Peter Joseph, the person whose 2007 film Zeitgeist inspired the Zeitgeist Movement, has moved on or, rather, has moved backwards. The Zeitgeist Movement at least spread the idea of a world based on no ownership and open access for all to what they needed without having to pay and in which modern technology would be used to provide plenty for everybody on a world scale. True, what it envisaged was technocratic and it offered no clear way of how it might come into being.
Joseph is now arguing that capitalism can be gradually replaced by the spread of a network of cooperatives that don’t use money:
‘Integral is a federated, post-monetary cooperative economy designed to incrementally replace capitalist market systems and hierarchical governance with a cybernetically coordinated, commons-based model of labor reciprocity ( …) It is not a set of ideals waiting for institutional permission or mass awakening—it is a system that can be lived into, node by node, creating tangible post-capitalist capacity without coercion, ideology, or dependency on state actors’ (integralcollective.io/faq/).
Because this will be operating within the wider capitalist economy, it would not be possible to practise free, open access. People working within the alternative economy would be allocated labour-time credits which they could use to obtain what they need:
‘Rather than using money, Integral employs a non-transferable time-credit system as a reputation-based ledger of contribution, enabling individuals to access the collective goods and services produced across a network of autonomous cooperatives. (…) Integral functions by tracking voluntary labor contributions through time credits, which are not spent like money but act as symbolic tokens of one’s participation. These credits entitle individuals to access the outputs of other cooperatives within the network’.
A similar scheme was discussed by Marx in 1847 in The Poverty of Philosophy, his polemic against the French anarchist Proudhon. Proudhon proposed that products should be priced directly as the amount of time it had taken to make them. Marx pointed out that others had proposed this before and that it had even be tried. ‘Equitable-labor-exchange bazaars’, he wrote, ‘have been set up in London, Sheffield, Leeds and many other towns in England’.
The one in London, opened by the utopian socialist Robert Owen in 1832, ‘used a new currency which was based on labour. Workers could exchange goods for notes according to the time they had taken to make the goods. The notes were measured in hours. The notes could then be exchanged for goods of equal “time value”’ (atom.aim25.com/index.php/equitable-labour-exchange-2).
In the 1860s Proudhon’s followers envisaged the exchangers being worker cooperatives rather than individual artisans and that these would eventually, gradually and peacefully replace the capitalist production-for-profit economy and its wages system. Others, in England and America, saw this as the way to the ‘Cooperative Commonwealth’ that was once an alternative name for socialism.
Joseph is in effect reviving this, but in a modernised form with the backing of computer technology. Marx had warned: ‘These bazaars have all ended in scandalous failures after having absorbed considerable capital.’ We can’t say that this will be the fate of Joseph’s scheme (if it gets off the ground) but it will involve the investment of considerable capital in the computers needed to operate it and in paying for the electricity to power them. That, in itself, indicates that the alternative economy wouldn’t be independent of its capitalist environment, quite apart from the zero chance of it being able to ‘incrementally replace’ capitalism by outcompeting economically the corporate and state enterprises that currently dominate wealth production.
Joseph dismisses the need for a ‘mass awakening’, but a higher degree of consciousness would be required of those prepared to abandon working for wages in the capitalist economy to take part in his blueprint than for political action by an ‘awakened’ working class to establish socialism.
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