ABSTRACT
Introduction Eric Helleiner notes that “beginning in the early 1980s, citizens in countries across the world, from Australia and Japan to Canada and Britain, have created hundreds of local currencies” (2002: 255-6). Local Exchange Trading Systems (LETS) are even more pervasive, with thousands in existence today all around the world. Local currencies and LETS comprise what I refer to as local exchange networks, where members buy/sell services and material goods either by utilizing local scrip or via electronic credits/debits. These networks vary widely in scale and scope, but a common objective behind them involves building a more self-reliant local economy and a “communitarian sense of identity” (Helleiner 2002: 257). Despite their prevalence and rapid growth, very little economic scholarship has emerged on these phenomena and what has emerged tends to dismiss them as either responses to market failures (Adaman and Madra 2002) or epiphenomenal utopian responses to global capital (Odekon 2006). One rationale for this treatment resides in how most economic frameworks are ill equipped to make sense of the “ethics of communal reciprocity” underpinning these market-based networks. How trading relations can facilitate community building and a collective ethic/identity is not something the mainstream of economics or its critics usually consider. Celebrants of the marketplace today treat exchange as essentially the product of self-interested actions of individuals who give little thought to collective values and ethics (Kozel 2006). On the other hand, Colin Macleod notes that “In traditional left-wing critiques, the market has been characterized as the enemy of equality on various grounds: it generates exploitation; it creates alienation; it is hostile to genuine freedom; and it is corrosive to bonds of community” (1998: 1). Critics and celebrants of market activity profoundly disagree about what exactly exchange relations entail, but both envision market activity as essentially antithetical to community (for better or worse). Local exchange networks around the world beg to differ. In what follows, I first explore Aristotle’s economic writings and how he argued market activity can serve to build solidarity while promoting individual and communal well-being. I then analyze the workings of, and motivations behind, local exchange networks to flesh out their attempt to humanize the
marketplace. This section focuses on how these movements strive to change the social relations surrounding the marketplace to promote specific goals and outcomes. I then consider a range of criticisms directed at these movements, from both the left and right, and conclude by highlighting how the Aristotelian perspective developed here reaches across the left/right divide.
