Telematic Currency, an instrument to buil the peace.

Discussed by Lluís Maria Xirinacs, Doctor in Philosophy, ex-senator of the Catalan Parliament during the transition and candidate of the Peace Nobel Price in 1975, 1976 and 1977.

1. Beyond Capitalism and Comunism.
2. The currency.
3. History of currency.
4. Abstract currency, fixes and person in charge modern.
5. Communitarian Capitalism.
6. Conclusions.

1. Beyond capitalism and communism.
I have the pleasure of presenting a social proposal quite different from most that we know today.

Agusti Chalux de Subira was born in Barcelona, received most of his education in France, where he first studied Chemistry and then, as you will know from the story I am about to tell you, entered the world of political economics, or rather, should we say, social economics.

As a youngster, as a teenager he happened to meet the famous Banker Horaci Finaly, of Hungarian descent, chairman of the Banca Paribas in Paris, and the Netherlands. This gentleman had his residence in Paris and used to invite the boy for dinner.

One day Mr. Finaly was busy and the boy, curious as any youngster, started to look in the desk's drawers and found a report. A secret, transcendental report and started reading it. The Banker walked in and surprised him reading. He scolded him for doing this, but then he calmed down and told him: "You probably did not understand what you have just read. Even if you did understand, it will not be accomplished until much longer after I die, then you can do as you please with it."

Little by little the boy managed to draw more information, receiving more and more explanations about what he just read. We are talking about year 1925, during WWI, when Mr. Finaly held a secret meeting with the famous French Banker Sir John Deterdig, Chairman of the Royal Shell Oil Company, and with Mr. Morgan, of the Morgan Bank, the most important of its kind in America.

They got together because the gold to pay for the weapons of the countries at war was finished. The war was coming to an end and they did not like that. They wanted their business to keep going, as was natural from their point of view. So they asked some experts who advised them to use paper instead of gold, bills or notes that would guarantee the return in gold later on.

Thanks to this strategy the war extended a few more years. The advisors told not to misuse paper because it might lead the economy to go astray, in other words, it could sink the economy.

This gentlemen accepted the first part of the advice, but not so the second. They did not keep control over this paper. They said if one measured money, the existing power of money present at that time might be lost.

This triggered Agusti Chalaux de Subira's to dedicate his entire life to investigate, complete, and fulfill the idea of using paper instead of gold.

(Agusti Chalaux's voice): "What is called economic crime is lack of solidarity, it is stealing from society, and stealing from society is an inadmissible crime".

2. The currency.
Currency has three functions, three values: the first one is economic value, that of property, that is to say, the right to a piece of merchandise. If you sell something they give you some money, which you can exchange for another piece of merchandise of the same value. Having money means that you increase the right to have goods.

This economic value is very important and people who understand this begin to accumulate money because it gives them the impression that they are omnipotent, since you can exchange it for any kind of merchandise. The more money they have, they more rights they have, rights of property over certain goods and services.

Inside a community, the mass of money is equivalent to the capacity to buy in the market. The selling capacity is the offer of goods and services, while buying capacity is the money to buy them, acquire them, consume them, invest them, or whatever. This economic value of money is still intact and presently being used. Besides, this value can also be used to control the buying capacity that a group of people or society has.

The second importance of money is its scientific value. This is little known, it is not used commonly.

Currency, since it is quantified, makes analytic accounting possible, this is to say, the amount of quantities of goods converted into money, into monetary value. And it is analytic because it can be subdivided into subsets of every kind, for example health, education, and the like.

To be scientifically valuable currency must comply with a number of conditions that present currency does not meet. In other words, the scientific value of currency has long been in crisis, for many centuries. Why? Because in order for currency to serve as an authentic measure of the market it has to be stable, precise, analytical, and dated. A number of details it does not count on at the present time.

