- - Sigwarth

BI-MONETISM
Beyond the confused capitalism
By Alan SIGWARTH
lecture 13 January 2001
translated from French

Ladies and gentlemen,
This very coin, the one you all have in your pocket, has been   considered for ages as a simple unity. But the fiscal system and the   globalisation we are living in, force us to realise that it is, in fact, a  complex body, source of unsolvable difficulties because it brings   along with it at least 4 basic moneys that is to say, as shown on schema 1
a money of consumption,
You need this coin in order to buy bread, meat,  vegetables and heating in winter, that is to say the bare necessities to live decently. Let us call it the cal-money.
 a money of investment ,
To produce these goods which are needed or wanted,  money has to be invested in lands, buildings, machines and any necessary equipment.
These francs have to be invested by someone or else no factory, no company. It is the in-money.
a money of production,
But the money invested would remain dead if another   kind of money would not circulate with the raw materials  which dynamize the entire economy.
It is the pro-money that, in the end, will give us :
a money of finalities,
work wages allowing us to fulfil our plans, our envies, and our  personal or social desires. It is the profit of the trouble we   have been taking to reach this freedom, it is the fin-money.

  So, this franc you have in your pocket is fourfold and  allows all the things I have described. Here is the proof:
If you move from where you work and bring this money along to Brittany, Spain, Morocco or even to Asia or America to spend it, well then, you move :
the mean of consumption,
the mean of making someone work,
the mean of investing in tools,
the mean of entertaining yourself,
all of this as you fancy it, very innocently, without meaning any  harm to the economies that you carry along with your money.
But if you multiply this by one million or one billion, as  pension or retirement funds can, then you face the irreducible  tangle of the world’s economies which is a dead-end. The cause
is not the spitefulness of the capitalists, which do not exist   anymore, nor of the employees who manage these funds, as good trading technicians or good bankers, for you and for the  well-being of their American retired people who are depriving  those of Europe. Without meaning any harm I would say, not  knowing it, because of the atypical and impersonal money.
Human beings are not maliciously exploiting you anymore, they are forced to work, just like you, it is an abstract monetary system stifling us, a historical production of our human mind which has become over-simple and which is crushing us.
"The terrifying simplicity of our market economy" (Schumacher) is only a product of the terrifying simplicity of the unit currency.
It carries in itself this original confusion giving birth to our confusional capitalism, explosive I would say, because no  population would indefinitely stand the  incompetence of the  politicians, floating along with the financial waves and  storms

Then, as long as you do not break this unique and confused money in at least a structural bi-monetism :
a European money for investment and production,
a national money for consumption and for the own finality of each country, or cultural isolate
you will not be able to master this domination of the abstraction  of money over Man, and this in every social class. Socialism  failed in this analysis of money, and so did liberalism, and let us say it, May 1968 well-controlled in its limits.
These are lost battles, but the struggle of Human beings against their ignorance of the forces ruling them and against the imaginary – substitute to the senses and to the truth they are chasing – is not.
In fact, electronic money very simply allows us to succeed in this  mastering, the consumer’s card distinguishing the cal and the in-money   in two lines which will transform society more than a line of fire.
Because this, Ladies and Gentlemen, has multiple and serious consequences :
So, by separating these two currencies it will not be possible to turn  the needs of the ones into the wealth of the others anymore – the great vice of the present confusional capitalism ! – and it will be made clear that anyone who would oppose to this splitting would actually support the wildest capitalism – the one which allows to  take advantage of the necessities of the ones to make the  others’ fortune. Out go the problems of the third-world countries.
Here is the first conquest , not solved until now, of the bi-monetism.
Would it be appropriate to impose taxes on this minimum necessary?
But it would be suicidal for any government as it would be like starving the people and decaying the nation.

So the cal-money is tax-free, and so it reduces as much the nonsense   of the Treasury and moreover, the insidious ideologies linking life  with social conformisms – mere historical products of religious obligations – as imaginary and confused as those of money.
Will the in-money be taxed? on the investments, but let us take the word literally: no one can make more sense in taking out a piece of a factory, of a machine, of a desk than a piece of bread for the State taxes. To levy the in-francs would be a stupid reduction of the economic potential.
The pro-money is left, but the answer is the same : it would be absurd   to deduct a part of the flowing capital for taxes, it is the best way  to slow down production, business and economic life.
And still, Ladies and Gentlemen, that is what our governing people  and their fiscal policy are doing, without considering the result.
The fiscal system, which is meant to fulfil collective purposes,  can only be – and is in fact – applied on the fin-money – the former increase in value – which real problem is the sharing.
As intricate as this problem seems in our present mono-monetism system  that you are rejecting, it becomes very simple that the Parliament  should   vote a sharing rate between individual and collective purposes .
That is where the sacrifices a nation is ready to admit for its plans  and its future take place, in the comprehension of every one.
This fin-money has still to be calculated: it is deduced from the G. D. P.  after deduction of the cal-money needed by all , and of the interests  - according to the international standard – that must be  paid to the investors who would otherwise – for their own sake – take them abroad where, thanks to the bi-monetism, they will  only be able to get consumer goods by investing in order to produce fin-money and therefore to supply the needed jobs.