Communal Currencies

The Experiment with Communal Currencies

The community markets using local currencies proposed by President Chávez were envisioned as a new element of the social and solidarity economy of which he had become an increasingly radical advocate (Wilpert, 2007: 76–84). Following the government-led cooperative boom, with annual official registrations of new cooperatives mushrooming from 2,280 in 2002 to 41,422 in 2005 (Fagiolo, 2009), these markets were meant to function as spaces for cooperatives to offer a share of their produce at low prices to poorer members of their communities. They were also intended to stimulate the latter to launch microenterprises, countering the handouts culture sustained by oil rents. The task of implementation was taken up by the Instituto Nacional de Desarrollo de la Pequeña y Mediana Industria (National Institute for the Development of Small and Medium-sized Industry—INAPYMI), which contracted two barter activists from Medellín, Juan Esteban López and Pablo Mayayo. Together with a Venezuelan, Livio Rangel, they formed the “national facilitation team” that would initiate what they called “barter systems with use of communal currency” in regions of their choice, each with its own currency. Each system would be coextensive with a loosely defined “bioregion” or an area with a strong history of popular political organizing, and trading would be centered on periodic (usually monthly) market fairs.

The three barter architects taught a particularly isolationist version of barter organizing that López and Mayayo had advocated in Medellín, emphasizing the prohibition of transactions with conventional cash in market fairs and referring to currency notes as “barter facilitators” to reduce their association with money (see Burke, 2012). The function of the communal currencies would be to complement barter exchange when the values of goods were not equivalent or serve as a medium of exchange when there was no coincidence of wants. In line with Chávez’s appeals to solidarity and his declaration that the organization “will be in the hands and soul of the people, with its good judgment; they will be the system, the communities” (Chávez, 2005), the team focused on teaching assembly-based self-management and the correct “attitudes of the good prosumer” ¹ (RNST, 2009). López, Mayayo, and Rangel also impressed upon the project their commitment to agroecology and to reviving subsistence agriculture as the productive basis of the systems, focusing therefore on rural small towns and villages. They characterized the project as a recovery of ancestral economic practices, situating this within Chávez’s “twenty-first-century socialism” through the notion of “pre-Hispanic socialism” (Livio Rangel, interview, Sanare, February 26, 2012), inspired by, among others, Fals Borda (2003).

The team’s emphasis on solidarity and the mending of cultural-historical ties was, however, muddled with more mundane promises of economic potential. Thus, the project was couched as a solution to the problem of market access: “In Venezuela, small producers . . . do not find places to market their products. We cover that deficit” (Pablo Mayayo, quoted in Rivas, 2009). The elimination of the intermediary—personifying the greedy capitalist in an economy based on buying cheap and selling dear rather than producing new value—would allow the producers to benefit more from their efforts and make the Venezuelan economy less vulnerable to sabotage than it had been during the “economic coup” of 2002–2003. The video used to promote the project was highly optimistic about the wealth-creating capacity of local currencies (INAPYMI, 2006):

In the barter groups, all users have unlimited access to facilitators by trading their products or services. This gives rise to a community market that does not allow locally generated riches to escape to the banks or international financial capital. The locally generated wealth remains at the disposal of all in the community, stimulating economic activity and the creation of more wealth.

The first barter system, centered on the village of Urachiche (Yaracuy), began trading in June 2007, and within a year 10 systems had been created, from Barinas and Zulia in the west to Sucre in the northeast (no systems were established in the central llanos or the Amazon). In July 2008 Chávez dictated a decree to regulate and support the development of the systems (República Bolivariana de Venezuela, 2008), and it was replaced in December 2010 by a law passed by the National Assembly that maintained its contents with minor changes (República Bolivariana de Venezuela, 2010). The government’s promotional activity attracted many participants, including many worker cooperatives and farmers, to the first market fairs, preceded by a series of compulsory induction workshops. The systems most successful in terms of early participation levels were Las Pariagotos (Sucre), with 400–500, Paraguachoa (Nueva Esparta), with about 350, and José Leonardo Chirino (Falcón), with 270–300, not very far from the 500 considered ideal by the national facilitation team (Juan Esteban López, interview, Caracas, January 11, 2012). However, these systems maintained these levels only for a few months, presenting a pattern of initial boom and swift decline. At the time of fieldwork, only 3 more systems had been created since the first year, and an earlier one had been divided in two, yielding a total of 14 systems. All the systems visited were stagnant or in decline (except the newest, which was only holding its third fair), with fewer than 50 participants each, and only 1 or 2 were formal enterprises. Fairs were held irregularly and less than monthly. One system’s fair had exceptionally about 100 participants, but this was preceded by a four-month hiatus caused by the absence of the key activist.

