# Decolonizing Money by Julio Linares [Poetic Technologies] x Ethereum Cypherpunk Congress

- Channel: [Ethereum Cypherpunk Congress](https://streameth.org/ethereum-cypherpunk-congress)
- Date: 2025-10-07
- Duration: 29:06
- Topics: Education
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-OT1MYlona2E
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OT1MYlona2E

## Description

How to move from Big Tech dependency, build a sovereign stack towards socio-technical counter-positioning unpacked by Andreas from Fileverse & https://ddocs.new

Ethereum Cypherpunk Congress facilitated by the Web3Privacy now collective: https://www.web3privacy.info

Julio https://x.com/Julio_Linares_
Poetic Technologies https://x.com/Poetic_Tech

Ethereum Cypherpunk Congress: https://congress.web​3privacy.info
X: https://x.com/web3privacy

## Transcript

so hello everyone um my name is Hines and today I want to talk to you a little bit about uh my book um decolonizing money it's coming out next year in Pluto press in vagabon you can pre-order the book right now um yeah so maybe a little bit of context for the book um I wrote this book uh let's say in the last two years but the process started uh doing work that I was doing with my late mentor and friend David Graber um who was a big big inspiration also for this work at the time with David we were looking into um this question of how could we um think about um a money system or or a type of money better said a form of money uh that could actually be Democratic as in ER real democracy or direct democracy um so this series of Explorations were also based on a lot of the work on uh death cancellation that David was doing when he was alive and also uh on the work on unconditional basic income uh that I also have been doing for many years and and so uh the question that drives the book a lot is um how can we change a relationship to money in such a way that we can also change money itself um and I try to situate this question in the current context of today within the current monetary politics of today um to think about what are from an anarchist and anticolonial perspective the ways in which we can um take action take direct action and actually change the world uh in a way that um does not destroy the planet so the first chapter of the book is a bit of a imagination exercise um in the sense that it's uh uh here we go uh this is the table of contents um so the first chapter of the book is actually a a research that I did uh in the territories that I'm from uh in this country today called Guatemala uh but actually the the story uh of of of of of this of this chapter is actually about uh how could money how can how has money uh been made differently so this is the story actually of Kakao so um who here has uh seen cacao like a cacao plant um okay seems not many people um caca was actually uh the currency uh par Excellence of the many Mesoamerican civilizations that existed uh throughout uh the centuries uh what was interesting about Cacao is that it was a money that actually grew on trees so people used it uh as a way to exchange uh for things that they could not get in their own local regions they would use it as a unit of account so as a way to make prices they would use it as a way to uh rewire their social relations so caca was often used in moments when there was uh say a wedding so as a wedding gift or a gift to a lover or a partner also in moments of collective grief so when a relative or ancestor passes away um there were many sort of games of Sex and Death that took place with currency uh in this case caca as a social currency and so in many ways caca was a living currency in the sense that um it had a lifespan caca was not a currency that if you do not uh uh if you if you do not use then it just stays there forever like today we would think about gold or even like digital money in some ways um so as a living currency it was also a rotting currency so the the money that um er people used had a expiry date and this fundamentally changes the way in which people relate to money because it's something that you cannot accumulate right um when you have cycles of growth of a plant uh that then you use as a way to exchange and then enjoy uh by eating it um it's really hard today to think about eating money but uh I wrote this chapter as a way to give people an a sense and Imagination of how could it be like to have a different money that is also uh that also embodies different values and different sort of social uh Dynamics social structures so um there were many Merchants across the meso americ region um from you know the Mayan kingdoms confederations to to the meika uh eventually Empire that would walk around all of the corners of what is now Mexico and Central America to exchange uh you know things of value of from from each other using cacao and what was interesting is that for example uh this God that you see here from a hieroglyphic EA is the Mayan God of uh both cacao but also of merchants so you see there that um there is like a deep woven inter relationship between between the two um one thing that um I also found during the book that's interesting it's also I think important uh for the purposes of thinking about uh US dollar Evolution which is the larger argument of my book is that um when the Spaniards arrived to the colonizers when they arrived to to uh what is now called America they quickly realized that caca was used as a way as a as a as a currency for a tribute and as a currency for trade so they quickly began to seize the cacao fields and the caca uh treasuries and deposits of Muma himself uh and what that meant is that they suddenly claimed the power to uh access this network of value but at the same time disrupted it and they disrupted it so much that then people could no longer continue uh this Millennial circuits of exchange that they had so there was a definitely a strong break to the value system that was living for around 4,000 years from the time of the mmix all the way to uh like 14 14 1500s when Kakao uh was seized by the Spanish and then used as a way to tax people for believing in false gods according to the Spaniards right um which also contributed to the mass genocide that uh that ensued and