(A version of this article originally appeared in the Wisconsin Network for Peace and Justice Newsletter.)

Finally, the depredations of capitalism are on everybody's lips.

Between a collapsing dollar, soaring fuel costs, the implosion of credit markets, and the recent, breathtaking display of rapacity by mortgage lenders and their Wall Street backers, the excesses of the current economic system have made repeated headlines. With the flaws and disequities of corporate capitalism unusually exposed to public scrutiny, we should take the opportunity -- while the civic dialog about the economy briefly widens and financial literacy hits a modest high -- to press a much more revolutionary vision of economic justice.

While progressive movements have become adept at identifying institutions, rather than individual motivations, as the primary perpetuators of societal ills like racism and patriarchy, we continue to suppose that a sort of blind worship of mammon is the force that propels the wealth-concentrating trajectory of capitalism. Capitalism certainly makes a virtue of greed, and while it's easy to point fingers at Wall Street's brokers and fund managers as the very embodiment of that vice, it was indisputably you and I who - through opening that checking or savings account, or choosing to participate in the retirement plan at work -- provided the raw material with which they work (in part, we must add, on our behalf). Complicity in capitalist accumulation runs uncomfortably wide with even the best-intentioned of us often implicated.

If we believe justice demands addressing the disequities of the present system, then we'd better look further than simply reordering tax codes to shift more wealth from rich to poor, or empowering those marginalized by capitalism to withstand its perditions, or to flourish by mastering its tools. We must look instead at what might otherwise seem an incidental detail - the money-system we use everyday for procuring our basic necessities.

Capitalism's most malign deception is that disequity results from the actions of markets, or from supply and demand, or from individual greed. While all of these have their minor roles to play, it is the central bank-based, positive interest-rate money system which fundamentally drives concentration of wealth, turning acquisitiveness from an option to a necessity, setting each of us in competition for money against every other, and coding constant expansion into the economy at every level.

Money is an information carrying device which human beings invented to measure the value of the goods and services we trade, and to store that value between trades. Because it therefore acts as a sort of language, money's one essential requirement is that the size and meaning of its units be transparent to all, and invariant across time.

But, while it's seldom remarked upon, how money is issued affects - and potentially corrupts -- the way it measures. Central banks originate all money in capitalist economies, and they do so by loaning it into circulation at interest, mostly for the sort of quotidian purposes that are the stuff of everyday life: housing, education, business start-up, etc.

As loan principal, each dollar represents a net debt owed back to the banking system (the dollar, plus some amount of interest), but as money, it conveys the information that it is worth a standard 100-cents. This disjuncture may seem minor on a single greenback, but compound it across the 9 trillion dollar U.S. money supply and pretty soon you're looking at something more than pocket change. Indeed, considering that much of the money supply originates in mortgage loans which - even when of a non-predatory nature -“ often require paybacks on the order of $2.00 to $3.00 per dollar loaned, one begins to get a sense of how the debt-leverage inherent in central-banking creates intense profit-making pressure right across the world economy. The dollar (and every other unit of central bank-based currency) effectively has a permanent interest-cost attached to it, and every user -- from the initial loan recipient forward -- has the incentive to try and pass that cost on. What results is the creation of ubiquitous (and generally automatic and unconscious) behavior among users of central-bank money to somehow collect additional value without laboring; this is what compels us to be slaves to price (advantaging the Wal-mart model of production), even if -- morally - we'd rather pay those that labor for us a living wage.

It's also what drives us to invest any idle money we're able to amass, violating the progressive precept that only labor (not provision of money) creates wealth. In a debt-based monetary system where all money has a "base-cost" due to central bank interest, the money supply is chronically "short," since more money is owed back to the banking system than is actually in circulation. The result of this is that any aggregation of money can potentially earn money by being lent out (in competition with the banks) or supplied as equity for productive enterprise. Even an institution as innocuous-seeming as a savings or retirement account must harness this malign feature of our money system in order to produce additional wealth for us without us putting in any additional labor.

The financial services industry -- which devotes itself to this iniquitous trick of producing more money from less -- now accounts for an astonishing 98% (by some estimates) of all daily financial transactions, when currency speculation is added to the money changing hands on the stock, bond and futures markets. No system which permits (much less demands) money be made from money can ever pass muster with a progressive vision of commerce. Only by reclaiming democratic control of money - of the very language of exchange, of its definition of measure - can we create a system of trade, both locally and internationally, which we can guarantee to be non-exploitative.

Somewhat remarkably, we are perfectly free to do this, and several dozen communities in the U.S. have taken the opportunity (thousands of systems operate globally). Whether set-up as electronic credits or paper notes, local currencies are generally denominated in hours-of-labor (usually cross-denominated in the U.S. at $10 or $12/Hour), cannot be lent at interest, and are democratically controlled by their users. Establishing a system is no more complicated than organizing a barter network -- individuals and businesses are recruited to become members, a paper currency is printed, and all who join are simply issued a small amount (say 3 Hours worth) to get the money into circulation. The local scrip is then used, and circulates, just like "regular" money.

Local currencies were conceived to supplement national currencies and are issued with the object of expanding local money-supplies to sufficiency. This drives up wages, encourages re-localization of production, shrinks the excess labor pool and redistributes wealth more equitably. Local currencies also present an ideal opportunity to focus a much wider audience on the fundamental problems of capitalism, and they constitute an important step toward re-democratizing society. Because of the world-wide commonality of their denomination (ie., the labor-hour), geographically disparate systems can ideally be linked for development of national and international trade. Most importantly, local currency use ultimately pushes us toward a trading system where an hour of labor in every corner of the world produces an equivalent standard of living, a feat inconceivable under a trade regime based on central-bank currencies and floating exchange rates.

Local currencies are potentially powerful tools, partly because they do their work simply in the course of people spending money. Widespread, well-developed systems around the U.S. could be pulling hundreds of millions of dollars out of chain-stores and permanently re-localizing that spending-power; but this requires a commitment to build a common vision of fair trade at the local level. Madison Hours, south-central Wisconsin's local currency system, is always looking for volunteers to help further such a vision, both locally and by assisting other communities. Contact Madison Hours or give me a call at 608-257-6729 if you want to get involved.