The Abolition of Money

Part of the bulletin series of articles.

Summary

• The Commonwealth does not use money, an achievement unique in the world today.
• The process by which it arrived at this state of affairs was not a single event but a long and complicated process.
• It involved periods of hyperinflation, overheating, domestic default and scarcity that threatened to destabilise the new country.
• Nonetheless, through the use of expiring money and efforts towards political subsidiarity, households had effectively stopped using money by the new millennium.

Read more: Finance and Accounted Revenue

The abolition of money in the Commonwealth, known formally as unbanking, refers to the long process by which the country stopped using money in everyday life. This extraordinary process was not a single decision but a designed series of stages that ran throughout the last decades of the 20th Century and concluded at the new millennium. Indeed, the millennium has become a sort of marking post of pre-commons and post-commons society, since there was no precise date on which the last household money was spent.

Moneylessness was preceded by a long period of expiring money, in which Commonwealth Crowns (as they were then known) had fixed expirations and thus couldn’t be saved. This was already a dramatic shift away from conventional money use and basically eliminated personal savings and accumulation. This period decreased in time until money was spent very shortly after it was acquired, for which its intended purpose was twofold. First, it encouraged the use of money on goods without expiry, and quickly overheated the economy as consumer demand for luxuries, appliances and durable commodities outpaced supply. Secondly, it discouraged the use of money on perishable goods that began to be distributed freely except where necessary, and so acclimatised households to the predecessor systems of the commons economy – primarily through free food, housing and clothing.

This transition was about as gentle as it could have been, and although it was marked by consumer panic and rapid inflation, it also established economic behaviours that would become important in the future. Indeed, by the end of money there was nothing to confiscate because there was nothing to accumulate – and the appliances and jewellery that were seen as a store of value in fact deflated as the domestic market caught up to total demand.

Phase	Household circuit	Industrial circuit and creditors
Introduction of expiry (c. 1970–80)	Money lapses after a long fixed period, so savings cannot accumulate	Retail banking and savings banks are finally socialised; credit to state firms expands; domestic creditors are paid in the existing crown which is losing value quickly
Shorter intervals (c. 1980–95)	Balances become less storeable until they are not worth holding, as national distribution replaces traditional pensions and savings	The crown is reconsolidated as a single currency; foreign obligations are re-denominated at index value
Effectively moneyless (c. 1995–2000)	Expiry becomes effectively instant, collapsing the value of money; the household is moneyless by the millennium	The ✦ (crown) is the only remaining currency; the Commonwealth citizen gold entitlement is fixed in grams

The transition changed not just the structure of the economy, but the nature of an economy in the broadest sense. It had a tremendous impact on the ways people lived, but the actual material impact on households was smaller than first imagined, because wages were already diminished through a series of redenominations and savings accounts had been closed. By the time of abolition, the distribution system (as predecessor of the commons) had effectively already replaced pensions and savings in its function. The Commonwealth gold entitlement is the remaining money asset of households today – an equal value of gold stores from which every citizen may draw on at emigration and which was fixed in grams at the end of the process.

Industry was hit much harder, and lost much more. Institutions that depended on money were effectively gutted and consolidated, nationalised or straightforwardly went extinct – banks, insurers, pension funds, bondholders and firms holding trade credit. Domestic claims in the old crown withered away with the value of the currency, and the new crown (✦) became the only unit available to firms. The unbanking process for domestic creditors amounted to a default in everything but name, and a lot of long-gone firms lost a lot of money.

Foreign obligations were generally protected. They were redenominated in the new crown at index value and honoured for obvious reasons. Before cultured meat took over the Commonwealth diet, imports made up about 70 per cent of the food the country consumed,¹ and a default would have degraded its trade credit in a very delicate time politically. The decision also eased lending in the post-money period (although institutional money never disappeared), since it protected the country’s reputation for reliability with its foreign obligations.

Today, money has not disappeared entirely. It exists in the industrial economy as Accounted Revenue using the new crown (✦), and is still in place as expiring money in some republics as they undergo federalisation. It is expected these republics will eventually transition to full moneylessness as they establish the institutions and economies necessary for the functioning of the commons, much as the rest of the country did. Previous attempts in newly acceded republics were slow and politically destabilising; great care is taken today to minimise the disruption of unbanking.