There are many reasons why people might decide to reduce their dependency on money, or remove themselves from the monetary system entirely if this is the path they have chosen to take.

Here at Permanent culture now we are concerned that people are slaves to an economic system that locks the lives of billions into a work-debt-death cycle whilst the 1% squanders that which they steal and extort from every single working man and women on the planet, on a daily basis. We are also concerned about the depletion in resources that is created by our dependency on money and developments in consumer capitalism that have led to the further wholesale extraction and needless waste of that which we take from the natural world.

This introduction to this series is really concerned with the present situation set against a background where the global monetary system has effectively collapsed due its inherent flaws. The rest of the series will look at how different people and groups have managed to trade their skills and that which they have produced without using money as currency.

A convenient arrangement, for whom?

The Capitalists, fairly early on in their game created a world where they controlled almost every aspects of our working lives to the point where it has culminated in our dependency to money, a simple observation of the world of work tells us that: we work for five days out of seven, where we have two days off to recover, and pay our bills and buy our sustenance, only to have to return to work on the Monday and do the same thing all over again because we have used up all of our money that was allocated to us as the payment for our Labour from the Capitalists to pay for the basics of living.This is wage slavery!

The Three slave masters

Wage slavery and debt are the perfect complimentary social control mechanisms of all time, as mentioned above, we are locked into this tedious and soul destroying way of working by the Capitalist, but because he doesn’t pay us anywhere near enough of the profit that comes from our Labour, another Capitalist from the Banking sector comes along and makes up the shortfall in our pay packets by offering us loans, credit cards and overdrafts, and for the billions who have been locked into this trap where there is no other money available other than what the Banks are offering,  people unwillingly buy into it, we are then locked into a double slavery scenario where one slave master is baying for your time and another your money, and worst of all, they are both friends.

Consumer capitalism has developed from this cosy mutual relationship between capitalist manufacturers and those who provide loans so that people can buy the products that the manufacturers have created, this relationship, along with all of the associated slick Marketing machines that promote materialism and ‘greed is good’ has enabled the biggest scene of mass slavery in human history to develop, where over half of the world lives on less than two pounds a day, and much of the rest of the planet that enjoys material abundance does so because they are allowed to borrow money from the banks whom they then become indebted to in the long term.

This Consumerism that people have bought into is the final slave master in this story, it demands that we constantly update our purchases to newer and slicker models, it encourages people to take up the consumption of material items as a cultural activity and it demands constant maintenance and feeding on your cash to keep you in this cheap manufactured club.

Towards a permanent culture

But like all slave masters they require something from you that enables them to control you, in our case its all about time and money and access to resources, if we can reduce the amount of our time, money and resources, or completely remove it all together from their control, then our slave masters have no power to continue.

The only way in which we can reduce or get rid of our dependency for money is to look at alternative models of trading that operate outside of the monetary system.

At present the world is faced with the impossible and absurd task of trying to pay off hundreds of trillions of pounds worth of debt created by the global banking sector under their fractional reserve, exponential growth banking system, it has been estimated that it would take the resources of three planet earths to service and pay off this debt.

This is completely unacceptable and since all of our Political leaders are in alignment with the Banks and money men of this world, it is up to us to get involved with and develop methods of trading that transcend money as a currency and move towards a new value system that isn’t based on divide, economic exploitation and environmental degeneration.

If anyone reading this is involved in any ways of working and trading which don’t involve money as its currency, we’d love to hear from you and share your experiences here on our website. We need to develop these practices and ideas together right now, due to heavily unstable and crumbling economic system that is in operation in the world, the only we can do this is by getting together and working it out, so please feel free to use our website as on online resource to spread information and connect.