シルヴィオ・ゲゼルの社会主義論と地域通貨の思想

抄録

In this paper, historical and social significance of ideas and practices of local (or community) currencies are examined, starting from economic thoughts and theories of Silvio Gesell. (1)Gesell's major work Die naturliche Wirtschaftsordnung durch Freiland und Freigeld (1916) was highly appreciated by J. M. Keynes. It aims at socialism with human freedom by abolishing unearned income such as ground rent and interest. In order to abolish ground rent, nationalization of land is to be achieved through offering certain amounts of state bond to private owners of land. The resultant payment of rent to the state is to be redistributed to mothers in proportion to their number of children (just like a sort of basic income). Whereas the idea to nationalize land does not seem particularly unique, Gesell's thoughts and theories of money and interest are quite original. In his view, traditional money has an advantage over all other commodity products physically not to decay or rust. Therefore money can easily be withdrawn from a market without loss, while other commodities are enforced to be sold. Under the circumstances interest is obtainable to money owners like merchants when they exchange their money with other commodities. In order to abolish interest as unearned income, traditional money has to be converted into 'stamp money', which needs carry-over cost like other commodities in the form of duty to stick stamp of one thousandth amount of face value of paper money weekly (so as to make annual rate of 5%). Stamp money would no longer be able to demand interest, and must continuously stay in a market to be exchanged. Thus it must solve also a decisive cause of depression due to money hoarding. This paper would examine significance and weaknesses in Gesell's theories; such as negligence of profit as a more fundamental form of surplus value in a capitalist society, as well as the logical relevance of his theory of interest. (2)Then this paper treats the ideas and historical significance of local currencies, which were initiated under the strong influence of Gesell's arguments in the early 1930s. In many cases to set up local currencies, the form of stamp money was utilized in order to mitigate the economic distress under the Great Depression in local towns and communities. However, as the national economic recovery policies became strengthened, the central governments and central banks prohibited most of local currencies from a view of unified national budgetary and monetary policies at that period. After several decades, the second wave of upsurge of local currencies has globally been conspicuous in our age of continuous economic crises and restructuring since 1970s. The number of local currencies grew rapidly especially since 1990s, and reached more than two thousands in the world, and more than five hundreds in Japan. They are largely facilitated by development of information technologies such as personal computer and mobile phones. Their forms are no longer limited to stamp paper money, but multiplied. For instance cases of Local Exchange Trading System (LETS) organize mutual debit account system through computerized records, without issuing paper money. In most cases of recent local currencies either in LETS type or in paper money type, interest is not paid for saving or debt, by following Gesell's idea. However, those to charge minus interest rate such as stamp money in Gesell's model became rare. At the same time quite a number of recent local currencies intend to organize equal exchange of labour time by using labour time as unit of account or setting money unit proportional to labour time (say 10 dollars per one hour of labour). This idea is disconnected from Gesell's, and follows the genealogy of labour money presented by Ricardian socialists, or R. Owen. In this genealogy, abolishment of surplus value based on exploitation of

(View PDF for the rest of the abstract.)