In sum, the project of implementing “barter systems with use of communal currency” can be considered a failure. The national facilitation team failed to manage expectations regarding their economic potential, reproducing the hype-disappointment cycles that are common to local currencies. ² Many early participants had not understood, despite the preceding workshops, that the isolationist approach meant that they would not be able to sell produce for cash or redeem their communal currency earnings for cash. They were not content with spending all their earnings on the things on sale in the barter markets. Others had not taken seriously the project’s autonomist vocation, thinking instead—paternalistically—that participation would increase their chances of obtaining a bolivar credit from INAPYMI, and abandoned it as they realized that this was not the case. When in mid-2008 the project was transferred from INAPYMI to the Instituto Nacional de Desarrollo Rural (National Institute for Rural Development—INDER), more people left as a result.

Some systems initially benefited from the participation of larger enterprises. In Lara state, the Saquito Larense system sought to attract the agricultural cooperatives of the important Central Cooperativa de Servicios Sociales (Central Cooperative of Social Services—CECOSESOLA). However, these cooperatives attended only one or two markets, explaining that the cost of transportation made further participation not worthwhile. Saquito Larense then offered to hold its barter markets at the site of CECOSESOLA’s own markets, but this was rejected. In neighboring Yaracuy, two state-owned companies—a corn flour processing plant and a grain packing facility—participated intermittently in the Urachiche system for the first year. These companies struggled to “figure out what to do with their currency earnings” (Nerys Pineda, interview, Urachiche, February 27, 2012). System members offered to “help out” at the plants in exchange for communal currency, but having accepted this on a couple of occasions the companies eventually left the system. The barter system of Isla Margarita initially enjoyed an ample supply of fish, but at the time of fieldwork the fishermen had lost interest and a handful of women now supplied the sporadic fairs with what fish they could obtain at low or no cost from their relatives and neighbors.

The reasons for the project’s failure are arguably numerous and complex. In broad terms, it set out to radically challenge too many aspects of existing society at once, following the time-honored utopian approach of implementing a prefabricated system as unspoiled by reality as possible. Among the causes of failure were what may be called internal design flaws—the system’s rickety foundations in strong cultural optimism and an inadequate understanding of the nature and origins of money.

Cultural Optimism

Venezuela’s barter systems can be usefully understood in light of Ellner’s (2010) characterization of Chavismo as divided along the lines of the “perennial debate” in leftist movements worldwide over how people should be made to engage in productive activity under socialism. This debate confronts the “cultural optimist” argument “that subjective conditions are ripe for far-reaching change and that people in general are ready to participate in socialist relations and overcome materialistic aspirations” with the “realist” position, which prioritizes increased production over cultural change, favoring “workable policies such as material incentives and the maintenance, at least for the time being, of certain practices associated with capitalism in order to achieve that goal” (Ellner, 2010: 64). The barter systems have been conceived and implemented from a strong cultural optimist position, presuming a desire on the part of the population to be educated into frugal and egalitarian “prosumer” lifestyles, accept the inconveniences of barter and “funny money,” and dedicate considerable time and effort to the development of self-managed market fairs.

