CULTURE

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The rise and fall of the great bartering network in Argentina

From the earth, a village is born

If you only knew: insiderism and Secrets

The rise and fall of the great bartering network in Argentina

By Marcela Valente

Buenos Aires, Argentina, Nov. 6 (IPS)— Argentina’s economic collapse and the deterioration of its social fabric fuelled, in little over a year, an unprecedented boom of a new bartering system, which shrank just as quickly due to inflation, speculation, scarcities, counterfeit bartering credits, and a plunge in membership.

The Barter Club began to function in Argentina in 1995 on the initiative of a group of environmentalists and professionals. Just 30 “prosumers” (producer-consumers) were involved in the informal trading network at the start.

But in 1998, when recession set in and unemployment began to soar from an already high level, the barter system started to grow exponentially.

The organizers of the new network issued “credits,” a pseudo-currency used to make up the difference when goods or services of disparate values are swapped. More and more “prosumers” began to join in, from bricklayers to mechanics, electricians and computer technicians, who offered a broad range of services in exchange for food or clothing.

The network soon began to gain prestige, attracting doctors, psychologists, dentists, architects, and translators.

Members even began to barter cars, real estate like homes and land, tourist services, and even loans for small businesses.

At its peak, nearly three million prosumers were involved in the system, which meant it benefited around 10 million people, counting the families of each member.

Some 8,000 bartering clubs were operating around the country when the system began to send out alarm signals.

“In October 2001, there was a flood of people who had been driven into poverty by the crisis and found no state social safety net, so the clubs decided to open their doors to the massive inflow of new members,” said Rubén Ravena, one of the founders of the Barter Club.

In the past four years of recession, the poverty rate has ballooned from 31 to 53 percent of the population of 37 million, and unemployment has climbed from 14 to 21.4 percent, according to official figures.

Although taking a course on “bartering based on the concept of solidarity” and having a product or service to offer were the initial requisites for joining, the requirements began to be relaxed due to the desperate situation created by the economic crisis, which gave rise to asymmetries in the system.

Many new members were given a loan of 50 credits to get started, but they failed to produce anything or offer any service.

“This problem continued for around six months, until March, when the government began to provide new assistance in the form of a stipend for unemployed heads of households, and a lot of the new members left, leaving excess credits circulating in a parasitic manner,” said Ravena.

But that would not have had such major repercussions if other problems had not cropped up as well.

The coordinators of what was by now an enormous network began to detect counterfeit credits — a problem that took on such magnitude that nearly 90 percent of the credits circulating were forgeries.

They were forced to begin issuing a new pseudo-currency, under strict security measures to prevent falsifications. But the damage to the credibility of the system was irreversible.

The credits declined in value and inflation set in. “It was as if we had been inoculated with a virus,” said Ravena.

Another calamity was a robbery in the central headquarters, in the Buenos Aires suburb of Quilmes, on the south side of the capital. “In the robbery we lost much of our monetary backing,” he explained.

Between the forgeries and the excess credits circulating, prices shot up to as much as 40 times the initial value of a product. “Credits began to be sold by the kilo,” said Ravena.

At the same time, large producers participating in the clubs began to sell merchandise on a large-scale outside of the system, triggering shortages.

The network’s organizers also uncovered speculative maneuvers on the part of unscrupulous members, who hoarded credits or sold them near the clubs.

“I was selling my cakes, and was doing well with the credits,” said Cecilia Vázquez, a former prosumer. “But at one point I realized that I couldn’t use them to buy any of the ingredients I needed to continue baking cakes, because there was nothing to buy, and I had to start using up my pesos.”

That sharp turnabout, which began to be seen in the middle of this year, reduced the number of habitual prosumers to 250,000, the total number of those participating in the system to one million, and the number of clubs to around 3,000, said Ravena.

“There was a point at which the clubs were mushrooming like laundromats and other fads. Every neighborhood was setting up its own, and there were often several within the space of just a few blocks,” he said.

“At that time, the members were supporting millions of people who had nowhere else to go,” people who have since left and now depend on the meager aid provided by the state.

Despite all that has happened, Ravena sees the crisis that has swept through the bartering system as part of a growing process.

