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Anti-Capitalist Meetup Part Two: Against Money, The Worgl [1]
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Date: 2025-09-14
There are many important observations in Bernard Lietear’s work (see: Bernard Lietear’s Rethinking Money: How New Currencies Turn Scarcity into Prosperity as one example); however, his first concrete example was the efficacy of The Worgl.
Created in 1932 by the mayor of the city of Worgl in Austria, Michael Unterguggenberger, this local currency pulled the town out of the Great Depression. People travelled to Worgl from all over the world in order to understand how this local currency had succeeded while countries and communities around the globe could not seem to right their economic ships.
The Worgl reversed the notion at the heart of modern money. It charged a demurrage fee of 1% for each month the currency was not circulated, i.e. spent. Thus it was a negative interest currency. The key attribute of the Worgl was it shrunk in value as time passed.
If you look at the image of the Worgl above, you will note that on the right hand side there are stamps affixed to the Worgl. These stamps had to be attached to the notes in order to keep them valid. The stamps denote each month the currency lost one percent of its value.
By creating a local currency based on negative interest, Unterguggenberger encouraged spending each bill before it lost value. This supercharged the town’s economy because the citizens of Worgl needed to spend their money before it ‘went bad.’
This one attribute, negative interest, encouraged people to buy goods and services instead of hoarding their ‘wealth.’ Were we to have a world economy based on negative interest money, the elons, bezos’s, zuckerberg’s of the world could not exist. They would be incentivized to spend, not hoard, their ‘wealth.’
After the economic crisis of 2008, interest rates fell to almost zero, especially in Europe. However, by 2014, the European Central Bank moved into negative interest rates some European banks actually moved into the negative interest range which upset capitalists who did everything they could not to report on this phenomenon, or report it in with obvious capitalist bias.
During economic downturns, central banks lower rates to revive growth. But in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, even very low rates weren’t enough to boost activity in many markets. So, some central banks tried to extend their efforts by breaking the zero lower bound. . . The Federal Reserve chose not to join the NIRP club. Negative Interest Rates post 2008 — this article has a capitalistic viewpoint against which all the evidence about negative interest rates needs to be carefully weighed.
It is important to note that negative bank interest is not the same as demurrage. In any case, The Bank of Japan was the last central bank to both to join the negative interest bandwagon and the last to end them in 2024.
To provide us with an example of what modern money does to what is considered one of the oldest human cultures, we need only to turn to the !Kung of South Africa.
The ancient !Kung society is part of the San peoples in Southern Africa whose culture has remained essentially the same for at least tens of thousands of years and possibly up to 200,000 years. For all that time, they were a gift based society in which goods were shared with all who needed them and a man was considered wealthy according to how much he gave away.
In the 1970s, the !Kung were gradually integrated into a cash society.
Almost immediately, the layout of their villages which had formerly been made up of temporary huts in a circle with the entryways all facing towards the center of the circle, so that everyone could see into each other’s dwelling, began to change. The entrances to the huts did not face inward but rather faced away from the center. This new village layout allowed families to ‘hide’ their possessions/wealth as the tribe begin moving from a gift economy into a modern interest bearing money economy. The thousands and thousands of years of social practice which made sure all families shared with others, thus reinforcing a common goal of what is best for all was dismantled by the introduction of modern money almost instantly.
Today, the homes of the wealthy San are permanent stone structures while the poorer families scrape by in the temporary thatched huts of their thousands year old culture.
But throughout most of the world the rest of us are born into an economic system in which interest is built into our understanding of how money works. From the time we are toddlers, we are given small tokens of capitalism in the form of quarters and silver dollars and taught these magic tokens buy goodies, but we are also taught to save as a preparation for adult life. Tiny children are interpolated into capitalism when their brains are unable to understand what these tokens really are. But we do implicitly learn that money equals goodies and that it is, somehow concrete. When I was in grade school, our class visited the Federal Reserve in New York. We were taken into the basement and shown barred rooms filled with gold. Given a chance to life a gold brick and told that each room held the gold for one country. When a country had to pay another (this was not explained in detail) the gold would be moved from one cell to another. This concretized money in my childhood brain. But money is an agreement, not something concrete at all.
Bernie Sanders told it like it is in a recent speech. He mentioned that he meets with billionaires on a regular basis, and that they truly are worse than we can imagine: they are mentally ill and infected with greed. No level of wealth is sufficient for these immoral creatures we have elevated to an absurd status while they ruin the earth for all living beings. They fantasize spreading capitalism into space. This is like fantasizing we spread murder into the universe as a founding principle of society. It is truly bananas.
Negative interest money lays down a moral precept at the base of an economy. It screams: “Share and spend so that the community can be prosperous” instead of “Grab and hoard so the individual can feel safe.”
The catch is that the ultra wealthy never feel safe because they know down somewhere deep they are worse than robber barons. They also believe they can be made poor again at any point because they understand that they have made themselves targets in this game called modern capitalism.
Lietear goes on to explain that there are many thousands of alternative currencies existing all around the world. We do not know about most of them or we do not realize we are looking at an alternative currency. He points out that earned airline miles are an alternative currency. My Unitd miles actually went bad a few years ago because I had not used them. Airline miles encourage us to fly again and fill planes, often by paying for only part of our tickets.
He points out that we are already in a planet wide experiment in alternative currencies. Lietaer advocates for the continued creation of these currencies alongside interest bearing money. Ultimately, we will learn how to construct a monetary system appropriate to this age.We may come to understand and accept a currency which advocates for life, not competition to the death.
We must all learn how our dollah, dollah lives are at the heart of not just the obscene levels of inequality but the fundamental immorality that is the basis for our economic system.
The Worgl was outlawed by the Austrian National Bank, which saw its monopoly on issuing currency threatened. The central bank banned the currency in 1933, and Wörgl's economic fortunes soon returned to stasis with the Great Depression. This one year experiment is sometimes termed, the miracle of Worgl.
Trumplandia is upside down world, but we have been tolerating its economic basis for at least 500 years. Allowing billionaires to steal our democracy will not turn out well for anyone.
It truly does not have to be this way. Interest bearing money kills, and when taken to its obvious conclusion, kills the planet. After studying Lietaer’s work and a few others, I began to realize that we will never have a just world as long as our economies are based on interest bearing money.
Some of our most blockbuster movies tell us this story. I find James Cameron’s work problematic, but Avatar, which remains the highest grossing film of all time at $2.9 billion, teaches us that greed destroys. One would think the message has gotten through to its viewers.
For now, power of the dollah, dollah remains. To mix science fiction blockbuster idioms, “the Force is strong in this one.”
***Please forgive the generalities in this story. I have been very unwell for a couple of weeks. I consider this bit of writing something meant to raise questions not provide answers.
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