At the present time currency is mute. There is no way to know if you have bought fish, a flat, or a murderer. You just don't know. A really scientific currency should have a part, which is used separately, called an "invoice" in economics. What is an invoice? It is a piece of paper that shows in detail the reason for the expenditure. The fact that the invoice and the currency go separately permits to commit a lot of cheatings, barbarities, corruption, and so on. Therefore the currency needs to add the list of things bought, their value, number, quantity, and so on. All this is scientific and makes it possible to measure the markets.

Ethic value is the third value and is even more absent in the actual currencies. This means that currency should not only look like an invoice, but like a cheque. A cheque is a signed invoice that shows that buys and sells, the transaction can be done from an account to other even without physical paper, or maybe just a physical paper to order the transaction.

What happens today? Currency is anonymous. This means that there are no persons responsible for buying or selling. If you have seen, thieves in the movies who assault a Bank or want a ransom ask for anonymous currency, not signed cheques or notes that indicate who is doing the transaction. Besides, it has to be used material, not new, with consecutive numbers that may be tracked down and so on.

It is a complete lack of control. Ethical value drowns and, as Marx said, you can buy or sell anything: human health, culture, freedom; politics can be bought and sold. There even is a kind of slavery exerted through money: if you don't do as I say in this company, you are fired. There is no evidence of this. This lack of scientific and ethical currency is what so called black money, money you don't know where it comes from, money that is not declared in taxes, and so on. With black money you can do anything illegal at a national or international level.

We summarize the three important features of currency: first, property and economics, still in effect; second, the scientific aspect; and third, the ethical aspect. These last two are not present at this time. This has to change and this is Agusti Chalaux's proposal.

3. History of currency.
Great evils are deeply rooted. For this reason they remain along the different periods of history. We have to search in order to find these roots.

There are four most important human factors of production. They all have an historical origin and there is an historical moment when they become vitiated. The oldest of old we could say is the enterprise. The economic enterprise we could say that even animals use it, when they plan strategies, as when wolves go out hunting, dolphins also plan their actions, and so on.

We can say then that enterprising is something that is connatural to man. Men used to live in hordes, much like chimpanzees and other animals at this level. The horde had two purposes: one was living and living together; the other was to produce for survival. This second part was the enterprise, to say in somehow. And it exists from the beginning. Thus, enterprising is essential. I mention it because certain types of Marxism go against entrepreneurs thinking that they are going to fix something. In fact the entrepreneur is someone we have to care for. It deserves our respect and we all should take part in their job, not be just pieces inside the company.

The second factor of production is the capital. When Agusti Chalaux talks about capital he is talking of capital-savings. In order to capitalize we have to invest in means of production. First is necessary to save, instead of eating the product of the hunting so that it can be used at the proper time, for example when it is cold, when there are no animals to be hunted, in winter, and so on.

The first capital existed probably when fire was discovered, when he learned to smoke meat. Smoked meat lasts longer and does not get rotten. So man started to smoke meat and to find other techniques of conservation. For this reason the word "capital" comes from the Latin caput-capitis, which means head, a head of smoked cattle. The more heads a person had, the more power of survival he had over others.

The third factor of production is private property. In the beginning property was a common good and goods were enjoyed by all the members of the community, although there were certain things that were for personal use. According to archaeologist Morgan, even the act of mating was collective.

The concept of private property appears when there is lack of food because the population increases and groups specialized in hunting and fishing certain types of animals acquire their own technology.

This specialization turns into a signal, a logotype, a totem. The horde divides into their own special groups of production and have their own totems. A totem group produces a lot more of what it hunts, but has less of what the others produce. This is the beginning of markets. Every six months, or once a year, the horde totems gather together and exchange the product of their hunts and so they compensate each other.

With the arrival of the markets comes the possibility of having private property. If there is no private property in the totem there can be no exchange of the different products. Thus, if you eliminate the totem's private property there can be no market exchange, if you suppress the market then the private property has no use and vice versa; if you suppress private property, then the market has no reason. It disappears.

