The book is now out as part of the VAGABONDS series from Pluto Press.

Buy the book from Pluto Books

DECOLONIZING MONEY: THE PROMISE OF ABOLISHING THE US DOLLAR

By Julio Linares

To change the world, we need a money revolution. Yet the debate over money has been dominated by two perspectives: those free-market capitalists who want money to rule everything, and those who want the state to harness money’s power. Decolonizing Money presents an anarchist theory of money which sets out strategies for collective liberation beyond state and capital.

Drawing on anarchist, abolitionist and anti-colonial feminist traditions, Julio Linares makes the heretical argument for a grassroots democratic movement to abolish the imperialist US dollar as a necessary step towards the cancellation of debt and establishing a worldwide basic income. Linares shows that money, beyond a store of value and a medium of exchange, is a series of promises a society makes to itself – and he challenges us to make them otherwise.

This innovative book takes up lessons from global history and social movements in order to unleash the political imagination. It shows us how the creation, use and most importantly the destruction of money are forms of power that need to be reclaimed through direct action, as part of a radical democratic project for autonomy and self-determination.

Julio César Linares is a community organizer and economic anthropologist born in the territories known today as Guatemala. He holds an MSc from the London School of Economics where he studied and worked on projects with the late David Graeber. He serves as Public Outreach for the Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN). He lives in Berlin, Germany.

Celebrated critical theorists Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, coauthors of The Undercommons and All Incomplete, consider this question in their loving forward to Manuel Callahan and Annie Paradise’s book Community Safety in the Fourth World War: Notes on Insurgent Conviviality, the eighth book in the VAGABONDS series, edited by Max Haiven, out this month from Pluto Press.

The book draws on more than a decade of “convivial research” and “insurgent learning” undertaken alongside struggles against police and systemic violence and, below, Stefano and Fred contextualize the book’s in terms of the “turn and return” of the question of the committed, activist, insurgent intellectual.

For context, here’s some information about the book, which is available worldwide now from Pluto

We are living through what the Zapatistas call the ‘Fourth World War’—a war waged by the forces of colonialism and racial capitalism—that insists we forget our victories, relinquish our practices of care, and abandon our struggle. For communities targeted and ravaged by policing and militarization, safety is a paramount concern. But where do we turn? To the state, with its warped ideas of security and all its attendant violences?

Drawing on more than a decade of ‘convivial research’ and ‘insurgent learning’, alongside struggles across the San Francisco Bay Area, and in dialogue with struggles across the Global South, the authors argue for self-organized, locally rooted insurgent conviviality. This, they claim, can be observed through a community safety with five critical elements: community self-defense; fierce care; assembly; knowledge production and self-representation; and autonomous justice.

Advancing conviviality as a praxis, as a counterforce to racial patriarchal capital, this book aims to re-enchant the world through a focus on life; to share and generate tools, strategies, and theorizations that build from below in order to cross-pollinate struggles everywhere.

Buy the book from Pluto Books

Foreword: Turn and Return with Manolo and Annie

Stefano Harney and Fred Moten

Manolo and Annie return us to a question to which we must always return.

How do we practice thinking in struggle?

We must always return, as if eternally, not because the struggle always returns. It does not return. It is always here and we are always in it. The struggle continues, and so do we, most deeply in the way it turns, and in the way we change, so that if we must return to the question of how we practice thinking in struggle it is because we are subject to rise into the dying sameness and fatal straight edge that is our captivity, having become casual, having been made casualties of the measured stillness that ensues when what we do gets stuck in what we are. And this is how the question to which we return is always shadowed by another.

What is the role of the intellectual in struggle?

Another way to ask this question is: what is the role of the trained intellectual in the struggle?

And another way to say the trained intellectual is to say the one who has been burdened with that identity, identified as special, made captive to specialization, sacrificed to power, sent to war, sent away, sent into the arms of strangers.