The key to recovery, he said, is to return to the system’s origins, when the network had a limited number of prosumers who were concerned about creating an alternative economy based on the concept of solidarity that encouraged people to work and helped shore up the damaged self-esteem of the unemployed.

The rules for membership are once again strict. Every prosumer must produce a good or offer a service, and no one receives loans enabling them to join.

All members must defend the value of the credit, at one credit=one peso, to prevent inflation and speculation, and any sales of credits must be reported.

“We never got the parliament to pass a bill on bartering that has been shelved in Congress for some time. But at least we registered the design of our new currency as intellectual property, which means that if the police find anyone selling our credits, they can be arrested,” said Ravena.

The new controls should thus give humanity’s oldest system of trade a new lease on life in Latin America’s third-largest economy.

From the earth, a village is born

By Brendan Conley

Mun Yuen Village, Thailand, (AGR) Nov. 7— In the mountains of northeastern Thailand, a quiet revolution is taking place. A diverse group of people who came together to construct a sustainable village has found that they are building much more. The group includes Buddhist monks, Thai students and professionals, villagers displaced by development projects, and farang -­ Westerners -­ several hundred people in all. They’re spending a month in rural Chaiyaphum province, building Mun Yuen, a sustainable, self-sufficient community, and the nation’s first earthen village.

A previous sustainable building project, at Joe’s Organic Farm in northeastern Thailand, resulted in a structure that would serve as village meeting and classroom space as well as lodging for visitors to the site.

“We are building a community, not just houses,” said Thanai Uthaipattrakoon. He quit his job as a conventional architect to teach (and learn)
natural building. “I want people to know that they can design and build their own home,” he said.

As he spoke, a group of saffron-robed monks passed by with wheelbarrows full of earth. They deposited their load in a shallow pit where young, sunburned Americans and Europeans joined Thai students mixing clay mortar with their bare feet. Above them, a local villager balanced atop a wall of adobe as he wiggled the last earthen brick into place.

“This is the way to learn about natural building,” said Uthaipattrakoon, looking around. “You learn by doing, by really experiencing it. At first I thought my role would be to help design the buildings, but now I am really getting my hands dirty, working the hardest I have ever worked.” Uthaipattrakoon smiled as he looked up at the first half-finished building, a community kitchen and meeting hall.

“This building is beautiful,” he said. “But in a way, the structure is not as important as the knowledge and spirit that we are building together.”

Bahn din

As Thailand moves further down the path of Western development, the need for alternatives is becoming hard to ignore. Bangkok, one of the world’s most polluted cities, is a sprawling, haphazard metropolis with massive daily traffic jams and few open spaces. Corruption pervades the country’s military-dominated government, and International Monetary Fund (IMF)-sponsored mega-development projects are extracting Siam’s natural resources, leaving polluted air and water behind. As the country becomes deforested, its famed biodiversity is rapidly eroding.

For Janell Kapoor, one alternative is obvious: build with mud.

“I think we all have an awareness that the world we’re living in doesn’t make sense,” said Kapoor, an Asheville, North Carolina-based natural building instructor. “Whether it’s being stuck in traffic, having no time to play with your kids, or seeing violence on television,” we all realize that something is not right.” For Kapoor, these small imbalances are symptoms of the accelerating spread of capitalism and consumerism -­ the process of corporate globalization.

“The work we’re doing here is part of what you might call a localization movement,” said Kapoor. “Look at a conventional house in the US or Europe, and try to track every part of that house -­ where the materials came from, how they were created, how all the machines and tools were made. By the time you’re done, you’ll have traveled the world, strip-mined mountains, clear-cut forests, exploited workers, and polluted the earth, all to build a house.

“On the other hand, look at how we’re building these houses,” said Kapoor. “We’re using clay from right next to the site, bamboo and rice husks harvested nearby, rainwater, and hand tools. Everything is local.”
At least three construction techniques are being used here to create bahn din -­ mud houses. Adobe bricks are made by mixing earth, rice husks, and water. Wooden forms are used to shape the mud into bricks, which are left to dry in the hot, arid climate. A thinner mix is used for mortar. Cob construction is different: a thick mud-straw mixture is sculpted by hand in layers to form walls. The wattle and daub method is used to fill in walls between wooden posts or columns of bricks: a weave of split bamboo or branches is coated with mud plaster. Here in Mun Yuen, thatch roofs provide shelter from sun and rain.

