Beyond Money: A Postcapitalist Strategy with Anitra Nelson

In order to overcome environmental and social crises, we must move beyond money

‘“Either you repeat the same conventional doctrines, or else you say something which in fact is true, and it will sound like it’s from Neptune.” —Noam Chomsky, Propaganda and the Public Mind (2001)

“If you had to choose one book to read on making the next political economy and reinventing postcapitalism it should be this one.”  —Adam David Morton, Global Capitalism, Global War, Global Crisis (2018)

“A fascinating portal into arguments about why we need to get beyond money.”     —Harry Cleaver, Rupturing the Dialectic (2017)

Many radical approaches for achieving postcapitalism target capital, maintaining money and markets in their visions and strategies. But what if money is the barrier to us achieving ecological sustainability and social equality? After all, we know how to live sustainably but market-based economies which of necessity are centered on monetary values prevent us from instituting the social and ecological measures required for health and peaceful co-existence among our own and with the other species of this earth.

So, what might a world beyond the discipline and constraints of the market look and feel like? And how would it operate to meet our basic needs? Moving from production for trade (for the market) to production on demand, activist scholar Anitra Nelson advocates a community mode of production and calls on us to ‘occupy the world’. Come along to hear about and engage in this lively intervention in current debates on postcapitalist futures.

ANITRA NELSON is a global–local activist and Honorary Principal Fellow at University of Melbourne (Australia), author of Small is Necessary: Shared Living on a Shared Planet (2018) co-author of Exploring Degrowth (2020), co-editor of Life Without Money: Building Fair and Sustainable Economies (2011) and Marx’s Concept of Money: The God of Commodities (1999/2014). See: https://anitranelson.info