so I think one of the lessons of this chapter is that the way we make money matters so the materiality of money is a reflection it's a mirror of our current civilization or the civilization in question and so this matters because money matters because uh if if we if if we only think about money as a sort of abstract social relation uh then we're missing a lot of the material reality that you you know it the civilization is founded on including the money itself so money is not outside of the circuits of social reproduction of how do we uh uh reproduce and care for our life is actually an inherent part of it and that's because money is a series of promises that we make to one another and so the problem is that of course under capitalism this money uh this the money as a promise has been turned into a commodity so one of the larger questions that motivates the book is what if money was not a commodity what if money was a common or a commodity as I like to say um so um the larger argument I try to make in the book as a sort of form of direct action as a call for social movements to to take on is to abolish the dollar uh and so I try to make the argument in the book that in order to abolish the dollar we first need to understand uh its body or how how how is it working the organs let's say that uh make up this sort of planetary structure that is killing the Earth um so uh very briefly I will not go into all the parts of the of the US dollar system but so if I to say that internally uh within the US the the United States there are two institutions um that act as sort of uh dual issuers or creators and destroyers of money and these are famously uh of course the Federal Reserve of the United States but also the treasury of the United States so the process normally happens in a way where the Federal Reserve issues uh money out in the form of debt that gets monetized into US dollars and then put into the circuits of the banking sector and Industry um and then the US dollar system um has the reach and power it does because largely of what it's called the treasury bill or treasury bond uh standard now what that means is that the the institution of the treasury is in charge of issuing Promises of future dollars in exchange of present dollars that the FED uh issues so investors so-called investors um which include the central banks of all the countries in the world are somehow forced uh semi forced or or or actually really forced in a way implicitly forced to hold both US Dollars and US TR treasury bills which are these promises of future dollars so what happens is that the treasury uh takes present dollars out of circulation and says to to central banks we will give you more dollars in the future so dollars with an interest and so this is the mechanism by which um uh the rest of the world is tributing wealth back into the US in um in a way where if countries stop to hold US Dollars then because the dollar today as the reserve currency of the world then their own power um as a sort of national money would decrease and so um this structure uh of uh let's say like violence and tribut and and forc labor and like the distribution of resources from say uh the South to the North or the periphery to the center has a longer historical uh structure uh which is something that David Graver my my former Mentor called the military coinage slavery complex um so what that means is that uh you have uh a military that is charged by a king or a sovereign in this case to go out and uh basically expand its uh territorial reach and slave people or turn them into Force laborers get them to work for a money the money of the king the money of the state the money of The Sovereign um and then uh tax them as a way to uh maintain the bureaucracies and the military itself and so this this structure is still very much alive today within the body of the US dollar uh in in many different ways so for example the US military uh is today the enforcer and the reason why um the the US dollar has so much power so if you if you look at the world um there are military bases of the United States all over the world especially in countries that are supposed to be their allies like Japan and Germany uh and of course there is a military and political reason for this but it's also e economic um so people have to hold dollars because of the threat of violence uh of the US Army then there is another thing which is interesting that relates to the energy Matrix of the world and one reason why we need to abolish the dollar is that today when we talk about energ energy Transitions and we think about I don't know solar pan and all these other so-called green technologies um one of the main issues is that um today uh in order to buy the hegemonic monetary system the the hegemonic energy ER grid of the world which is um petrol you need uh you can only buy them in dollars and so this is known as the Petr dollar system um and it's actually uh even more messed up because the US Army is actually the the the biggest consumer of of of of oil so they're both in charge of protecting this regime that you can only as a country buy oil in dollars and at the same time they're the biggest uh consumers of it so we cannot really have an ecological social energetic transition unless we unlink ourselves from this Dynamic uh and of course this is replicated at other levels where you see in the banking sector in investment um there is no real macro structural investment in alternative energy grids mainly because all of the money is being funded towards petrol and Oil Capital um so um I'll skip the next Point um so what's important here is that you know someone someone's deficit in this case the US dollar the the US's deficit um its budgets are effectively funded by the rest of the planet so today the rest of the world can if the US uh sort of um War Machine were to disappear the rest of the world could go at it alone without the United States most of the world um you know many countries in the world have already uh different forms of food sovereignty autonomy uh but that are largely stolen away by forced importation of goods by debt uh that are forced upon that by the international monetary fund the World Bank and these other sort of uh