The villagers here were displaced from their former homes and faced with building anew. They wanted to avoid contributing to deforestation, and they wanted to build simply and cheaply, to avoid adding to their debt. After Kapoor led an earthen building workshop at Wongsanit Ashram near Bangkok last year, the villagers decided that bahn din structures were the answer.

The struggle

For Noi Singna, one of the villagers here, the road to Mun Yuen has been long and hard. It began for her 13 years ago, with the construction of Lam Khan Choo dam. The huge government development project would destroy her home.

“Our life before the dam was good,” said Singna. “We supported ourselves by fishing and collecting bamboo shoots and vegetables from the forest.”

Plua Chamnan, 70, also lived in the vicinity of the dam. “The government told us that when they built the dam they would also build an irrigation canal. They said we would be able to grow more rice than ever before,” she said. “But this was not true. They never built the canal, and the whole area was flooded, so nothing could grow.”

Faced with the destruction of their livelihood, the homeless villagers traveled to Bangkok, where they intended to press the Prime Minister for compensation. When he refused to meet with them, they organized a peaceful invasion, scaling the walls of the Parliament building. Riot police repressed this demonstration, knocking protesters from the walls to the ground, and beating and tear-gassing the villagers, including children and elderly people. In the aftermath, 225 protesters spent three days in jail.

Still homeless, the displaced people set up camp in front of Parliament, fasting and demonstrating for eight months. They were joined by people displaced by two other dam projects, and supporters organized by the group Assembly of the Poor. Finally, following a change in government, the protesters were offered a loan to purchase land.

“The government gave us a 7 million baht [approximately $160,000] loan to purchase this 570-rai [220 acre] area of land,” said Singna. “We decided to set up a cooperative to accept the loan,” she added. “This gave us more legitimacy in the eyes of the government, and it made our group stronger. As individuals we had no power, but we learned through our protest that collectively we had power.”

The struggle did not end with the purchase of the land. A forest fire burned the area recently, one that the villagers believe was intentionally set. Illegal logging takes place on national forest land nearby, and the loggers perceive the villagers as witnesses to their crime. When an observation tower was built at Mun Yuen for stargazing, loggers burned it down, believing that it was being used to spy on them.

With the arrival of dozens of volunteer builders and the construction of the first clay walls, the village has reached a turning point.

“It’s such a warm feeling having all these people here, working and exchanging knowledge,” said Singna. The community is unique in Thailand -­ in a way, the European-American concept of an intentional community has been imported here. The village will serve as a demonstration and learning center in the future, open to students of ecology and natural building. The residents have begun a reforestation project, planting thousands of fruit and hardwood trees. Mun Yuen seems certain to live up to its name -­ the words mean “long lasting.”

The spirit

Phra Sutape Chinawaro, a monk who is teaching Buddhist meditation to the builders here, knows something about struggle. As a member of the Communist Party in the 1970s, he joined a guerrilla army to fight for a Marxist revolution in Thailand. After the revolutionaries reconciled with the government, Chinawaro worked as a secular activist and then became ordained as a monk, to work for change in a much different way.

“I discovered that if people use violent means, they will never be done with fighting,” said Chinawaro. Peaceful change, he said, begins with looking inward. “If you want freedom from capitalism, you need freedom of mind,” he said. “If you want a peaceful community, you must have a peaceful heart.”

The idea that inner change is necessary for social change is at the heart of engaged Buddhism, a philosophy that pervades the project here. Indeed, one of its foremost proponents, Sulak Sivaraksa, a Thai social critic, founded Wongsanit Ashram, which supports the building project. Sivaraksa, author of Seeds of Peace, has been imprisoned and exiled for his criticism of the Thai government. He promotes a philosophy of social change that is radically opposed to corporate globalization and “the religion of consumerism,” and deeply rooted in the Buddhist ethic of self-awareness and mindfulness.

Buddhism is central to Thai culture, but the spirit seems to have affected the farang here too. Far from the Western missionary attitude, the foreigners are here to learn.

“I’m still detaching from a very materialist, consumerist way of life,” said Eliana Uretsky of Berkeley, California. “Here, I feel like I’m learning how to be a human being.”
“I’m gaining a much greater presence of mind about my role in my own community,” said Julie Covington of Asheville, North Carolina. “In the past, that was a passive role. Now I feel a need to be active, to pass on this sense of community.”

