If governments won't reform our toxic financial system, can we just do our own thing? Some ideas from Extinction Rebellion

from ‘avant garde money’

An interesting blog on the Extinction Rebellion site - who play their daring part in the wide wave of transformative actions happening at the moment.

By Jem Bendell and Rabbi Jeffrey Newman, it anatomises how our debt- and profit-driven economy is driving disastrous environmental outcomes (illustrated by the Japanese blue tune fishermen who, having hunted it to near extinction, now redouble their efforts as it has become so expensively rare).

Bendell and Newman list the various direct actions that XR might take on its “international rebellion week” starting April 15th. They also set out a list of government reforms that could put the financial system into “reverse thrust”. Yet the most interesting passage is when they imagine - probably correctly - that our leaders won’t listen:

If international rebellion doesn’t startle our politicians into making the climate crisis their central agenda, then we must stretch the rebellion into our everyday lives. How many coordinated withdrawals and loan defaults might bring down a targeted bank? How many local councils issuing inter-operable currencies could create an alternative to the Bank of England?

How many people joining networks with their own currencies, like Fair Coop, Credit Commons and Holochain, could make these viable alternatives? If government does not heed peaceful calls to change our economic system so that climate sanity is an economic norm, we may well find out. 

We are hoping that our ‘citizen action networks’ - the first of which is coalescing in Plymouth and South Devon - will be the means whereby such constructive rebellion is steadily forged and coordinated. A complement to XR’s direct actions, at the level of everyday services and infrastructure. Great to see like-minded thinking emerge across this moment.