I just read this great review by Ellie Griffin of the Barbie movie, (spoiler alert) as well as Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1915 utopian novel, Herland, and Taylor Swift's Eras Tour, well worth reading.
Herland describes a 2000-year-old isolated and prosperous civilization comprised entirely of women who lost all their men to an ancient war and began to reproduce via parthenogenesis (asexual reproduction). The result is an ideal social order, free of war, conflict, and domination. A society where motherhood is sacred, and everyone is either a mother or a mother to be and had great care of one another. A society where the children’s education was vital and integral to society. Their religion was Earth and life centered.
The Herland story begins with three men explorers who, having heard of a legendary society hidden deep in the mountains, set off in their airplane to go find it and did. They landed their plane in a remote area and set off to explore the society they had seen from above with beautiful fields, buildings, and roads with “fastmoving” (30 MPH) vehicles. Upon being discovered by the women the men were carried to a room where three women met them who interviewed them to learn who they were and all about where they came from as well as to tell them about who they were, their history and how the Herland society operated. The women regarded the men as an excellent opportunity to learn about a society that reproduced like the animals, whom they regarded with great love and care, it was an egalitarian sisterhood sharing power as none were advantaged over another.
Naturally the men tended to share only what they had assumed to be the positive aspects of their world but even then, the women of Herland were sometimes shocked by what they heard. The men realized that revealing the darker aspects of their society would be too traumatic for the women so did not. The three men had very different personalities but married the three women they had been partnered with who were contemplating the possibility that with men they could begin to reproduce like the animals did.
As an all-female society, they certainly embraced the Divine Feminine, the Great Mother Goddess, an architype that represents nurturing life which, in our patriarchal world, has been the subject of near continual repression for millennia. Herland was a conversational story describing the all-female society and contrasting it with our world that the three men explorers came from. Eventually, however, the men in Herland got homesick and left promising to never reveal the location of the hidden Herland allowing it to continue to flourish.
The movie Barbie was a story of self-discovery, self-reflection, exploration, and courage. It depicted a matriarchal society as well called Barbieland. In Barbieland, where every female was called Barbie, it was believed that Barbie dolls had liberated women in the real world. Unlike Herland there were men in Barbieland who all were called Ken. It was a peaceful society as well, rendered in a lot of pink plastic, and the Barbies oversaw everything. While Ken felt he had no value unless he had Barbie’s attention and, despite his disappointment, he accepted that “every night was girls’ night.”
Then Barbie, in the middle of a group celebration asks about death which brought everything to a halt. Barbie becomes dysfunctional and learns there is a rip in the membrane between the worlds. The wise “weird Barbie” told her, “to fix it you have to travel to the real world.” Ken went along. In the real-world Barbie discovers that women are not at all as liberated as she had believed and struggled with the cognitive dissonance she experienced. Ken on the other hand, discovered he liked the real world where he was shown respect and enjoyed privileges he had not experienced before, saying I feel “no undercurrent of violence.” Barbie, looking worried and stressed, says “that’s not what I’m feeling.”
Upon learning that a Barbie had entered the real world the board of directors of the toy company were in crisis. Having a Barbie in the real world would upset the patriarchy applecart. They set out to capture her and put her back in her box. Barbie escaped and fled with the help of a woman and her daughter and they all go back to Barbieland.
In the meantime Barbieland has been turned into Kendom. Ken has brought back the trappings of the ego-driven patriarchal world, mini-fridges full of beer, contact sports, flatscreen TVs etc. and considerable attitude. As the Kens play boy music, watch boy movies and be generally destructive and disrespectful. This creates an existential crisis in Barbieland.
The Barbies have a meeting to discuss what to do about it and come up with a plan to get the Kens fighting one another. This leads to an all-out war between two factions of Kens. Meanwhile the Barbies, take advantage of the Ken’s inattentiveness, retake power in Barbieland and restore the Ken’s confidence in their ability to govern. The Barbies promise to appreciate and value the Kens. The trappings of patriarchy became unsatisfying to the Kens as the novelty wore off. Thus, peace and tranquility were restored, along with more equanimity, to Barbieland and we assume they lived happily ever after.
