that it brings to the fore the problem of ensuring that people ‘take up’ a new attachment, and that this attachment draws them into a set of related questions that can slowly erode and reshuffle ossified routines, and orient them towards new possibilities for ‘activating’ themselves into the mesh of Transition offerings.
In this sense, Peter North’s book in the Green Books series of Transition manuals – Local Money15 – ushers a much more inclusive approach to currency experimentation. In the book, interestingly, he pinpoints a number of relevant considerations that ought to determine whether to work towards establishing a LETS scheme or a local currency as part of an engagement in Transition.
For instance, North connects LETS to Transition for their ability to allow people to experience themselves once again as makers, as participants in a ‘great reskilling’, whereby individuals can begin to engage as producers and providers of goods and services.16 In the peak oil narrative of Transition (which is still the overarching theme of North’s book), a reskilling of this sort would be needed for communities to be less reliant on outside provided services. Alongside the sharing of skills, however, North equally indicates that some of the motivations for engaging in LETS can be to meet like-minded people, as well as to experience a sense of community by attending to shared pursuits. For this reason, he advises the setting up of LETS as a project that can best engage a pre-existing community of ‘green-minded, quite self starting and alternative people’.17
As a set of socio-material arrangements, LETS schemes seem to work best in relatively small groups, and they become harder to manage as the group gets bigger. For this reason, it is not surprising that North also notes the presence of considerable overlap between participants in LETS schemes and members of Transition initiatives, as though they already share a common milieu of attachments and commitments.18 Most LETS schemes ‘started from already established groups who wanted to trade with each other: members of community and environmental organisations, churches, people interested in alternative therapies and wholesome food and the like, and people interested in building local ecological alternatives. In other words they are just the sort of people that are most easily drawn into a Transition Initiative’.19
LETS appears to offer an opportunity to signpost the unfolding of Transition through a concrete, tangible project; an early win that ‘manifest[s] the energy in the community’,20 but it is also understood to be just a ‘useful first step’.21 As a review of LETS schemes in the UK reported as early as 1995, it is not uncommon that these tend to stick, at least initially, in the plethora of environmentally conscious groups.22 This remark goes a long way in explaining the very limitation of LETS to draw in participants who might not share these traits and might be unfamiliar with a system of this sort, or who might not already be on a path to challenge their status as consumers by, for instance, wanting to take part in a LETS scheme as providers of services. As reported by Williams, one of the barriers to joining a scheme of this sort entails precisely whether prospective participants ‘view themselves as having anything to offer and whether there is anything worth their while requesting’.23
For this reason, I want to suggest in this chapter, Transition currencies provide a different opening through which people can be approached at the lowest possible point of contact: namely as consumers and users of money. In this lies the specific difference that Transition brings to currency activism, i.e. it introduces an awareness that the relationship between LETS and complementary currencies is not so much one to be settled once and for all in terms of strategic efficiency for achieving policy goals, but one that plays itself in terms of the ability of either scheme to entangle and include others, so as to ensure that the threshold of engagement remains low. This perspective affords a helpful orientation for navigating the continuum of options between the more close-knit LETS scheme and citywide currency projects. In other words, local and complementary currencies have the ability to disrupt otherwise habitual and unreflective patterns of spending, popularising some of the principles that are equally embodied in LETS schemes, to crowds that may come to them in the more depersonalised capacity of habitual users of pound sterling. North, who calls it ‘Garfinkeling’ from the name of a famous sociologist interested in probing ‘taken for granted’ expectations, explicitly acknowledges this disruption of unexamined routines.24 By entering in people’s lives through this door, it becomes possible to usher them into the possibilities for action already available to them as simple users of money, so that they may perhaps come to experience themselves as critical consumers and – more broadly – as participants in an economy that has only as much value as its members strive to keep putting into it.
Local and complementary currencies, and the language through which they are often justified and presented, affords an easy point of access towards experiences that can challenge the otherwise constraining capacity of being a consumer. Of course, currencies schemes also remain open to criticism for not doing enough – for example for not stirring up more than ethical consumerism – without engaging people as active producers and ‘reskillers’ in the same way that, say, a LETS scheme does. Another approach, however, is to stress instead the continuity between LETS and Transition currencies, looking at the orientation towards enabling increasingly less committed individuals – approached purely in their capacity as users of money – to become somehow entangled with the moving of Transition and, from there, set off on a journey across its folds. If LETS provide ways of giving visibility to the coming together of a community, but suffer as the commitment to engage in them dwindles as participant numbers grow and become less familiar with each other, local and complementary currencies address people at the lowest possible denominator, namely as spenders of money.
The Totnes Pound
It can be illustrative to dwell on the experience of the Totnes Pound. To begin with, Totnes already had one of the longest standing LETS schemes in the UK, which collapsed in 2006 for organisational reasons.25 The history of the Totnes Pound in a way forks from the experience of the Totnes LETS, with the Transition initiative seeking more forthrightly the participation of businesses.26 While some businesses (five in the mid-nineties according to Williams27) already participated in the Totnes LETS scheme, this is a long way from the 18 that were involved in the Totnes Pound from the first day,28 and the one hundred and twenty-seven that are listed to participate in it at the time of writing.29 It is also interesting to note how, for the purpose of enabling business recruitment, organisers ‘did not regularly get in discussions with the businesses about monetary systems or about peak oil’.30 Another point where the Pound forked from the LETS experience was in the seemingly ‘trivial’ aspect of naming the currency, with the Transition initiative aiming to call the local currency Pound, as opposed to the LETS unit of exchange that was called the Acorn. This was done to enhance the affinity of the new currency-object with money proper,31 and possibly to avoid cueing only the community of ‘green-minded’ people that LETS schemes would otherwise normally be directed to, at the risk of leaving out others who might not have had any idea about the possibility for experimentation embodied in something like an alternative currency.
Now, of course, the forking from the experience of LETS does not deny the fundamental relatedness with the LETS experience. Undoubtedly, the idea that LETS schemes embody is similar to that of a local currency: to create a localised circuit of exchange that prevents wealth leaks. What something like the Transition Pound was able to do, however, in comparison to the LETS, was to remove some of the barriers that stood in the way of engagement of the everyday user of money in a LETS scheme. These barriers are sidestepped when that consumer is approached through a variation in an object (money) that he or she is already accustomed to, as he/she goes about purchasing what he/she needs. In other words, the Totnes Pound offers an alternative attachment on which to rely for completing an activity – shopping – that is already ingrained in the life of the consumers it is directed to. If we imagined it as a dramatic performance, it would be akin to one carried out in the town square, where many people happen to pass already, rather than in a secluded theatre where people have to make their way to. While the latter audience might be more dedicated, the former one is open for ‘capture’ by noticing something new and different that may interest them into the ramifications of that particular performance.
The