This cultural optimism is particularly evident in the method of price setting established by the barter architects, which weakens material incentives for supplying quality produce. Each barter system has a value and quality committee responsible for ensuring that all goods and services on offer are assigned a price, displayed on a price tag, before trading starts. Prices are expressed in the money of account of each system (e.g., 20 cimarrones), but the unit of account is in fact the bolivar, and this is even a legal requirement: “The value of the communal currency will be determined in equivalence to the money of legal tender” (República Bolivariana de Venezuela, 2010: Art. 55). Prices in the conventional Venezuelan economy are taken as reference and then lowered roughly 20–50 percent so as to incorporate “solidarity” with the buyer. This equation of solidarity with low prices is linked to the Chávez government’s confrontations with the private sector over price speculation and induced scarcities of basic commodities (Ellner, 2013), leading barter activists to identify capitalism with high prices rather than with its “heavy artillery” of cheap commodities (Marx and Engels, 1976: 488). In the barter systems, prices are lowered across the board. For instance, an elderly woman living in a low-income neighborhood sells her handicrafts for 50 BsF at home but offers them at a “solidarity price” of 30 at the barter fairs (anonymous-A, interview, March 2012). The value and quality committee ensures that all stated prices embody solidarity and that prices are the same for similar goods across the fair, correcting them when otherwise “to break with competition” (Yolanda Prado, interview, Mamporal, February 1, 2012). One system coordinator explains: “No one can come and say: ‘Look, my marmalade costs more than the other one.’ No, no, they all cost the same, because they all have the same productive effort” (Omar Rodríguez, interview, Mamporal, February 8, 2012). The suppression of any price mechanism capable of reflecting real-world differential production costs, quality, or relations of supply and demand has resulted in a diminished supply and rationing of sought-after goods, resembling the experience of “really existing socialism” in the twentieth century (Nove, 1991). Productive effort is deemphasized: “One always brings anything. . . . like that, anything, because you got to bring something there” (anonymous-B, interview, Barlovento, February 2012). “Here we take what we have at hand, what we can get; we take it with us to barter” (anonymous-C, interview, Isla Margarita, March 2012).

Consequently, once the initial excitement had waned, participants who persisted often held strong noneconomic motives. As a member of an agricultural cooperative—the only such to remain in her barter system—acknowledges, “I have sometimes had problems with [my husband and associate], because he says, ‘I don’t know what it is you get out of the barter!’” She explains: “I simply fell in love with the barter. For the friendships I have made, for all that I have known through the barter. I have visited various states, and made friends in different states. It is not because I am in need, because I am not. I simply fell in love with the barter, I liked it, and there I am” (anonymous-D, interview, March 2012).

Understanding Money and Barter

A striking contradiction about the barter markets is their purported status as spaces liberated from money and their condition in fact of being drenched in monetary relations. The strict prohibition of cash (bolivar notes and coins) in the market fairs contrasts with the zeal with which the value and quality committees ensure the assignment of prices to all products. The monetary nature of prices is denied by substituting the word “value” for “price,” a “language politics” (Burke, 2012: 287; Gibson-Graham, 2006: xi) encouraging participants to pursue the satisfaction of needs with use-values rather than profit making. Language, however, does not overcome the fact that exchange ratios stated in monetary units are prices. They are numerical quantities of abstract monetary units—one bolivar, two cimarrones. In contrast, use-values are concrete and qualitative and cannot be described in monetary units. Doing so makes them exchange-values. One purpose of the communal currencies, in the words of a barter architect, is “to recover the use that money always had—money in its original phase when notes or coins were not used, but instead for instance salt, cacao, coca leaves—which is as a means of exchange” (Livio Rangel, interview, Sanare, February 26, 2012). Accordingly, what is to be avoided is the use of money as a store of value, which they consider a latter-day Western perversion synonymous with capitalist accumulation. In contrast to the medium-of-exchange and store-of-value functions, however, another textbook function of money—being an abstract unit of account—has received little attention, positive or negative, from the barter architects. Participants attest that they often renegotiate exchange ratios, in the act of transacting, in ways that approximate “true” moneyless barter, where “the parties . . . are comparing their individual and immediate needs, not values in the abstract” (Grierson, 1978: 11). However, the barter systems’ practice of comprehensive pricing brings them closer to commercial barter or countertrade—customary between contemporary multinational corporations and governments (Howse, 2010)—than to pre-Columbian barter. This is how conventional money is omnipresent in the barter markets, linking (albeit flexibly) the exchange ratios of all products and services to those of the capitalist economy through monetary prices and thereby limiting the scope for renegotiating values.

