A headline on today’s MarketWatch.com says it all: “Shoppers on strike in September”. In an earlier blog post, I suggested that the decrease in consumer spending may seem like uncoordinated fear but is actually partly the result of an organized campaign by fed-up consumers who are using a General Consumption Strike as a tool to change the world. Now is the time to join this growing movement to consume less and live more.

The mass media is understandably alarmed by the sharp declines in consumer spending that have happened in the last three months: as everyone knows, our economies are based on unhealthy, unsustainable consumption. The more we destroy the earth by turning our natural resources into disposable garbage the “healthier” our economies are, or so we are told. But it is becoming obvious to most people that, as the revolutionary leader in Ursula K. Le Guin’s classic The Dispossessed taught, excess is excrement and the only way to restore health to our social body is to decrease the unnecessary excesses of our society and to lower our consumption of the earth. In other words, live simply so that others may simply live.

The New York Times summarizes the gains of our General Consumption strike thus:

Retail sales fell sharply in September as consumers shunned department stores, auto showrooms and shopping malls, ratcheting back spending for a third consecutive month.

Last month’s 1.2 percent decline in retail sales was the sharpest drop in years, and it came in the heart of the back-to-school shopping season, traditionally the busiest time of the year for retailers outside of the December holidays.

  

The scent of capitalism’s decline is in the air, people are now looking for alternatives. Some are turning to Marx — the Guardian reports sales of Marx’s books are up 300% in Germany — and others are looking to local currencies and alternative economies. Our time is approaching, let us be prepared.

Let’s be honest: no one understands economics anymore. It’s been over a hundred years since Marx published Volume One of Das Kapital, a book whose audience was the working class. Today, only specialists are expected to enter the debate on economic policy, the rest of us it seems are supposed to wait on the sidelines while the value of their money varies widely without understanding why. The ongoing economic collapse, grants us an opportunity to rethink our reliance on a currencies that are inhuman and make no sense.

A growing number of activists are focusing on the question of the role of money in the ongoing destruction of the natural environment. Last month, Enric Duran, a Spanish activist borrowed over €500,000 from banks, gave it away to activist organizations and then distributed 200,000 copies of a newspaper in which he publicly refused to pay the money back. 

Duran explained his actions thus:

This financial system depends on more and more money being given in loans. The loans in the end have an environmental impact as people use them to buy a car, to travel, to expand a factory facility or to build houses amongst other things. Thus this system of economic growth by means of loans depends on the constant and growing conversion of natural resources into CO2 and waste. Hence at a time when we are reaching the limits of growth in energy production due to the decline of oil and when the output limits of many mines are also being approached, it seems safe to conclude that this system created more than 300 years ago on the basis of expanding credit cannot continue in the way that we know it today.” (click here Duran’s full statement)

We have become so dependent on money that while we may entertain critiques of capitalism, there are few people who would entertain a movement against money itself. How are we to live, eat, pay our rent or buy things without money? This is a question that we must begin to address.

Some proposals include Time-based currencies, local currencies, Local Exchange Trading Systems, and ROCS among others. And the most inspiring news is that there are already dozens of community currencies in the United States.

What would a Blackspot Currency look like? Would it be time-based? Would it be international or purely local? Let’s get to work imagining a new economy based on Blackspot principles and local flair. And maybe one day, Adbusters will be the first magazine to offer subscriptions paid for with an alternative currency.