What does all this have to do with the Natural Economic Order? Well, Herland and Barbieland were both prosperous societies of economically independent women, and both had their own money systems, though this was not revealed in any detail. However, it reminded me of Silvio Gesell’s main work, The Natural Economic Order through Free Land and Free Money published in 1916, in which women were to be made economically independent of men. This was to be accomplished by making all the land publicly owned and leased to those who would make it productive while all the revenue would go to mothers. German economist and author Werner Onken explains:
LIKE THE SINGLE TAX" REFORMERS of the Henry George School, Gesell held that the rental revenue from the land would enable the state to finance itself without the necessity of further taxes. In attempting to trace the rightful owners of these rental revenues in accordance with the principle of causality, Gesell concluded that the amount of rental revenue depends on the population density and this in turn depends on the willingness of women to bear and raise children. For this reason, Gesell proposed to distribute the revenues from the land rent in the form of monthly payments to compensate mothers for their work in rearing children. The maternal subsidy would vary in proportion to the number of their children under the age of majority. He advocated the extension of this scheme to include mothers of children born out of wedlock and foreign mothers living in Germany as well. His intention was that all mothers should be released from economic dependence upon working fathers and that the relationship between the sexes ought to be based on a love freed from considerations of power and economic dependency.”
So, Gesell, besides being an advocate for free land and free money is also advocated free love!
Bernard Lietaer wrote in New Money for a New World that any society that worships an all-powerful male God is a patriarchy, and that, save mythical stories, there have been no matriarchal societies. This is because societies that believed in a female god were not matriarchal but rather were matrifocal and egalitarian, a sisterhood sharing power, worshiping the Great Mother Goddess, who represented the abundance of life and the ancient innovation of money. The shadow side of the Great Mother architype being greed and scarcity. Lietaer cited three occasions in history when such a system existed, Ancient Egypt, the High Middle-ages, and in Austria and Germany during the Great Depression.
Gesell’s “Free Money” was about eliminating the power aspect of money so that no one would be advantaged over another which was evident in the economies of both Herland and Barbieland. Gesell proposed money issued with a small monthly parking fee, called demurrage, required to maintain its face value. This fee eliminates the ability to accumulate and hoard money as well as eliminating its liquidity advantage over material goods. He wrote,
“Only money that goes out of date like a newspaper, rots like potatoes, rusts like iron, evaporates like ether, is capable of standing the test as an instrument for the exchange of potatoes, newspapers, iron and ether. For such money is not preferred to goods either by the purchaser or the seller. We then part with our goods for money only because we need the money as a means of exchange, not because we expect an advantage from possession of the money. So, we must make money worse as a commodity if we wish to make it better as a medium of exchange. So, we must make money worse as a commodity if we wish to make it better as a medium of exchange.”
Gesell’s idea regarding money were successfully demonstrated during the depression in Germany but most notably in Wörgl, Austria in 1932-1933. One resident was Michael Unterguggenberger, a railroad engineer who had read Silvio Gesell’s book, The Natural Economic Order, and being excited about the ideas went to the town counsel to propose issuing currency based on Gesell’s ideas, called Stamp Scrip. The counsel was skeptical but desperate to do something because the town had 30% unemployment, there were homeless and hungry families, the town’s factory had closed, and everyone was struggling. So, they elected him mayor. Wörgl, a town of 4500, had 500 jobless people and another 1,000 in the immediate vicinity, and 200 families who were penniless and homeless. The mayor-with-the-long-name (as Professor Irving Fisher, a prominent economist from Yale would call him) having read Silvio Gesell’s work, enthusiastically put it to the test.
The mayor had a long list of projects he wanted to accomplish (re-paving the streets, making the water distribution system available for the entire town, planting trees along the streets and other needed repairs.) Many people were willing and able to do all those things, but he had only 40,000 Austrian schillings in the bank, a pittance compared to what needed to be done.
Instead of spending the 40,000 schillings on starting the first of his long list of projects, he instead put the money on deposit with a local savings bank as a guarantee for issuing Wörgl’s own 40,000 schilling’s worth of stamp scrip. He then used the stamp scrip to pay for his first project. Because a stamp needed to be applied each month (at 1% of face value), everybody who was paid with the stamp scrip made sure he or she was spending it quickly, automatically providing work for others. When people began to run out of ideas of what to spend their stamp scrip on, and seeing the benefits returned to the community so fast, they began paying their taxes in advance.