The fourth factor of human production is invention. It springs from the specialized totems that create refined skill techniques that cannot be known or discovered by others because they are busy making discoveries in their own specialties.

Thus, to each one his own secret. Guilds kept their secrets during the Middle Ages and today exists the concept of industrial secrets, industrial secret robbery, and so on. The inventions have to be corresponded. Plato, the great philosopher who lived in the fourth century B.C., terrified because the people of Athens had killed his teacher Socrates, started to travel far from Athens and found in primitive societies this responsible currency, this scientific currency. So he spoke of this god, money, Plutos was benevolent in these countries where they had this currency, whereas in Greece and other countries where anonymous currency was used because of the presence of malevolent Plutos, one found all kinds of delinquency, social instability, wars. In those countries that used responsible currency there were neither wars nor delinquency.

During the Neolithic Mesopotamia was a prodigious example of economic production and cultural, literary, mythological, astrologic production. Besides, commerce developed greatly among cities, international trade flourished too with Egypt. Yet, later on, with the arrival of Sargon I, Babylon, founded by him, becomes the first mega city or metropolis, which means "mother of the cities", but which was a disaster, a place of total oppression that became big at the expense of other peoples. Plato said that all this occurred due to the loss of responsible, scientific currency.

What is happening? Why are we talking about this now? Because now it is technically possible to have a type of currency of that kind at the speed you choose to. Even if the market goes fast, currency can go even faster thanks to the electronic and computer we count on now. Now it is possible to go back again to that golden age of social economics that was the Neolithic period.

4. Abstract, fixed, and responsible money.
Modern technology has exploited telematics during this past century: teleinformatronics, which is electronics, information and telecommunications, the three of them together, which have started separately but are beginning to become one. This is admirable. Those of us who know Agusti Chalaux, even earlier than forty or fifty years ago, when no one spoke of telematics, when computers still didn't exist, feel admiration when we realize that everything that he mentioned is happening, has happened.

Now we count on present technology to carry out this economic or monetary reformation. What would this mean? It would mean that every person has a current account at a Bank. In this Bank he/she has his/her power to buy, this is to say, the economic element of property. A person wants to buy or sell something, meets with the buyer or seller to do a transaction.

At the beginning this transaction is rudimentary, is expressed in a slip of paper that indicates the type of product bought or sold, the quantity, the price, then you add up them up if there are several products, and you have the equivalent in money. Then you need to have the date, the place, the name (or equivalent to the name), the identification of the buyer and of the seller and their Banking accounts numbers. Then they write down this document that goes to the Bank, and the Bank makes the change.

He/she makes the change with the other Bank, writes down the change in the current account. This is quite simple. Today it can be even more simple thanks to the means offered by electronics, credit cards, so that even the writing down could disappear. Everything should enter the information system and that's it. But there is a fear that everything should be written down and people are afraid that others may know what he/she is going to do.

This fear is understood due to the tricks we usually do with money. The big ones appear on the newspapers, but we also do a lot of little tricks every day, tricks that are ethically unacceptable. Agusti Chalaux defends the presence of the invoice-cheque (this would be the name of the new currency) that would have two parts, one secret and one public. The public is the invoice and the secret is the cheque.

This way not every one should know what you have done, it would go to a secret archive, not controlled by the executive authorities, because the executive is party-supported, therefore very dangerous. It would be controlled by the judicial authorities and not even the judges would have access to this archive, except when looking for evidence for a case in court or in case of an accusation that seems real. In other words, the secret would be kept safe.

Evidently, there can be tricks, infiltrations, and so on, but on a minor scale because they would have to be paid for with money of this kind too, and therefore could be better controlled.

Then, as we said, the cheque has a secret part, but this part belongs the private property economics; things dealing with public property, patrimony and let's say social professions, are all public. For example, the salary of city hall employees, councilmen, the mayor, all this has to be public, as well as public works, expenses of the public administration, all this has to be public even if the cheque is part of the responsibility.

