On the road to a moneyfree future?

Mark Boyle's project sounds fascinating. A few days ago he left his hometown Bristol to embark on a journey of 9000 miles, a pilgrimage to the birth place of Mahatma Gandhi in India. Boyle, 28, is expecting to walk for 2 and half years until he reaches his destination. What really stands out: Boyle plans to walk without any money, credit cards or exchangeable material values. He is planning to offer his skills to the people he meets in exchange for food. Money - he believes -destroys community. In his blog he explains:

From this point on I endeavour to never touch money again. A strong claim I know and one that seems unrealistic at best. And one I am sure I'll be lambasted for if I fail. And probably even get criticised for if I succeed. But why strive for anything other than your ideals in life, why aim for something less than that you believe in. I have compromised too much in my life so far, spending my time fighting against the symptoms of greed, insecurity and fear. From now on I will live my life the way in which I believe life becomes more beautiful. No more compromises. No more battling against symptoms. Now is the time for social homoeopathy.

Boyle used to be an entrepreneur with a dot.com business, but for a few years already he has been advocating for an economy without money. The Freeconomy community is about sharing skills and knowledge.

Freeconomy allows people to make the transition from a money based communityless society to more of a community based moneyless society, and to share the land they don't need or can't use to facilitate a local food community. In essence, freeconomy is about making dinner for a friend who was yesterday a stranger (...)

Freeconomy has over 3000 members in 56 countries offering skills, land and knowledge to other members.
Boyle's journey will be documented by the people he meets on the way. He will equip them with the password for this blog and thereby allow them to update it. He is also planning to regularly report from his trek.
I find this project truly amazing, because of its determination, its idealism and its gentleness, however I would like to raise two things I find worth reflecting here:
For one, he might get along without money, but he surely took a passport with him. As it seems unlikely that he is managing to charm the guardians of the diverse nation states he will have to cross into letting him through without identification. And if he tried? What kind of message would that be? Millions of people have to struggle with national borders in their pursuit of happiness; hundreds die every year, because they have to bypass the control of national borders. Surely nation states are as troublesome in our world as the existence of money.
Then, secondly, what do we know about money? Can we really blame the poor state of the world on the existence of abstract forms of exchange? Freeconomy puts it like this:

Birds don't have money, trees don't use money and as far as I know earthworms have never heard of such a ridiculous concept. Money, in any human language today, gets translated to mean security. It's insurance against the universe, nature and the rest of humanity letting us down and not providing for us. No money = No security.

His arguement is that the false security of money makes us strive for profit and credit, while real security comes from community, from living with people, sharing and loving each other.
This argument is based on a very modern fallacy. The picture of an ideal community in which people live together authentically is posited against the mediocre alienated state of the affairs we live in. This ideal community is likened to nature, to birds and earthworms, where a perfect harmonic balance exists. This balance of course is the cruel reality of natural live, in which the very human capacity of morality doesn't exist.
The critiques of capitalism often overlook, that - as Max Weber has pointed out - capitalism is not ruthless and without morals, but quite the contrary. Capitalism was founded on moralist arguments against ruthless profit-making and luxury. Moreover it is this quality that made it so successful. Capitalism is based on humans’ wishes to make the world a better place.

It is good to walk out and spread the word of human love and understanding. Boyle's pilgrimage will surely teach him and others a lot. Hopefully however it will also make him reconsider his basic argument: Money is not the issue: The most radical changes in the last 500 years, including the development of the global money based economy were caused by people with good intentions.

Interdisciplinary Workshop Series

Call for Contributions:
Interdisciplinary Workshop Series “Major Concepts in Tourism Research”
March to May 2008
Leeds/ UK

Much research in the field of tourism addresses at least one of the following concepts: Exchange, Memory, Representation and Experience. Although these concepts are very popular, it is not at all obvious what they actually refer to, and how we may be able to grasp them in our research.

Therefore, the PhD-students at the Centre for Tourism and Cultural Change at Leeds Metropolitan University are organizing four workshops. Each of these workshops will extend over two days during which we will discuss intensively one of the concepts. The discussions will be based to a large extent on the contributions of the participants. Thus, we invite PhD-students from all disciplines to present short papers. PhD-students may also contribute ideas and critiques of articles, which we will distribute before the workshops. The contributions do not have to be polished conference papers but can be presentations of ideas related to the particular workshop theme. The papers will be circulated among the other participants 10 days before the respective workshop to promote lively and engaged discussion. People can also attend without presenting any formal contribution.