The ambiguous use of the word trueque (barter) among Spanish-speaking local currency activists appears to originate with the “barter clubs” created in Buenos Aires in 1995 (Gómez, 2009: 73–74); indeed, this soon-to-be massive innovation by a group of suburban middle-class environmentalists is a much closer precedent of Venezuela’s communal currencies than any indigenous custom (cf. Burke, 2012: 139). For local currency practitioners, barter can refer to three different phenomena: (1) purchases involving physical local currency, dubbed “multireciprocal barter” by the Argentines and euphemized as “indirect barter”; (2) transactions without physical currency negotiated with reference to monetary values (commercial barter); and (3) transactions without physical currency negotiated without reference to monetary values, what we may call “barter proper.” The Venezuelan barter architects, devoted to the banishment of cash, conflate 2 and 3 as “direct barter.” This neglect of money’s function as an abstract unit of account may be explained by their belief that “money is only a thing, a tool. Just as we need tables, chairs, tent canopies if it rains, and sound equipment to have a market, we need the medium of exchange” (Pablo Mayayo, interview, Sanare, February 26, 2012). The barter architects’ ontology of money as a thing used as medium of exchange and their belief in its origin in certain commodities—“salt, cacao, coca leaves”—resembles the neoclassical economics creation-myth of money as one among many commodities bartered in a primeval moneyless economy. This conjectural account, epitomized by Adam Smith (1776) and Karl Menger (1892) and subject to little later modification as the orthodoxy of mainstream economics (cf. Graeber, 2011: Chap. 2), tells us that the money commodity achieved its status as the universally accepted medium of exchange as a result of the rational economic behavior of individuals. Thus, to minimize the number of barter transactions necessary to arrive at the goods he desired, economic man perceived the convenience of acquiring the most saleable good in return for his own produce. The precious metals enjoyed superior saleability because they were already universally coveted for their beauty, and so they were the first to become money.

There is very little support in the anthropological literature for the historical existence of the pure barter economies on which the neoclassical economics creation-myth of money as the universal medium of exchange is founded (Crump, 1981: 54; Dalton, 1982; Graeber, 2011: 28–29). Neither does this school, with its ontology of money as a mere material lubricant of barter, have a consistent theory of how a stable universal measure of value—the money of account—could have arisen out of barter (Hudson, 2004). Outside orthodoxy, however, the understanding of the nature and origins of money has advanced considerably in recent decades through a confluence of research in sociology, post-Keynesian economics, and the “new economic archaeology.” The resulting current, often labeled “neo-chartalism,” is a heterodox body of monetary theory that draws on older credit and state theories of money and is consistent with economic anthropology (Ingham, 2004; Wray, 2004). For this current, money is not essentially a commodity or a neutral reflection of underlying social relations of production and exchange (as for some Marxists) but a set of social relations in itself, even in its archaic “commodity” forms (Ingham, 1996). These social relations are ones of claims and obligations—or credits and debts—denominated in an abstract money of account and upheld by some form of authority. Accordingly, emphasis is on this measure or standard of value, the origin of which should be sought in public institutions, not in the individual acts of neoclassical economics’ “antigovernment fable” (Hudson, 2004: 118). The temples and palaces of Mesopotamia developed a money of account for calculating debts in the third millennium BCE, more than two millennia before the appearance of coinage (Hudson, 2004; Ingham, 2000). Coins and other money things are foremost tokens bearing the units of abstract value (Ingham, 2004: 48), constituting claims on goods priced in these units. The domain in which a certain money of account has sovereignty is called a monetary space, and “the historical generalization that the successful creation of stable monetary spaces has been the work of states is indisputable” (Ingham, 2006: 273).

