheld and so they started seizing the cacao fields and mumma's uh treasury so they went in to the actual uh like uh Treasury and then took a bunch of caca as a way to fund their own uh Colonial uh re like expansion basically and so uh unfortunately then this was used Kaka was then used as a way to tax people uh at like crazy rates that also contributed to the mass genocide that ensued and that we still have not recovered from and so the the lesson of of this chapter is to say that uh the way in which we make money matters uh the materiality of money in a way reflects back to us uh the values of our civilization and so it's important how we make money but also how we destroy it how we how money is destroyed this is something that it's important because as I say in the book we need to claim back this power to both create money which is a power that today only States and banks have and also to destroy money which is a power that we can take through different forms of direct action so so um who here has uh held the dollar or used the dollars before okay pretty much almost everyone um so the the argument I'm trying to make in the book is that um if you're are serious about trying to create uh social ecological just transition we have to reckon with the fact that today we are locked into a system that is dominated by the US dollar regime and so what is the body of the dollar today um the body of the dollar is it's quite a large system I will not try to to say all all of its different parts but I will I will say that um at its core at least within the US um there is um the both the Federal Reserve and the treasury which are the two institutions that are in charge of creating money ising money in the form of debt and also creating future money so the the treasury uh of the United States what it does is that it issues Promises of future dollars in exchange for the present dollars that people hold today so today when you hear about Investments people often say that uh the most secure type of investment is to hold us treasury bonds because they provide a secure uh rate of investment but what it really is happening on the back is that the dollars that you you give to the to the United States are then sort of destroyed but then they give you the promise that in the future you will get more dollars no and this system is based on uh this idea of economic growth if you think about economic growth what it really means is the issuance of debt of an infinite debt that it can never be repaid so this is what drives the current uh problems that we have with climate change extractivism and all of it is based on the Federal Reserve issuing un seramal amounts of debt that are then abs by the rest of the planet and whose resources are extracted through this process so um maybe to go a bit deeper and to go a bit more uh sort of historical about how this whole structure is is is taking place is uh what David gra called the military coinage slavery complex and this is a structure by which states have funded funded themselves into being whereby a king hires an army to enslave a population into Force labor and then tax them in in the money of the king in order to fund itself so this this triadic relationship this trialectic as I call it is really at the core of how even the US works today so the the reason why the US dollar has so much power is because of its military basis all around the world right um it's very hard for even like their allies like Japan and Germany these are the places where most of uh US Army troops are are stationed um and it works a lot through violence so we that the rest of the world is effectively taxed uh out of existence uh enforced by the violence of the US Army uh so that you know everyone else has to work for it no so it's also important because um today we have like locked in into the energy grid of of of the Petro dollar system so when we talk about uh energy Transitions and other other energy matrixes we have to come to terms with the fact that even today the only way we can uh as people buy a petrol which is still the hegemonic energy source in the world countries can only do it through dollars so this is an enforced thing and the who is the biggest consum like consumer of oil the US Army right so it's the US Army both defends the the petrol the petrol system the fossil Capital system and at the same time benefits from it so um I'll skip a bit on the Wampum uh Wampum was a beard that uh was used by the hen Confederation before the rise of what is now called the United States as a way to make agreements and make promises with each other and this was the system that was destroyed similar to how the kakao system was destroyed in meso America to then put the colonial uh the origins of the colonial Dollar in place um so I think what's important here is to say that the there is this uh idea that you know someone someone's uh deficit comes at the expense of someone else's Surplus so today uh the whole world could live without the US uh uh regime let's say war machine but the but the US cannot live without everyone else so there is this Imperial Way in which the US spends money into being in the form of deficits and then basically uh taxes the whole planet into this sort of uh extraction of wealth right um so one thing that is very important to say is also that um there is this notion that uh uh the sociologist WB duoa wrote uh about the end of slavery in the United States uh which is this idea of abolition democracy by which he meant that when the newly released uh slaves were freed from slavery they didn't have any Democratic institutions that would embed them into the labor market so they went from becoming from free slave from from being slaves to being free laborers into a system that was structurally made against them because of racism and all this all these structural things so the idea of evolution democracy today is held by is uh talked about by people like Angela Davis and Ruth Wilmer Gibson who talk about it in the context of prison abolition who say you know if we want to abolish uh prisons we also have to create the Democratic Alternatives content institutions so that we can actually have a society that can uh take care uh of each other in non-punitive and violent ways um and so you know this system is often called super imperialism in the sense that it's a system that really envelops the whole planet countries all around the world have to like central banks of around the world have to hold dollars uh in order to keep the power of their own currency right and so this is the system that we're today locked in uh and so we have to abolish the dollar because if we don't do it uh the cycle of uh Ecco sdes and genocides that we're seeing in the world would only deepen and continue