Wörgl was the first town in Austria which effectively managed to redress the extreme levels of unemployment. They not only re-paved the streets and rebuilt the water system and all the other projects on Mayor Unterguggenberger’s long list, and they also built 200 new houses, ran a soup kitchen feeding over 200 people daily, a ski jump and a bridge with a plaque proudly stating that ‘This bridge was built with our own Free Money’. Six villages in the neighborhood copied the system, one of which built the municipal swimming pool with the proceeds. The French Prime Minister even made a special visit to see firsthand the “Miracle of Wörgl” as did numerous other officials.
Wörgl Stamp Scrip
Most of this additional employment was not due directly to the mayor’s projects as was the case, for example, in Roosevelt’s contract work programs. Rather, the bulk of the work was provided by the circulation of the stamp scrip after the first people contracted by the mayor spent it. In fact, every one of the schillings in stamp scrip created between 12 and 14 times more employment than the normal schillings circulating in parallel. The anti-hoarding device proved extremely effective as a spontaneous work-generating device.
In just 15 months Wörgl had accomplished $2.5 million worth of public works while only issuing $6000 due to the high velocity circulation of the currency. It also had a remarkable psychological effect which was that people began to think long term and replanted forest around the town and a bigger water reservoir to provide future capacity. This phenomenon was also true of ancient Egypt, the great pyramids were about the future as were the 1000 great cathedrals and 300,000 churches built by the people across Europe with their own ‘free money.’ Also, women enjoyed more freedom as the Divine Feminine was worshiped, as Isis in Egypt, as the Black Madonna in the High Middle-ages.
Wörgl’s demonstration was so successful that it was replicated, first in the neighboring city of Kirchbichl in January of 1933. In June of that year, Unterguggenberger addressed a meeting with representatives of 170 other towns and villages. Soon afterwards 200 townships in Austria wanted to copy it as did towns in other countries including the U.S. as news of The Miracle of Wörgl spread world-around. U.S. economist Irving Fisher even wrote a book on how to do it, called Stamp Scrip.
It was at that point that the central banks panicked and decided to assert its monopoly authority. The people sued the central bank but lost the case in November 1933. The case went to the Austrian Supreme Court but was lost again. After that it became a criminal offence in Austria to issue “emergency currency.” Many say that this action so angered a large percentage of the population of Austria that they welcomed Adolf Hitler as their economic and political savior.
In our real world today, we have multiple existential crises threatening us, environmental, economic, political, and spiritual. However, most people do not realize that money is the root of these crises, or that money is the governing factor. As economist/ historian/diplomat John Kenneth Galbraith famously said, “The problem of the modern economy is not a failure of a knowledge of economics; it's a failure of a knowledge of history.” And that “The study of money, above all other fields in economics, is one in which complexity, often a device for claiming sophistication, is used to disguise or to evade truth, not to reveal it. "
There have been proposals to change this, every progressive populist political party in the late 19th century had the issue at the top of their platform, the Chicago Plan in response to the Great Depression caused by the banking system, the 1939 Plan for Monetary Reform, the 2011 NEED Act in response to the 2008 crash, and it is at the bottom of the Green Party’s platform, called Greening the Dollar. All these proposals removed the power of banks to create money and made the government to be the sole issuer of money, all of which was to be spent on the collective welfare. Today most new money goes into the Wall Street speculative economy, benefitting the people who own Congress.
There is a nascent world-around movement to change this system. Some 30 national organizations make up The Movement for Monetary Reform (IMMR). The American affiliate is the Alliance for Just Money dedicated to educating about and advocating for sovereign monetary reform which should be at the top of our political agenda. We have an exponential monetary economy that is incapable of changing priorities and a linear materials economy that is finite. The monetary reform proposals, such as the NEED Act legislation, seeks to fix that by making labor and materials the limiting factors on money creation. If we don't have the labor and materials to do whatever then no money is created to do whatever. This will help us bring everything back into balance, environmentally, economically, politically and spiritually due to the psychological effects of a positive money system. Anything physically possible, ecologically wise, and socially desirable would be financially feasible.
This legislation would create a public care-motivated system of asset-money that will eliminate debt and begin to heal the damage done by the private profit-motivated system of debt-money. As Frederick Soddy wrote in The Role of Money, creating the money is “the most vital prerogative of democratic self-governance”. It is a political issue because money is the governing factor.
Nice job Howard!