The problem of the creation of the stable monetary space necessary for the establishment of price lists has been of no concern to the barter systems, since they take bolivar prices as reference. The communal currencies are subordinate to the official money of account, much like the arbolito of the Argentine barter clubs (Ould-Ahmed, 2010). The main difference here is that the Venezuelan barter systems have been able to maintain the fiction that their currencies are equal in value to the official currency without being convertible into it because they have stayed apart from the prevalent economic struggle for existence, whereas the arbolito suffered hyperdepreciation relative to the peso because it had in fact become a tool in this competitive struggle. ³

As a system of social relations of credit and debt, money can be likened to a scoring system. It has been called a “memory bank” or “a means of remembering” that can “help us keep track of those exchanges with others that we choose to calculate” (Hart, 2001: 17). Given their emphasis on solidarity and generosity, one might expect that the barter architects would favor a soft, indulgently forgetful scoring system or even fairs without price lists and currencies altogether, but this is not the case. Furthermore, upon joining, participants are “given in custody” 100 communal currency units, and any subsequent saving or dissaving departing significantly from this number is discouraged, considered inimical to the egalitarian ethos of “barter.” Instead of rejecting monetary calculation, the chosen strategy has been to play down the valuable nature of the currency, designing notes to have the look and feel of board game cards rather than banknotes, with minimal security features. This rejection of the store-of-value function is reminiscent of earlier local currency experiments elsewhere, especially local exchange trading systems, where currency can be created by any member, interest-free, usually up to a personal credit limit. However, largely as a consequence of this abundance of exchange media, business participation in local exchange trading systems has everywhere been insignificant (Dittmer, 2013). In Venezuela, this approach, rather than dissuading “accumulation” and the successive build-up of income inequalities within the barter systems as intended, has simply put off many from participating at all. “Many times [new attendees] tell us: ‘No way, I don’t want that pack of cards!’” (Elsy Delfín, interview, Barquisimeto, February 24, 2012). Progressive governments do not fight inequality in wealth by intentionally undermining confidence in their currency, since this would scare away business, as the Venezuelan barter systems have; they tax wealth instead.

As discussed above, the barter architects seek to recover what they believe to be the original, pre-Columbian form of money. Any serious endeavor to do so would, however, be hampered by the general weakness of conceptual understanding and dearth of adequate theorizing of pre-Columbian exchange systems in scientific research (Smith and Schreiber, 2005). To the extent that commodities may have circulated as quasi-moneys, they are of little relevance to Venezuela’s communal currency experiment, unless one is willing to make a leap in logic from the belief—shared by the barter architects and neoclassical economists—that commonly traded commodities became the original moneys to the expectation that a new brand of paper notes would now be widely adopted on similar grounds. The communal currencies are token or fiat money, bearers of abstract units of value or purchasing power the magnitude of which is meant to be greater than their use-value as commodities (printed pieces of paper). Pre-Columbian lessons regarding the organization of such a currency system should primarily be sought in currencies that are also tokens, carrying units of a single money of account in a monetary space. The main candidates for having had such systems are the Aztec and Mayan states, since they were the most commercially advanced documented societies of the New World (Masson and Freidel, 2013), but not even these states appear to have achieved the political consolidation required for the establishment of a single monetary unit of account (Gil-Vásquez, 2013: 90; Kowalewski, 2012). For the Aztecs and Maya, cacao beans may to some extent have been token money, judging by the claim that the beans used as medium of exchange were not of the same sort as those used to make cocoa (Clavigero, 1844 [1780]: 227) or that they were often “defected beans that did not have any other utility but that of serving as symbols” (Gil-Vásquez, 2013: 81).