Thinking in disorder

In Your Children Come Back to You, a film directed by Alile Sharon Larkin—a film whose greatness is given in that it cannot simply be called her film, in that like all great cinema, and especially the cinema of what is called the L.A. Rebellion, it refuses the fictions of both the auteur and the role in favor and in practice of a profound and general indirection that Larkin and her fellows rigorously claim and release—the child protagonist asks of her aunt: are you adopted? At first, neither the aunt, nor we, understand.

Then the child tells a story she learns in her Black Panther Party freedom school. It is a story of strangers who steal the children of Africa, of Asia, of the Americas. They exploit and exclude the children while even more cruelly inviting and incorporating them into their world. The children struggle free from the strangers, refusing to be adopted by them and held in the world.

But what we come to understand, and at the end, even the aunt comes to understand, is that even the struggle against adoption, the struggle against theft, can be stolen and adopted. This is to say that every intellectual, having been trained to accept a role, and constrained to enact its double in catastrophe, in (the theater of) the war against subsistence, has been adopted by strangers. The fortunate ones spend their eternal middle passage in business class.

It is in this regard that the question of the relationship between the intellectual and the struggle shadows the question of how the practice of thinking frees itself from the sameness of strangers. These questions are explored at great length by Frantz Fanon in the latter chapters of Les Damnés de la Terre. And there, as in Your Children Come Back to You, an indirection shows through authorship, and precisely in the way that theory, receding brilliantly into description, erupts in generous intellection, like the generative spring of a general strike, which refuses to correct but rather practices what R.A. Judy calls “thinking in disorder.”

The responsibility of the intellectual

What’s shown and proved in and through Fanon is that in the colonized world this indirection is given in returning to the villages, to their incessant turning and turning over in struggle, and by learning with the villagers in their constant questioning, so that the intellectual, in disappearance, in release of and from his self and his role, becomes revolutionary. This will not have been an agential scholarly activity of the intellectual, of his mind, or body, or spirit, or figure, or role. Nor can it be done in either the city, the university, or the newsroom. All of these institutions are merely his conditions and what’s at stake is not the refinement of the volunteer but rather rough consensuality.

Today we must be discovered by ours. This passion is the set and reset, the turn and return, of Manolo and Annie, in friendship and familiarity, which is given in their describing and foregiven in their practicing.

The turn and return of the double question do not begin with Fanon. And though his case may be paradigmatic for theft and adoption by strangers and exemplary of the subjective reaction to the sameness strangers impose, there are two other modes and understandings of theft, adoption, and (adaptive) response that have subsequently held sway in the last seventy-five years of thinking in Fanon’s wake: Michel Foucault’s formulation of the specific intellectual and Noam Chomsky’s formulation of the intellectual’s responsibility.

Foucault made and practiced his formulation in a movement to study, and then to reform, and then to abolish prison; Chomsky in his in speaking out against US imperialism and propaganda in self-conscious performance of a theory and a grammar of human nature. Certainly in “the West,” their approaches are honorably deployed by contemporary intellectuals, who continue to define the relationship between themselves (in training, under constraint) and struggle from the Movement for Black Lives to the movement in solidarity with Palestinians suffering imperial and colonial genocide, to the movement to instruct and protect those most vulnerable to the xenophobic rampages now occurring in the United States of the Stranger.

Lorde, beyond Foucault and Chomsky

In a recent review of Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s biography of Audre Lorde, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor questions whether Lorde should be considered an activist. She considers the problem of Lorde’s placement in movement and struggle when, as Taylor puts it, Lorde did not participate in “meetings where you have to listen to someone else’s opinion.” This might seem like a criticism of a figure Taylor otherwise admires, and a study she otherwise praises, but it can also be read it as a return to, and as a turn in, the question of the intellectual’s position that Chomsky asks and answers, thereby taking that position. Lorde need not have been a proper activist because her role was to produce work whose telling of truth and exposing of lies would inspire and be used by activists. Her placement is, rather, a relationship to Black feminist struggle, in this regard. In so distinguishing the figure of the activist from the figure of the intellectual, Taylor indexes and joins a history of leftist thought and/in leftist struggle built on a division of labor that features, for instance, in Alain Badiou’s self-conception as a leftist intellectual or in the distinction Antonio Gramsci makes implicitly between himself and the “organic intellectual.”