For Katherine Foo, a Wellesley, Massachusetts resident now volunteering at Wongsanit Ashram, “Buddhism provides a philosophical framework for activist work” -­ a spiritual motivation that is missing from secular organizing.

Phra Chinawaro believes that some great motivation is necessary to stop the current large-scale exploitation of people and the earth. “The American capitalist empire is infecting the whole world,” he said. The struggle of displaced people against government corruption and the building of sustainable communities are signs of hope, he said, but the journey toward peace and justice begins in each individual.

Indeed, the infectious consumerism that drives corporate globalization is rooted in individual desire, multiplied by cultural and economic forces. Buddhism, with its ethic of selflessness and non-attachment, offers a way out.

Seated on the ground, Chinawaro glanced up at the adobe wall towering above him and reflected for a moment.

“There are people who know the difference between the bad society and the good, and they have the ability to choose, to act,” the monk said. “They have a great responsibility, and I place my hope in them.”

Natural building projects in Thailand and the US are ongoing. For more information, see www.kleiwerks.com (email janell@kleiwerks.com) or www.sulak-sivaraksa.org.

If you only knew: insiderism and Secrets

By Bill Boisvert

With each new corporate scandal reminding us how far out of the loop we are, Americans are obsessed with insiders. We are convinced that inside information is superior to public information, and lionize whistle-blowers who lay bare the hidden workings of power. But strangely, when revelations come, they invariably do no more than affirm what is already common knowledge. When the secret tobacco company files surfaced in the ’90s, a development hyperbolized in the movie The Insider, the revelation they contained was that — steady, now — cigarettes are addictive and bad for your health. And if Congress ever succeeds in prying loose the secret files of Dick Cheney’s Energy Task Force, will anyone be shocked by the discovery that Enron was rewriting the nation’s energy regulations?

One touchstone of the cult of insiderism — the idea that what the public knows is a smokescreen of lies, that what’s really going on goes on behind the closed doors of institutional secrecy — is the Pentagon Papers. When this top-secret government study of US policy in Vietnam through 1968 was leaked, the legend goes, it told the real story — the inside story — of Vietnam, documenting the callousness of policy-makers’ calculations and the duplicity with which they were sold to a gullible Congress and public. The revelations provoked unprecedented acts of censorship. The Nixon administration went to court to try to bar newspapers from publishing the documents, making the Papers a cause célèbre. The controversy set a template — a conspiracy of the powerful, unmasked by a crusading press that rouses an enraged populace from its slumber — that would inform populist iconography for a generation to come.

But like other insiderist legends, this tale is a myth.

Although the Papers stood the official story on its head, they had virtually no effect on Americans’ perceptions of the war. For all the commotion surrounding their publication in June 1971, they were yesterday’s news. By that time, six years of stalemated fighting had discredited the government’s claims of progress. TV newscasts had broadcast the devastation of South Vietnam by US bombing and search-and-destroy missions. A huge anti-war movement had grown up to contest the government’s pronouncements on the conduct and motives of the war. “We had to destroy the town to save it” had become the war’s absurdist epitaph. By June 1971, the Tet Offensive had driven Johnson from office, the My Lai massacre had made the front pages, students had been shot at Kent State, Jane Fonda had been to Hanoi and a majority of Americans were telling pollsters the war was morally wrong. There was no one left to disillusion.

That’s the unintended irony of Secrets, a memoir by Daniel Ellsberg, the man who leaked the Pentagon Papers. His premise is that “secrets of the greatest import ... can be kept reliably for decades by the executive branch, even though they are known to thousands of insiders,” to the detriment of democracy. It’s a dubious claim that’s hardly borne out by the evidence in his book, and it’s part of a wrongheaded but still influential idea on the left — that the American people are innocents whose inchoate anti-imperialism will erupt once the facts about the government’s interventionist schemes are exposed. These misapprehensions mar Ellsberg’s often very perceptive account of the times, causing him to grossly inflate the relevance of inside information to the forces that shaped the Vietnam era.