The cacao currency, however, was not the pristine instrument, uncorrupted by centralization and accumulation, that the barter architects claim to recover. To the contrary, cacao beans were certainly subject to accumulation, as is attested by Herrera’s (1726 [1601]: Dec. II, 219) well-known account of Moctezuma II’s warehouse containing more than 40,000 loads of cacao beans (presumably of 24,000 beans each), although it is not clear to what extent these were intended for use as currency or consumption. Cacao also contradicts the romantic notion of uncentralized, democratic money, supporting instead the prevalent view that, to function as bearer of abstract purchasing power, a currency must be held scarce. The Aztecs achieved this through the restriction of ownership of land for cacao cultivation to the nobility, warriors, and merchants (Aranda, 2005). Hence, the fact that social elites in possession of large productive resources were the issuers of the cacao currency underwrote its general acceptability despite its low intrinsic value. The culturally overoptimistic barter architects have failed to recognize that this is the money game they are playing and have consequently not grasped the nature of the challenge, memorably stated by Hyman Minsky (2008: 255): “Everyone can create money; the problem is to get it accepted.” The efforts to reinvent a monetary system that would constitute an advance upon the undemocratic tendencies of capitalist monetary systems are laudable, but the forms these efforts have taken are attractive only to a very small number of people.

The Effects of State Support

A superficial consideration of the unique government origin of Venezuela’s communal currencies might suggest that they would be more successful than other local currencies at solving the problem of acceptability. In the Argentine barter club experience, the six-month cooperation agreement entered into by the original barter club founders in the Programa de Autosuficiencia Regional (Regional Self-sufficiency Program—PAR) with the Department of Small and Medium-sized Enterprises was crucial to the superior acceptability of their notes: “this short period of six months was sufficient for the social franchise system to multiply exponentially, with the ostensibly unconditional support of the national government” (Primavera, 2003: 129). Apart from illustrating the potentially very important legitimating effect that even merely symbolic government support can have on currency acceptability, the Argentine case does not allow more detailed comparative conclusions to be drawn. This is because the PAR notes solved the problem of acceptability (temporarily) in a context of severe monetary contraction and in a society familiar with monetary diversity (Powell, 2002). However, the Venezuelan government’s exclusive endorsement of López, Mayayo, and Rangel’s particularly isolationist-egalitarian model of barter organizing predicated on strong cultural optimism—very different from the Argentine PAR’s professedly unpolitical self-help scheme—has arguably been detrimental to the establishment of communal currencies even in the relatively favorable context of the Bolivarian Revolution. Through their status as government employees, the barter architects have been able to impose a single model, creating homogeneous barter systems across the country rather than a diversity of organizational forms consistent with evolutionary processes. In October 2008, once 10 of these systems had been created, they were gathered under the nongovernmental Red Nacional de Sistemas de Trueke (National Network of Barter Systems—RNST), run by an ossifying “operational committee.” ⁴ Furthermore, the government was quick to convert the barter architects’ model into law, including its banishment of cash and financial practices. Thus, the government support has served to spread and perpetuate a flawed, unadaptive model. By comparison, the more autonomous Santa Elena barter market in Medellín, which López and Mayayo left for Venezuela, has experienced some healthy self-regulatory evolution, allowing more integration with the conventional monetary economy (Burke, 2012: 173, 202).

Whereas the barter architects and most system coordinators interviewed continue to emphasize the need for cultural change to adjust people to the isolationist-egalitarian model, rank-and-file participants are keen to reconsider the design of the systems to increase material incentives for participation. Proposals range from allowing some cash sales within the barter markets (anonymous-E, interview, Monagas, February 2012) to setting up exchange desks where communal currencies could be converted into bolivares (anonymous-F, interview, Isla Margarita, March 2012). Some participants appear unaware of the extent to which such proposals are rejected by the RNST leadership. For example, one participant affirmed that the introduction of currency convertibility was being discussed with the Central Bank (anonymous-A, interview, March 2012), in contradiction with López’s assertion that “on this I think Pablo [Mayayo], I, the National Network of Barter Systems . . . this we do not negotiate. It cannot be backed by money in any way” (Juan Esteban López, interview, Caracas, January 11, 2012). This example supports the observation by a public official formerly responsible for the government’s work with the communal currencies: “I think one of the things that impede the strengthening of the barter, and each day it is, like, sectarianized, in stagnation, is that the baby wants emancipation. And there is a system, the network itself, that does not allow it to emancipate itself” (María Teresa Quintana, interview, Caracas, February 14, 2012).