Another kind of division, one closer to Foucault’s strategy, is evident in the circulation of a term, “activist intellectual,” whose merger of identities reifies the split it is supposed to suture. Here the intellectual joins the struggle as the holder of specific knowledge that can be translated into strategy. His is a kind of knowledge applied to and for the excavation and denaturalization of order. Lorde’s authority, which is non-specific, ethical, theoretical, and tactically at a certain distance, can also be said to have been marked by this in/division, which is turns out, as if inadvertently on the bias, to produce knowledge committed to order’s reconfiguration. The specific intellectual is a strategist just above the ground of the struggle whose commitments, held in the products of their critical and imaginative capacities, are demonstrated in the actions of others. Then we’re left to marvel at the same old appearance of new bosses.

Of course, if there is some distance between the models Foucault and Chomsky describe and enact, but the way that Lorde, through Taylor’s lens, can be said to inhabit both indicates that the debate between them is also a collaborative re-approach to the problems of theft and adoption, adoption and training, adaptation and constraint. If all of the august thinkers we mention have indispensable things to say about these problems, all of them also can be said to accept, and to adopt, and to adapt to, and to be constrained by the existence of the (role of the) intellectual. Fanon knew that before he could think about his relationship to the struggle, before he could enact that specificity, his first step was to get free of strangers, and to react against the world that was offered to and imposed upon him in training—the world defined by and made in the service and as a scalar extension-in-enclosure of the role. But if freedom from the role is freedom in the role, then the first step is estrangement.

Let’s surge conviviality

But when Manolo and Annie talk about raising situation tents, about printing maps that can be augmented live, about documenting vigils, and about forms of gathering in the community, they release an abreactive deviance in and from and beyond and before that first step. This differing, pre-positional precedent to estrangement, to the viciousness of strangers, and to every utterly justified reaction to that viciousness (re)turns from the role. In this they follow but also broaden and deepen and break the path of Fanon, and of Amilcar Cabral and Walter Rodney and Andaiye and Grace Lee Boggs, among others.

They work the field, on and under the ground, of the damned, where movement for becomes movement with, when expression practices, not knowing ahead of time which studious derailment will be useful, not knowing before we get there how our involvement in struggle will feel. In forgoing the ascendancy of being chained to the struggle for freedom, we are obliged to keep finding out how to be held in the release of struggle. Rather than asking ourselves about relationships, a term of the adopted in any case, let’s wonder what we can do, what we are able to do.

Let’s change the same. Let’s surge convivially. Let’s turn and return with Manolo and Annie.

My people have won

Hey man,

What if it goes beyond rejecting full-time academic work before that work rejects him?

Do you remember once that I said to you: I can’t understand why Manolo thinks we are winning … and you said he thinks we are winning because he hangs around with winners.

I was just reading a piece by a guy . . . from a quilombo community here in Brasil. His name is Antônio Bispo dos Santos, and he is known as Nêgo Bispo. It ends this way:

We are debating counter-colonization. For us, quilombolas and Indigenous peoples, this is the agenda: counter-colonization. The day universities learn what they do not know, the day universities agree to learn Indigenous languages instead of teaching them, the day universities agree to learn Indigenous architecture and to learn about the plants of the caatinga, the day they are willing to learn from us as we once learned from them, then we will have a confluence. A confluence of knowledge. A process of balancing the different civilizations of this place. Counter-colonization.

Along the way he also says “I am a winner. My people have won.” It’s like Manolo and Annie did not want the university until it was a confluence, which it will never be. But in the meantime, as has become so clear, the university keeps losing, and they keep winning.

x

Study with the people

Hey Man,

This is beautiful, and it makes me think of this, of course: Curtis Mayfield’s We’re a Winner.