Ellsberg went from high-level berths at the Pentagon and the Rand Corporation, advising the likes of Robert McNamara and Henry Kissinger, to center-stage in the peace movement, getting maced by cops while marching shoulder-to-shoulder with Noam Chomsky. Along the way, he spent two years in Vietnam, nominally with the civilian pacification program, but really as a student-at-large of the war.

Ellsberg was an insider at the Pentagon, in the rice paddy and on the picket line. The breadth of his experience is probably unique and gives him, at times, a sharply insightful perspective.

By the time he returned from Vietnam in 1967, Ellsberg says, the policy establishment agreed with him that the war was a lost cause; but despite his and others’ arguments for de-escalation, the war dragged on. And there was a deeper problem, which Ellsberg points out to Kissinger:

“It will become very hard for you to learn from anybody who doesn’t have [super-secret] clearances. Because you’ll be thinking as you listen to them: ‘What would this man be telling me if he knew what I know?’ ... You’ll give up trying to assess what he has to say. ... You’ll become something like a moron ... incapable of learning from most people in the world, no matter how much experience they may have.”

As insiders stopped listening to the world, the world stopped listening to insiders.

Much of Secrets is an account of Ellsberg’s efforts to escape this hall of mirrors. As his frustration over the war mounted, he gravitated to the peace movement and began to experience the paradigm shift that was radicalizing so many others. Indeed, his was a classic ’60s journey of protracted consciousness-raising. The tension between his insider and outsider perspectives led to what was clearly an intellectually and emotionally traumatic break with the Rand-Pentagon elite. His leaking of the Papers may have been on some level an atonement for his past association with it.

In reading the Papers, Ellsberg found that policy-makers understood from the outset that South Vietnam was unsalvageable, that US intervention would require upwards of a million troops (and possibly nuclear weapons), and that even then victory would be doubtful. Rather than being misled by bad advice, presidents from Eisenhower to Johnson had gone against the insider consensus, dragging the American people along through manipulation and fraud. Ellsberg therefore decided to breach the wall of secrecy shielding “inordinate, unchallenged executive power” from accountability for its “desperate, outlaw behavior” in Vietnam.

His portrait of an executive branch run amok is no more tenable than the quagmire theory. It downplays serious disagreements among advisers about the prospects for intervention and gives short shrift to the political context of presidential decision-making.

Domestic opinion was never uniformly dovish (Ellsberg admits that the public were usually more hawkish than the insiders), and presidents acted with an eye to powerful pro-war constituencies. As late as the summer of 1967, Senate hawks held hearings demanding an escalation of the air war. Far from a “desperate, outlaw” tangent, presidential policy persistently aligned itself with domestic political pressures.

Even the Tonkin Gulf incident, exhibit A in Ellsberg’s indictment of executive branch deception, tells more about congressional acquiescence than presidential perfidy. Ellsberg quotes Sen. William Proxmire saying he would not have voted for the Tonkin Gulf Resolution had he known the incident was a fraud, but lets this self-serving excuse pass without asking why Proxmire felt a bloodless patrol-boat skirmish justified writing a blank check to the president for unlimited war. Instead of probing congressional support for the war, he offers a morality play about a Machiavellian executive and a bamboozled legislature.

One could argue that the public would have been more dovish had they possessed inside information; that’s Ellsberg’s rationale for leaking the Papers. But secrecy never impeded a substantive anti-war critique, as Ellsberg’s own experience shows. Writing of an anti-war demo in April 1965, just weeks after American ground troops landed in Vietnam, he notes that the speakers “were on solid ground, even if they didn’t have inside information.” They had their own sources, no less (and perhaps more) informed than the Pentagon. Indeed, Ellsberg’s own keenest insights into the war’s illegitimacy, he tells us, came from reading French historians, not the Papers. The truth was out there — theorized by intellectuals, reported by journalists, confirmed by veterans, propounded by activists — from the start, even if it took a while to sink in.

Because Ellsberg still sees the war as a struggle between policy factions arguing over intelligence estimates, the larger picture eludes him. Vietnam was not the pet project of a rogue president or a coterie of planners; it was a product of the Cold War consensus. It was the long, twilight struggle Kennedy promised us, a reprise of conflicts over Korea or Berlin of the sort the country had decided it would fight without a clear-cut victory. Insider pessimism was matched by a conviction, widely shared by the body politic and policed by anti-communist ideologues, that the effort was worth it.