The Difficult Pursuit of Ecosocialism

Does the failure to establish significant “barter systems with use of communal currency” mean that any alternatives to money-as-usual are fated for a marginal existence in Venezuela? The government has not given up on the barter systems; under the name grupos de intercambio solidario (solidarity exchange groups), they are mentioned five times in Chávez’s last electoral program, subsequently adopted by Maduro. This program also makes a novel reference to ecosocialism, resonating with the environmentalist priorities advanced by the barter architects. It includes the objective of “building and promoting the ecosocialist productive economic model, based on a harmonious relationship between man and nature, that guarantees rational, optimal and sustainable use and exploitation of natural resources” (Chávez, 2012: 5.1). During the 2012 electoral campaign, the barter systems were officially recognized as an element of the government’s stated intention of transitioning to ecosocialism (Torrealba, 2012). However, the potential of local currencies of some form or other to contribute significantly to an ecosocialist transition is far from clear, even if they were made to be more adaptive to real-world conditions than has hitherto been the case. Internationally, there are no unquestionable success stories of local currencies contributing significantly to socio-ecological transition projects (Dittmer, 2013), but neither has any counted on the government support that appears possible in Venezuela. What kind of government support would be desirable remains a point of contention. A precedent in this regard is the proposal made in mid-2010 by the vice minister of the communal economy Ana Maldonado, in agreement with Chávez (2010: 103), to link up the barter systems with the public grocery chains Bicentenario, Mercal, and PDVAL. This was rejected by the RNST out of concern for the protection of small-scale “prosumers” against large competitors and fear that a massification of the barter systems would endanger their purpose of cultural transformation toward a solidarity economy (María Teresa Quintana, interview, Caracas, February 14, 2012). The RNST leadership made sure that the individual would remain the basis of the systems, forgoing the option to back the currencies with the productive resources of the grocery chains. This may be taken to indicate the strength of the barter activists’ commitment to the “small is beautiful” principle of radical ecologism. To what extent their model of small-scale production and exchange is important to an ecosocialist transition is, however, not a matter of principle but a matter of case-by-case research, given, for example, the variability of relations between scale and food system energy use (Pelletier et al., 2011).

Clear, though, is the inability of postcollapse participants to develop environmentally sensible barter systems. The somewhat paradoxical consequence of the barter architects’ radically utopian effort at immediate and profound change at the level of the barter system is the creation of great inefficiencies in terms of energy use for transport. Participants in the postcollapse systems are dispersed throughout their territories, and long distances must be covered to gather a few dozen barterers in a market. In many systems, it is common for participants to cover one-way distances of 50–75 kilometers to get to market, and neighboring systems often attend each other’s markets. With Venezuelan gasoline prices the lowest in the world at US$ 0.02 per liter (World Bank, 2013), there is little incentive to limit displacements or adapt the systems to the realities of more local communities. In fact, when explaining what they like about the barter, several participants give answers of this kind: “We have traveled to various places, we have represented [our state]. . . . May everything end but the barter (laugh), to travel and visit new places” (anonymous-G, interview, March 2012). The situation, in terms of energy efficiency, might not have been much better without collapse, since nationwide exchanges have been seen to play an important role ever since the system planning phase (Equipo Facilitador Nacional, 2008). When industrial capitalism is understood to be interlinked with the extraordinary historical episode of humanity’s degradation of the fossil energy stock of the planet, it is straightforward to demand why it should be more consistent with anticapitalist, “pre-Hispanic socialist” purism to banish modern money (cash) than to prioritize local economies compatible with low-energy travel.

