Strike Debt Bay Area Book Group: Decolonizing Money

For our October meeting we will be reading all of Decolonizing Money: The Promise of Abolishing the US Dollar, by Julio Linares (Pluto Press, Amazon)

To change the world, we need a money revolution. Yet the debate over money has been dominated by two perspectives: those free-market capitalists who want money to rule everything, and those who want the state to harness money’s power. Decolonizing Money presents an anarchist theory of money which sets out strategies for collective liberation beyond state and capital.

Drawing on anarchist, abolitionist and anti-colonial feminist traditions, Julio Linares makes the heretical argument for a grassroots democratic movement to abolish the imperialist US dollar as a necessary step towards the cancellation of debt and establishing a worldwide basic income. Linares shows that money, beyond a store of value and a medium of exchange, is a series of promises a society makes to itself – and he challenges us to make them otherwise.

This innovative book takes up lessons from global history and social movements in order to unleash the political imagination. It shows us how the creation, use and most importantly the destruction of money are forms of power that need to be reclaimed through direct action, as part of a radical democratic project for autonomy and self-determination.

Strike Debt Bay Area hosts this non-technical book group discussion monthly on new and radical economic thinking. Our first book was Doughnut Economics. Some of our more recent books have been Hayek's Bastards, Here Comes the Sun, Pacific Circuit, A Paradise Built in Hell, What’s Left – 3 Paths Through the Planetary Crisis, The Age of Insecurity and Elinor Ostrom’s Rules for Radicals. For more information: http://strike-debt-bay-area.tumblr.com/