as the US keeps funneling weapons and keeps funneling uh Finance uh money into into uh regimes that are like fascistic and also uh into destroy the what's left of uh the biodiversity in life and so um yeah that's why we should abolish the dollar um so then the maybe maybe also as a bit of like a theoretical background since we're in a conference about the commons um um there is this part in the book when I talk about uh this opposition of two systems of value if you may uh between the system of life so how we reproduce life every day how we take care of ourselves take care of each other uh how we uh take care of the environments that we're in uh how you know life has this sort of autopoetic way of reproducing itself um in many interdependent ways and the system of value of capital which is really based on this idea of money ER using money to make more money basically the the famous MCM Prime in the idea of you use money you buy Commodities in order to make more money right um and so this two systems are ped against each other and this is something we have to reckon with when I hear a lot of the conferences today A lot of people are thinking about how could we use the soall public goods or Commons in order to make Capital but actually this is not how it works the commons are not uh Capital they are a a a a social sphere that is created by by a a compy set of actors not only humans that allows for life to flourish in plural ways capital is the opposite Capital creates monocultures through enclosing uh things that were before Commons making them into Commodities and then selling them for a price including our own bodies right we sell ourselves for money for wages in order to live so we are today uh sort of in a system where it's not just the debt that is created by let's say the US uh system but also through uh our wages so what I'm arguing for in the book is to say that what if we were to commodify money this is a word i i invented uh but what if we were to make money a Commons in the sense of forgiving the debts canceling the debts that today hold us you know into so much suffering in the world uh but also in the form of a what I call a liberatory basic income so an an income that is a representation of our you know a common share of the wealth of the planet without assuming private property so what I'm arguing for here is that if you want to go beyond both states and capital we have to reckon with the fact that you know first we have to release ourselves from wage labor and really move into a different Paradigm a different civilization but at the same time uh you know ensure that the system can be uh Democratic and so um I will maybe talk touch a bit about on the crypto side so I I made a project uh some years ago called circles Ubi and we run a pilot in Berlin where we self-organized a basic income uh experiment where people would get a local currency and then use it to buy and sell uh the things that they needed from food to health care and and many other things now one of the things that was interesting about it was that circles was an application built on top of a blockchain That was supposed to be decentralized but it eventually got bought by a specific uh you know group of people so it made me really think a lot about the power dynamics at play if we want to democratize money and we're using an infrastructure that is uh a feudalistic in the sense that it's control by a plutocratic elite that have most of the capital and power to vote and make decisions then we are just swapping one master for another so it made me really think a lot about the politics of the technology and the infrastructure uh and like what do we actually want do we want to have some sort of decentralized feudal system on the digital realm or do we want to have something that is more local democratically run and so that's a question of not just of Technology but of politics of how do we want to organize life in a different way and so it's also important because um one of the sort of stories that came from the from the basic income pilot was that when we talking to Farmers they often have the problem that uh they are competing against Imports coming from let's say Spain so the tomatoes that they would produce are more expensive than the ones that come from the periphery in uh in Spain so there is this imperialistic uh way in which the ER the economy is is created where cheap Imports flow towards the center and the farmers in the center like say Brandenburg or the areas around Berlin are uh made precarious no so how can we build autonomy at the local level in Europe in the us so that the Thrive for imperialism also stops this is one of the outcomes or that came out of the of the pilot let's say from some of the experiences and I only have a minute so I have here some methods about how to actually abolish the dollar but because I don't have time uh we can leave it for the questions thank you very much thank you so much hello thank you so much for uh your presentation very insightful now in the beginning you mentioned or you kind of assumed that you know there are nation states yet when when you look at uh which places in the world which territories to use a more general term are the most subjected to the United States dollar um Power and imperialism then these are often times subnational or quasi national jurisdiction such as um let's say the the Martia Islands or um really small places that kind of are bullied into a free association now these places um contribute to the power of the um US Dollar by having like a gray area where money can come in and out so that the legitimacy of the United States dollar is held up um without kind of infringing on the Integrity now how would you like translate this system that is built on or for a large s like economy onto something that is much smaller and much more secluded um where you have to rely on exports and imports coming in thank you so I think it goes back to this idea of building economic democracy and autonomy at each level like do Europe uh for example depends on the rest of the world in order to sustain itself so how could we actually build the means of subsistence locally in even places like Europe so that this Thrive for imperialist expansion doesn't happen in a let's say a non-consensual way or in the violent way uh but actually based on Exchange that is rooted in mutual interdependence that is more horizontal right so it's not being against like international trade but the terms of it the terms of trade is really what matters no um yeah and my book is on pre-order you can pre-order it now if you want decolonizing money and I'll be around this day so if you want to ask me more questions I'm I'm happy to be here thank thank you so much thank you thank you [Music]