satellites of the United States so the sort of Imperial deficits that the United States takes in order to fund itself its Army is its weapons and its sort of uh you know genocidal uh um regimes are basically funded by the rest of us um and so one way that I like to think about uh abolition and abolition is politics is this idea of abolition democracy which was a term that was coined by web duwa um which was a sociologist um that was writing about uh at the end of um the the period of slavery in the United States he was arguing that when the institution of slavery was abolished there were not uh structural counter institutions that were brought into being Democratic institutions that were brought into being to uh enable the newly free slaves slaves to enter into this new uh regime of of of work and and labor and relationships with others like former slaves had nothing they they only had their labor so they they had no assets there was no proper red distribution of wealth in that context so abolition democracy is basically this idea that in order to change a specific uh institution we have to first abolish it and then create the counter institution uh uh for it um so this is a concept that is taken up today by people like Ruth Wilmer Gibson and Angela Davis when they talk about prison abolition in the United States so one argument that I make to try to connect to this to these ideas and these efforts is that instead of uh only focusing on the S sort of repressive hand of the state on the on the prison side and trying to abolish that we should focus our efforts and energies on uh actually attacking the the funding mechanism the the monetary system that enables the prisons and the military and the police to continue as they do um so this sort of whole system this large system uh is called by um uh sort of a Marxist archaeologist uh historian uh Michael Hudson he calls it super imperialism and the reason the the reason behind the super is because of the regime that we entered since 19 uh 7071 I believe when Richard Nixon uh took the dollar off the gold standard this was a moment when the United States was struggling to pay for the war in Vietnam uh and they were depleting their gold reserves in order to do so uh France was taking a bunch of them of their gold reserves and so um Nixon uh and his and his administration decided to to say we will uh end the gold standard and make the dollar the new standard so effectively from one day to the next countries all around the world had to hold dollars uh with like fluctua and exchange rates to maintain sort of the the power purchasing of their own um economy uh and their own like monetary system and so this uh signified a huge uh like uh shift in the balance of power powers where all countries in the world were effectively now H getting taxed uh by the United States to fund the United States you see it with again with the the sort of uh Dynamics with oil with with Saudi Arabia like few years later after the after after this happen in I think it's 1974 um Saudi Arabia made a deal with the United States to recycle the dollars that the US would give them for their oil into the United States Treasury so this is is effectively how the system is financed so the United States buys oil from oil producing countries like Saudi Arabia and then Saudi Arabia puts those dollars back into uh the US uh Treasury System the US Treasury gives them uh us treasury bills and and so the the expansion continues so this exchange of or recycling of dollars in exchange for security is one of the ways in which the US has managed to maintain its hegemony and sort of um uh yeah allies let's say in different parts of the world and it's the same of course with with Israel no but instead of with oil it happens with with weapons um we see it today with the ongoing genocide in Palestine the US uh regime is basically funded uh by War and by weapon sales so um you know Israel is one of the places where a lot of the research and development of new weapons happened and so um so long as we cannot break this link between the the military the Industrial company complex the monetary system and the force uh like labor or like uh yeah genocide of violence that goes on we will not be able to actually have a proper uh uh social and ecological just transition so this is why we have to abolish the dollar because if we don't do so the sort of meta crisises of genocide ecocide and and other other ones will not stop so my call for people is to think from their own perspective from their own social movements whe whether if it's the crypto world or the degrowth world or any other type of uh contemporary utopian uh liberatory movement in the earth to think together in ways in which we can actually change uh the monetary regime and move towards a system uh that is based on uh care and freedom and dignity for everyone on Earth so um in terms of uh proposals um what I largely call for in this process is that most countries in the world today are you know indebted to largely institutions like the IMF the international monetary fund and the World Bank which as I said are sat satellites of the United States so what I one of the proposals in the book that I call for is to go beyond uh the debt uh system the the sort of Imperial Deb system that holds most countries in the world uh with their hands shut so I think it's like one3 1/4th even half of most uh like National incomes of countries in the world are basically send in debt repayments back to to again fund the the military industrial complex of the United States so fundamentally we have uh like to to first do that to if if we manage to abolish the dollar then my argument is that we would ensue a moment of of of what is called the Jubilee or a a moment of cancellation of debts where all this wealth that is normally being tributed back into the Empire could actually go into funding other things such as uh an unconditional basic income such as uh services for people um basically the things that people need to live but the idea is that we cannot do that unless we cancel the debts and so how do we cancel the debts my argument is that the most direct way is actually to abolish the dollar I have been part of uh social movements