Taking Stock of an Anarchistic Dream after 30 Years of Militancy
Abstract:
In this essay, I go over my personal experience after discovering the work of Gesell as a doctoral student in the mid-90s and trying to diffuse these ideas & the approach in my writings, university teaching, and via conferences over the course of my academic career and beyond. It is essentially a story of failure owing to a variety of obstacles, which, in the form of rubrics, punctuate the narration. These stumbling blocks have been 1) the bitter & militant, and unsurprising, hostility of the System, via its academic custodians, to any form of concrete push for monetary reform; 2) the concomitant repellent effect of the intellectual devices built in the System’s discursive apparatus, namely, Marxian/Marxist, Keneysian, and Austrian “orthodoxy”; 3) the narcissism and invidious egomania of most peripheral thinkers and self-styled Gesellian reformers with more or less following –all of them understanding well the great potential for change presented by the physiological unsanity of our monetary system, yet all of them too greedily looking forward to reaping personal gain from an eventual aperture to reformist change, and thus too self-seeking to form the unitary front that would be otherwise needed to push this revolution through; and finally, 4) the thorniness of the issue at hand, monetary economics itself, whose investigation is fraught difficult problems, theorietica & practical complexities, and characterized by a long, intricate and partly occulted history.