The war would therefore end not with the revelation of secrets but with a revolution in consciousness that repudiated the Cold War consensus — one grounded in public weariness with the material and moral costs of “twilight struggles” and swayed by the New Left’s overt anti-imperialism and nonviolence. Ellsberg’s own change of heart on the war was a microcosm of how that revolution reoriented public attitudes. The revolution penetrated the Pentagon Papers themselves. “A feeling is widely and deeply held,” wrote Assistant Defense Secretary John McNaughton, “that ‘the Establishment’ is out of its mind ... that we are trying to impose some US image on distant peoples we cannot understand (any more than we can the younger generation here at home).”

The Papers were an anti-climax. The war continued; six months after their publication, Ellsberg glumly notes, they had accomplished “nothing.” Thus Ellsberg’s hopes that the Papers would help thwart Nixon’s secret intentions to expand the war in Indochina proved illusory.

But the Papers’ effects were illusory largely because Nixon’s plans were not secret — even the “secret” bombing of Cambodia was rather promptly reported in the New York Times — and not out of line with public opinion. Indeed, the Nixon administration, for all its skulduggery, shows quite dramatically the irrelevance of insiderism. Nixon deliberately cultivated a reputation for desperate outlawry to frighten the Communists. Unlike the Papers, his secret tapes, which Ellsberg generously quotes, are unsettling to this day:

Nixon: I still think we ought to take the [North Vietnamese] dikes out now. Will that drown people?

Kissinger: About two hundred thousand people.

N: ... I’d rather use the nuclear bomb. Have you got that, Henry?

K: That, I think, would just be too much.

N: The nuclear bomb, does that bother you? ... I just want you to think big, Henry, for Christsakes.

Nixon settled for conventional bombing, with the proviso that “we’re gonna bomb those bastards all over the place. Let it fly, let it fly.” But despite his deranged bunker mentality, his overall policy was one of dutiful de-escalation and withdrawal — cannily calibrated to undercut opposition to the war and win re-election in a landslide. As much as he longed to, he could not ignore the new consensus that the country would not bear any burden or oppose any foe, and that some things would just be too much — the unfinished revolution in consciousness we call the “Vietnam syndrome.”

By focusing public ire on corporate evildoers and corrupt politicians, by deflecting attention from bad policy to the cover-up of bad policy, the cult of insiderism has left a pernicious legacy. Take the 2000 presidential election, a textbook case of an insider cabal — the Jeb Bush-Katherine Harris cabal, the Supreme Court Five cabal, take your pick — thwarting the popular will, and also a textbook case of insiderist obtuseness. The firestorm over a few hundred Florida ballots took the spotlight off Gore’s extra half-million ballots; while in the debate over which gang had betrayed the Constitution, the Constitution’s betrayal of democracy by way of the Electoral College was swept under the rug. Thus an opportunity for systemic reform, embedded in a priceless teachable moment of constitutional crisis, was dissipated in a trivial search for villains.

Even worse are the insidious long-term effects of insiderism. By deriding the machinery of democratic governance as a sham that disguises the behind-the-scenes machinations of insiders, it implies that democratic government is for suckers, that democracy is inescapably the captive of well-connected interests at odds with the public good. The result is to further a political culture of irresponsibility and uninvolvement that lets everyone off the hook — legislators, who ratify bad policy behind feigned ignorance and belated outrage, and the public at large, who retreat from the hard work of political engagement into free-floating cynicism.

Ellsberg’s concerns about the constitutional separation of powers and abuses by the executive branch are pertinent today, as an undeclared war gathers under the most venal and secretive administration in recent history. The Republicans’ wholesale auction of policy to campaign donors, their lockdown on formerly public information and their penchant for incognito detentions make such anxieties plausible again. And unlike the witch hunts of the Clinton years, suspicions about the Bush administration are well-founded in real damage done to the public weal.

But it would be a mistake to revive the cult of insiderism. All of Bush’s misdeeds are done in the glare of press coverage, with the informed consent of Congress. And they are in no way a departure from our national culture of heedless, oil-addicted crony capitalism. Bush comes from Texas; Texas doesn’t come from Bush. What we need is not secret information, but a revolution in consciousness that will, as in the ’60s, challenge the national consensus in far-reaching ways.