Furthermore, we have invited an expert on the specific topic for each workshop to give an introductory keynote and lead the discussions. On the basis of their introductions we will explore meanings and different approaches to the concepts. This constitutes a unique opportunity for PhD-students to get feedback on their reflections and work in progress by leading academics and other PhD-students, sharing and developing ideas in relation to the four themes addressed.

Cost: £20.00 for one workshop. You can also register for all four workshops for £60.00.

Please register for one single workshop or the whole series not later than 17 February 2008 by either sending an abstract of about 200 words or stating by how you intend to relate to the topic of the workshop.

Please note that the deadline for submission of the papers and contributions for the first workshop is 29 February 2008. E-Mail: C.Mueller@leedsmet.ac.uk

Timetable of the Workshop-Series

13/14 March 2008 Workshop “Experience”
Keynote: Claudio Minca, University of London
“After the Island: the hard work of being (with) tourists”

3/4 April 2008 Workshop “Exchange”
Keynote: Keith Hart, Goldsmith College London
"On commoditization: exchange in the human economy"

17/18 April 2008 Workshop “Memory”
Keynote: Sharon MacDonald, Manchester University
“Memory, Materiality and Tourism”

8/9 May 2008 Workshop “Representation”
Keynote: David Crouch, University of Derby
“The Problems with Representation: Consumption, Space and Images”

Tourism as the last Utopia?

In an interview with the e-zine atopia, antropologist Marc Auge has agured that tourism might be the last Utopia. He explains:

Despite appearances, the everyday world already knows some utopias. Tourism is one of these. The tourist is the one who is able to imagine the whole of the planet as places of transition. This utopia can be judged in two different ways. Either one considers that this is the final stage of the consumer society, you are sold movement, displacement, with some sun or sand to boot. Individuals buy their capacity to move and one is therefore at the limit of the system. According to the utopian perspective, the individual who moves around, who is unattached or, more precisely, who plays with attachments, free to choose these bonds, seems to me to have a highly commendable value. Quite the opposite of solitude then, a freedom of choice that no longer roots itself in identity, a given culture.

Auge is well known and has been critized a lot for his notion of non-places, in which he described airports and shopping malls to be lacking of a distinct local quality. In his discussion here of tourism as utopian he repeats a fallacy that often governs the thinking of modernism from the perspective of a "post".
Tourism is used here, as it is frequently and by no way without sense, as a metaphor of modernism while the tourist becomes an expression, an examplification of modern man. Modernism is conceived as a condition in which the individual identity looses its authentic and genuine reference to one place. The tourist, that is the modern person, is able to imagine the whole of the planet as places of transistion, places to play, in which no attachment of any seriousness is needed anymore, no foundation in a given culture or identity.
The problem with this view is of course, that it doesn't understands the dialectic of attachment and play, or of necessity and freedom to use the concepts of Hannah Arendt. While the modern man is understanding himself as being homeless and uprooted, the promise of freedom that this situation seems to entail is seriously hampered by his own constant fear, that - really - this apparent freedom is an illusion. Auge's postulation of a tourist utopia has often been described by authors both in literature and in theory. For Adorno as much as for Guy Debord, the fun and spectacle of a modern society of tourists was the place of a dystopian horror of the same uncanny qualities as Huxley's brave new world: Drugged into consent by the cultural industries, human beings lost their capacity to critically reflect their condition and lost their freedom altogether.
Hannah Arendt has convincingly argued (in the human condition) that modernity is marked by a loss of understanding about the relation of necessity and freedom. The conditionality of human life is linked to its transcendence and therefore man cannot be free without an understanding of her conditions because freedom means nothing but the repeated transcendence of conditions and necessity. While modern man might feel free and uprooted, he really has lost the understanding and capacity to see the conditions that govern her life. This makes modern politics at the same time inherently utopian (a free society seems near) and paranoid (as a conspiracy is always threatening to spoil the promise).
The utopian value that Auge argues for is nothing new, but remains firmly in the realm of modern thinking and concepts. Naively he repeats that it would be nice, if everybody was at play with their identity and cultures. The modern play he rightly observed is at place not only in the tourist encounters with locaties but in as much in the invention of tradition, the construction of imagined communities and the extinction of the ones we identify as conspiring against us. The modern play is dead serious. In as much our capacity to understand where we are actually located in this world is limited, we should be rather sceptical about the utopian promise of our apparent homelessness.