The barter architects like to see themselves as working to establish noncapitalist islands in a sea of capitalism (Pablo Mayayo, interview, Sanare, February 26, 2012) corresponding to an “interstitial” strategy of societal transformation (Wright, 2010: Chap.10). What separates the islands from the surrounding sea is the absence of cash transactions, the nonconvertibility between the communal currencies and money, and the absence of “capitalist greed” through the imposition of solidarity prices. As suggested by the mobility aspect, this understanding, which Burke (2012: 326), following Gibson-Graham (2006), has appropriately characterized as capitalocentric isolationism, hinges upon an inadequate, Manichean concept of the boundaries between the barter systems and the “surrounding” economy. Acknowledging the extent to which the barter project is entangled in the wider economy of “fossil energy civilization” (Giampietro, Mayumi, and Şorman, 2013: 294) would suggest that little advance toward ecosocialism can be made unless the apparently unradical matter of gasoline subsidies is dealt with first. Rather than rejecting money as essentially capitalist, barter activists ought to recognize the importance of green tax reform. The Maduro government’s announced intention to raise the domestic price of gasoline is a positive sign in this regard (Vyas, 2013). Many barter activists promote agroecology, the exchange of traditional seeds, and do-it-yourself artisanal production, potentially important ecosocialist practices that are not helped by being circumscribed by radically isolationist-egalitarian monetary systems that, compared with their capitalist equivalents, are run on a shoestring.

Conclusions

Venezuela’s communal currencies were introduced by President Chávez as an innovative element of the social and solidarity economy and are unique among community currencies worldwide in their central government origin. The architecture of the currency systems was largely left to a three-man “national facilitation team” favoring a radically isolationist-egalitarian version of “barter systems with use of communal currency.” Despite initially solid government support, the barter systems went through strong hype-disappointment cycles, with participation levels beginning to collapse after a few months and remaining low. The failure to establish any significant communal currency system is partly due to their having been conceived and implemented from a strong cultural optimist position. Their lack of success may therefore be taken as an indication of the present inadequacy of this position to socialist transition in Venezuela. Furthermore, the barter architects’ embrace of the unfounded conventional wisdom—perpetuated by mainstream economics—that money is a thing that historically arose spontaneously out of barter has not provided sufficient basis for thinking through how new monetary systems could be established. Neither has the claim that the token currencies of the barter systems constitute a recovery of pristine commodity moneys of “pre-Hispanic socialism.” Further conceptual confusion is provoked by the denial of the monetary nature of the communal currencies and of the prices on which “barter” transactions are based, resulting from neglect of money’s essential function as a unit of account.

Although without Chávez’s initiative there might not have been any community currencies in Venezuela in the first place, the government support has also had a negative side. It has favored the generalization of a model that lacks flexibility because of its identification with monetary isolationism and strong egalitarianism, a situation subsequently maintained by a nongovernmental national network. Like many local currencies worldwide, the experiment has involved an environmentalist component and has been associated with the government’s goal of transitioning to ecosocialism. Many barter activists engage in ecosocialist practices, but the ecological rationality of these is not helped by circumscription to barter systems. To the contrary, the barter system setting increases the need for displacements, since individuals wedded to the isolationist-egalitarian model are few and scattered in space. Theorizing the barter systems as operating in the interstices of capitalism is misleading; they are strongly conditioned by the structures of fossil-energy civilization. The experiment suggests that initiating a transition to ecosocialism requires the huge disincentive of gasoline prices to be tackled before ecologically sensible alternative economies can be constructed in Venezuela. To advance in this direction, the ecosocialist grassroots would have to focus more on the general path of the Bolivarian Revolution, confronting the government’s penchant for deepened extractivism (Teran, 2012). At the same time, if the government wants to make a serious effort at turning communal currencies into a relevant element of ecosocialist transition, it may have to assume a more active role in centrally “rectifying pathological or incompetent decision-making in failing groups” (Fung and Wright, 2003: 21). Case studies in empowered participatory governance highlight such supervision as an essential component of successful, coordinated decentralization of economic decision making, an approach that resonates with Ellner’s (2010) call for a synthesis between cultural optimist and realist transitional strategies in Venezuela. Finally, unless the government overcomes the challenges of rampant inflation and a highly overvalued bolivar, it appears unlikely that it will increase its support of decentralized efforts to expand the supply of exchange media in the economy.