for uh the cancellation of debt uh one of them is called debt for climate and one of the strategies there is to build counterpower and to show uh from below from the different sort of chapters that the movement is in that we need to have a united front against that from the workers uh of the world to The Climate uh activist uh forging alliances across different uh territories and regions is very important because we live in a planetary system so we need to develop a type of planetary politics to be able to confront it um so maybe just a a bit on on on on the larger sort of theoretical proposal in the book um I call it the form of the community as Aon to uh KL Marx's idea of the commodity form so what I'm trying to say here is that um what would it be like or how could we go about creating a different monetary fetishism and by fetishism here I mean this ability in which human beings have to give power to objects which then have power over them now the problem today with the sort of commodity fetishism the fetishism of the commodity is that all of these fetishes are founded upon the principle of private property so even our own bodies we are turned into objects by the system of capital to sell our labor for money in order to live um so this exchange is something that we have to um or or link is something that we have to uh unwind and my argument of doing that is to say if we can create a monetary system where everyone can claim the power to issue money in the form of a liberatory income in the form of a share of the wealth that is collectively held by the Earth uh I mean think about it we are the only species on Earth that has to pay rent to live on it no other animal has to do that um and so the argument is that the Comm this community fetishism or the fetishism of the commons appli to money would mean that this promises this circulating uh money system this Democratic money system as I like to call it or DMT would enable us to both free ourselves from wage labor and at the same time allow us to control the process of monetary creation and destruction in the form of the cancellation of debt so the idea is to move from a regime based on Commodities and private property to one based on Commons and communal or or Collective uh ownership over our bodies and over the Earth um so um I have been also involved in um some experiments uh Pilots are trying to make uh basic income happen uh in a distributed way so many years ago I I created a project called circles UPI which was a protocol where effectively everyone in the system issued their own token uh erc20 token at the time and they could then use that to create trust relations with each other and then pay for the things that they needed so we set up a pilot in Berlin uh with different different people offering things from food to health care to uh distribution of of of of things and it was an interesting experience uh mainly because um you see a lot of the current limitations both in terms of Technology but also in terms of the political economy of what is possible today in a place like Europe in a place like Berlin which is where we did the pilot and so I'll share with you two learnings of that that I think are relevant uh one of them has to do with the actual structure of crypto uh and and how crypto uh reproduces uh certain structures that are problematic for our purposes of Liberation one of them is this idea of plutocracy so today the the politics of mathematics or the politics of algorithms within blockchains reflect a plutocratic structure in the sense that the more tokens that you have the more power you have to decide over things in a blockchain now for someone like like me and and the group that I was with making an application on top of a blockchain that has such a different differential power uh is actually problematic because if we are successful in making a planetary basic income happen then who will uh have the power over that system the ones who control the blockchain and so if you look at history the closest thing that you can find with this type of hierarchical yet decentralized system is something along the the lines of feudalism so what do we want do we want crypto feudalism or some form of more democratic uh local uh Municipal politics to arrange money how how much time you have surely way okay cool um and the second learning uh from the circus pilot was um it's a story that I want to share with you about uh a farmer that we used to work with and what a lot of his struggles were about how to ensure that he could sell uh healthy uh affordable vegetables to people in the areas of Berlin growing the vegetables in brandenberg which is the area surrounding Berlin and he would say to me you know when I sell my vegetables at the shop they're often 50 cents to a Euro more expensive than the ones that come from Andalusia in Spain which is a region where tomatoes are grown with uh migrant labor from people coming from North Africa and many other countries um and so you see the structure of the economy there where the Imperial structure of the economy where Imports cheap Imports and cheap labor are then moved to the centers making both the perip periphery and the center fragile and so one of the reflections there uh with the basic income pilot was that in order to actually uh have what we want which is economic democracy autonomy uh Freedom food sovereignty all these things we really need to create the material basis the material conditions for this to take place in the centers of Empire because so long as uh like places like Europe places like the US H cannot go at it alone cannot have their own means of subsistence in their own regions the the Thrive for expansion and extractivism colonialism imperialism and all the rest of it will continue so to me uh a basic income rooted in local democracy in Regional democracy is a way to do that to enable the basis for us to actually transition um but we need to go beyond also the current politics of uh crypto which are like a nightmare honestly like we need to do better um and so I'm running out of time but here are some of the methods to how to abolish the dollar I'm happy to talk about them oneon-one uh thank you very much for your listening and your time