Living without money - RAI ethnographic film night

  The Royal Anthropological Institute showed a couple of graduate ethnographic films last night which touched on my two mastermind subjects of choice – branding and money. The first was from New York looking at the freegan movement – less a new form of human community, more of an activist brand as it turned out. The freegans were filmed being filmed while ‘performing’ trash tours and feasts to highlight the waste of good food by local Manhattan supermarkets. Just like May Day a few years back – where ‘activists’ were outnumbered by researchers (including a classic moment – below - of ‘anarchist panda’ answering a consumer questionnaire - what does an anarchist segmentation look like?) In attempting to deny the capitalist system, as highlighted by Klein in No Logo, freegans had themselves become a brand. The irony was not lost on the protagonists and highlighted the problem of categorizing brands as somehow an invention of the capitalist system of exploitation rather than seeing their roots in a wider social and cultural genealogy of "things".

 

Likewise, a "Bender and Yurt" community trying to live ‘sustainably’ and ‘in tune with mother earth’ on 42 acres of agricultural land in South Devon, suffered from the same naïve and simplistic critique of capitalism. By rejecting ‘money’ in the name of equality and sharing and trusting in an informal set of spiritual/pagan ideals to guide them, they had succeeded in producing a community riven with tensions which reflected the real inequalities of power (even the unconscious power of individual ‘strong’ personalities), abilities to contribute (specifically those with young children on communal work days) and long term personal aims. I can’t fault the intentionality of their community, but what transpired could have fallen straight out of the pages of Animal Farm with folders, commitments, 5 year plans and a complete lack of a means of accounting for individual obligation, debt, credit or exchange. Without a form of ‘money’ this society – despite its small size – was unable to harness individual spirits into collective action, falling back instead on a strange mix of managerial, psychological and spiritual jargon to elicit contributions.

The film maker was brutally honest that she hated her film for making them seem like manic hippies (dancing and singing as they planted trees and celebrated the production of human manure) when in reality they were more practical and pragmatic believers in ‘permaculture’. However, it struck me that they were guilty of the same misapprehension of the modern capitalist economists who see their ‘money’ as some historical progression towards sophistication / hubris rather than appreciating the role money can play in creating a better, more sustainable society.