Manolo and Annie want to study with the people. As you say, the university would never survive the confluence, but the study it bears and bars, as if to protect, in order to suppress, might flourish. Nêgo Bispo’s people neither teach nor learn their language. They invent it. They come upon it, from inside it, as they make it, as they breathe it, as they build it, as they gather it. What if losing is the nervous oscillation between teaching and learning? What if winning is insurgent conviviality?

x

We are living through what the Zapatistas call the ‘Fourth World War’—a war waged by the forces of colonialism and racial capitalism—that insists we forget our victories, relinquish our practices of care, and abandon our struggle. For communities targeted and ravaged by policing and militarization, safety is a paramount concern. But where do we turn? To the state, with its warped ideas of security and all its attendant violences?

Drawing on more than a decade of ‘convivial research’ and ‘insurgent learning’, alongside struggles across the San Francisco Bay Area, and in dialogue with struggles across the Global South, the authors argue for self-organized, locally rooted insurgent conviviality. This, they claim, can be observed through a community safety with five critical elements: community self-defense; fierce care; assembly; knowledge production and self-representation; and autonomous justice.

Advancing conviviality as a praxis, as a counterforce to racial patriarchal capital, this book aims to re-enchant the world through a focus on life; to share and generate tools, strategies, and theorizations that build from below in order to cross-pollinate struggles everywhere.

With the preface by Steafno Harney and Fred Moten.

Buy it from Pluto Press

Authors

Manuel Callahan is the co-founder of the Center for Convivial Research and Autonomy (CCRA), a transterritorial research collective based in the San Francisco Bay Area with connections to struggles across Southern Mexico. Since 2003, he has facilitated the Universidad de la Tierra, Califas. For over three decades, he has been a primary activator of Acción Zapatista, including work with the Zapatista Autonomy Project. He is both a researcher and co-convener of the Counter Counterinsurgency Lab.

Annie Paradise is a member of the Center for Convivial Research and Autonomy (CCRA), a transterritorial research collective, and a collaborator with the Universidad de la Tierra, Califas, an autonomous learning initiative, both based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is a researcher and co-convener of the Counter Counterinsurgency Lab, and together with Manuel Callahan and others, facilitates Methodologies Against Forgetting and Oblivion (MAFO).

Endorsements

To change the world, we need a money revolution. Yet the debate over money has been dominated by two perspectives: those free-market capitalists who want money to rule everything, and those who want the state to harness money’s power. Decolonizing Money presents an anarchist theory of money which sets out strategies for collective liberation beyond state and capital.

Drawing on anarchist, abolitionist and anti-colonial feminist traditions, Julio Linares makes the heretical argument for a grassroots democratic movement to abolish the imperialist US dollar as a necessary step towards the cancellation of debt and establishing a worldwide basic income. Linares shows that money, beyond a store of value and a medium of exchange, is a series of promises a society makes to itself – and he challenges us to make them otherwise.

This innovative book takes up lessons from global history and social movements in order to unleash the political imagination. It shows us how the creation, use and most importantly the destruction of money are forms of power that need to be reclaimed through direct action, as part of a radical democratic project for autonomy and self-determination.

Buy it from Pluto Press

Author

Julio César Linares is a community organizer and economic anthropologist born in the territories known today as Guatemala. He holds an MSc from the London School of Economics where he studied and worked on projects with the late David Graeber. He serves as Public Outreach for the Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN). He lives in Berlin, Germany.

Endorsements

In many places around the world, the freedom to simply care for one another is being attack by the powerful, and acts of solidarity are being made illegal. In a moment of struggle defined by the rollback of the social safety net, the criminalization of migration, and the right-wing clampdown on bodily autonomy, radical networks of care are fighting back.

From volunteer rescue boats in the Mediterranean to underground labs preparing gender-affirming hormones, people are reclaiming the means to care for one another in defiance of a system that devalues and exploits the labor of care.

Against atomized despair, Pirate Care shows that fighting back isn’t only about legal and legislative changes but also about organizing, direct action, and disobedient care.

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Authors

Valeria Graziano is a cultural theorist and organizer. Along with Marcell Mars and Tomislav Medak she is the convenor of the Pirate Care Syllabus project. She has contributed to a number of collectives, including Precarious Workers Brigade, the Radical Education Forum, Boycott Workfare and the Women Strike UK. She is the co-author of Rebelling with Care: Exploring Open Technologies for Commoning Healthcare and she lives in Rijeka, Croatia.

