This chapter explores how people wishing to develop creative alternatives to money-as-usual issued by states have experimented with a range of diverse alternative forms of currency such as LETS schemes, time banks, local paper currencies, electronic forms of payment, and more recently, cryptocurrencies. Sometimes these are small, local schemes. Sometimes, such as in Argentina after December 2001, millions use them to survive an economic crisis.
This paper engages with recent geographical debates on alternative economic practices, arguing that insufficient attention has been paid to the scale at which they operate. Through an analysis of recent attempts to 'fix' economic activity at a scale felt to be normatively desirable through alternative currencies, the paper argues that when attempting to build non-capitalist practices, scale matters.
In this paper I examine the politics behind the establishment of Local Exchange Trading Schemes or LETS. By deploying concepts of the ‘heterotopia’ and of ‘micropolities’, I examine the extent to which advocates of LETS as a resistant space have developed a micropolitical tool that enables the realisation of resistant conceptions of money and exchange, of livelihood, community, and cooperation. A fourfold conception of the heterotopia is developed to examine, first, the multiplicity of resistant conceptions of money and work developed by participants.
This article examines the success of paper-based alternative currencies in facilitating convivial, sustainable localised economies. Based on fieldwork in the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany, it discusses the capacity of activists to create alternative forms of currency that communicate the organisers’ visions of a localised economy, before examining material practices: for whom do the currencies work, and who struggles to use them?