Marcell Mars is an advanced internet user. With Tomislav Medak he founded a shadow library Memory of the World, He develops and maintains software infrastructure to support custodians of (universal access to) knowledge. His research Ruling Class Studies, started at the Jan van Eyck Academy, examines state-of-the-art digital innovation, adaptation, and intelligence created by corporations such as Google, Amazon, Facebook, and eBay. Marcell lives in Rijeka, Croatia.

Tomislav Medak is a commons and disability activist and an independent researcher with a focus on technology, environmental crisis and degrowth transition. He’s a member of the green-left party Možemo! (HR). With Marcell Mars and a community of friends in Zagreb he founded Multimedia Institute/MAMA, since 2000 a hub for cultural and political organizing. Together they have co-edited Public Library and Guerrilla Open Access. He lives in Zagreb, Croatia.

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To see Palestine is to see the world. Since October 7th 2023, the forces of racial capitalism and settler colonialism have become all too visible in Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza.

In To See In the Dark, Nicholas Mirzoeff explores how images, and especially video, viewed outside Palestine enabled a dramatic switch in public opinion, leading to a global uprising against the genocide.

In this groundbreaking analysis, he connects the personal and the political through his own anti-Zionist Jewishness and its histories of violence. The result is a new collective and anti-colonial way of seeing, intersecting online and embodied experience.

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Author

Among the founders of visual culture as a field, Nicholas Mirzoeff has also written extensively on Jewishness and Palestine . His books include How To See The World, The Right to Look and The Appearance of Black Lives Matter. He has written for the Guardian, Hyperallergic and The Nation. He lives in New York City.

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Ranging from the terrifying embrace of the slave ship’s hold to the racist encoding of ‘cuddly’ toys, On Cuddling is a unique combination of essay and poetry that contends with the way racial violence is enacted through intimacy.

Informed by Black feminist and queer poetics, Phanuel Antwi focuses his lens on the suffering of Black people at the hands of state violence and racial capitalism. As radical movements grow to advance Black liberation, so too must our ways of understanding how racial capitalism embraces us all. Antwi turns to cuddling, an act we imagine as devoid of violence, and explores it as a tense transfer point of power.

Through archival documents and multiple genres of writing, it becomes clear that the racial violence of the state and economy has always been about the (mis)management of intimacies, and we should face it with resistance and solidarity.

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Author

Phanuel Antwi is Canada Research Chair in Black Arts and Epistemologies. He is an artist, teacher and organiser concerned with race, poetics, movements, intimacy and struggle. He works with text, dance, film and photography to intervene in artistic, academic and public spaces. He is a curator, activist and associate professor at the University of British Columbia.

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It’s in our food, our cosmetics, our fuel and our bodies. Palm oil, found in half of supermarket products, has shaped our world. Max Haiven uncovers how the gears of capitalism are literally and metaphorically lubricated by this ubiquitous elixir.

From its origins in West Africa to today’s Southeast Asian palm oil superpowers, Haiven’s sweeping, experimental narrative takes us on a global journey that includes looted treasures, the American system of mass incarceration, the history of modern art and the industrialisation of war. Beyond simply calling for more consumer boycotts, he argues for recognising in palm oil humanity’s profound potential to shape our world beyond racial capitalism and neo-colonial dispossession.

One part history, one part dream, one part theory, one part montage, this kaleidoscopic and urgent book asks us to recognise the past in the present and to seize the power to make a better world.

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Author

Max Haiven is a Canadian author, teacher, editor, political organiser and board game designer. He is the editor of the Vagabonds book series, and the author of Palm Oil: The Grease of Empire and Revenge Capitalism. His new board game, Billionaires & Guillotines, is an experiment into role-playing the revolution, from the side of the capitalists.

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In 2008, as the storms of the financial crash blew, Isabelle Fremeaux and Jay Jordan deserted the metropolis and their academic jobs, traveling across Europe in search of post-capitalist utopias. They wanted their art activism to no longer be uprooted.

They arrived at a place French politicians had declared lost to the republic, otherwise know as the zad (the zone to defend): a messy but extraordinary canvas of commoning, illegally occupying 4,000 acres of wetlands where an international airport was planned. In 2018, the 40-year-long struggle snatched an incredible victory, defeating the airport expansion project through a powerful cocktail that merged creation and resistance.

Fremeaux and Jordan blend rich eyewitness accounts with theory, inspired by a diverse array of approaches, from neo-animism to revolutionary biology, insurrectionary writings and radical art history.

Published in collaboration with the Journal of Aesthetics & Protest.

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Author

Isabelle Fremeaux is a popular educator and action researcher. She was formerly Senior Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies at Birkbeck College London. Along with Jay Jordan, she is a coordinator of The Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination.

Jay Jordan is co-founder of Reclaim the Streets (1995-2000) and the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army, and co-author of We Are Everywhere: The Irresistible Rise of Global Anticapitalism (Verso, 2003) and A User’s Guide to Demanding the Impossible (Minor Compositions, 2011). They are a coordinator of The Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination.

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In November 2019, a new strain of coronavirus appeared in Wuhan, China, and quickly spread across the world. Since then, the pandemic has exposed the brutal limits of care and health under capitalism.

Pandemonium underscores the turning-points between neoliberalism and authoritarian government, crystallised by ineffective responses to the pandemic. In so doing, it questions capitalist understandings of order and disorder, of health and disease, and the new world borders which proliferate through distinctly capitalist definitions of risk and uncertainty.

From the origins of the crisis at the crossroads of fossil-fuelled pollution and the privatisation of healthcare in China, Angela Mitropoulos follows the virus’ spread as governments embraced reckless strategies of ‘containment’ and ‘herd immunity.’ Exoticist explanations of the pandemic and the recourse to quarantines and travel bans racialised the disease, while the reluctance to expand healthcare capacity displaced the risk onto private households and private wealth.

Tracing iterations of borders through the histories of population theory, the political contract and epidemiology, Mitropoulos discusses the circuits of capitalist value in pharmaceuticals, protective equipment and catastrophe bonds. These and the treatment of populations as capitalist ‘stock’ in demands to ‘reopen the economy’ reveal a world where the very definition of ‘the economy’ and infrastructure are fundamentally shifting. Much will depend on how these are understood, and debts are reckoned, in the months and years to come.

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Author

Angela Mitropoulos is a theorist and academic based in Sydney, Australia. Among other writings which track shifting boundaries and movements in the history of philosophy, science, aesthetics, politics and economics, she is the author of Contract and Contagion: From Biopolitics to Oikonomia (2012).

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In an era when capitalism leaves so many to suffer and to die, with neoliberal ‘self-care’ offering little more than a bandaid, how can we take health and care back into our hands? In The Hologram, Cassie Thornton puts forward a bold vision for revolutionary care: a viral, peer-to-peer feminist health network.

The premise is simple: three people – a ‘triangle’ – meet on a regular basis, digitally or in person, to focus on the physical, mental and social health of a fourth – the ‘hologram’. The hologram, in turn, teaches their caregivers how to give and also receive care; each member of their triangle becomes a hologram for another, different triangle, and so the system expands.

Drawing on radical models developed in the Greek solidarity clinics during a decade of crisis, and directly engaging with discussions around mutual aid and the coronavirus pandemic, The Hologram develops the skills and relationships we desperately need for the anti-capitalist struggles of the present, and the post-capitalist society of the future. One part art, one part activism, one part science fiction, this book offers the reader a guide to establishing a Hologram network as well as reflections on this cooperative work in progress.

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Author

Cassie Thornton is an artist and activist from the US, currently living in Canada. She refers to herself as a feminist economist, a title that frames her work as that of a social scientist actively preparing for the economics of a future society that produces health and life without the tools that reproduce oppression— like money, police or prisons.

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