And every one can have access to this information. Let us think that at the present time only the people with power have access to all private organisms while we have access to almost nothing of the public or the influential people. Therefore this money favors them, not us. It is a suicidal fear, should we say. So, this would be the operation. Agusti Chalaux dedicated part of his life to read and find data, to recover information on simple ways of identification, without the use of signatures, but rather a fingerprint, or using a system to look at the iris of your eye, things that simplify identification thanks to the new advances in technology.

This would be the mechanical way of doing it. Agusti indicates that its implementation should take some time, two or three months, something similar to the implantation of the euro, which meant using both currencies simultaneously for some time, but from a certain moment on no currency would be used. None. This means that all transactions would go to the Bank, the archive the judge, and no one carries money in his/her pockets. Money would be good for nothing.

Another amazing advantage that people do not know about and does not think about is the flight-out of capital. This is to say, if there is no money, there is no flight-out of capital. If it does, the old money will not be valid, it does not have monetary value because capitals cannot flight out. Another important thing is that one can have control over economic international transactions by using special invoice-cheques to export or import money going out and there will be track of the accounting. This refers to the feature of abstract, fixed, responsible and modern currency.

5. Communitarian capitalism.
Agusti used to call his proposal Communitarian Capitalism. While capitalists deny the truth of the communist proposal, and communists deny that of capitalists, he reaches a synthesis of the positive value of both.
This goes beyond the political Marxism we have had historically because Marx was dialectical and denying this is not dialectic, but dogmatic.

Marx for example praised capitalism and said that in order to be a communist one must be first a capitalist, there are some positive things which are necessary for the construction of the final solution, the right solution, and he speaks of communitarian capitalism.

In order to understand this well first we have to distinguish something people often do not distinguish, and is to make the difference between the private and the political contexts. People mix public with political, they talk of public school and political State school, they talk about public TV and State TV, or the Generalitat of Catalunya, or the Mayorship of Barcelona, but these definitions belong to the political context.

Thus the public context has disappeared; it has been swallowed by the political or the private context, and there is always the discussion as to whether schools should be public or private, which means official or private; same happens with transport, health and so many other things. Actually Agusti Chalaux proposes a third alternative, an intermediate path, which is the public system.

When a democratic constitution says that power lies with the people and that all the powers of the State are in the hands of the people, they are saying that people and public come from the same European root publicus and populus, and that the premises of the democratic power are in the people and it is the people that should decide. This is very important.

Thus, communitarian capitalism is a capitalism that is not private, nor is State capitalism, which is the communist, in other words it is it is the people's capitalism, so, who is to have capital? The people. And with this money it will give money to some thing or the other, it will assign to the private sector that which it considers convenient, it will contract private companies, it will take care of non private subsidies and pensions that become private and are consumed privately, and then it will give the necessary for the functioning of the State, of the State services. Today we have the idea that it is the State that commands people, that the taxes belong to the State, not to the people.

But the greatest aspect of his proposal, which many Chalaux commentators omit, or skip, or do not see, is that this public level considers a public financing which is not State taxing, but is another source which, as Chalaux's hypothesis proposes (since it has to be verified), has to do with the accounting system of a country in order to know what goes on. The hypothesis says that there is a source of money, which feeds communitarian capitalism, which is capitalized by the community.

I think the idea is clear. Where does it come from? In our Catalonian language we say "Who is going to pay for the masses?" The masses for the death, for the should of a person (we dedicate thirty masses so that it goes to Heaven). Who will pay for the masses is a cliché. What is the source? Here is the important thing about Chalaux's proposal and I do not know if I will be able to explain it in just a few words. Suppose you have a fraction number and in the numerator you have everything that has been produced in a country, all the production of the value of production of the country; and in the denominator you have all the salaries, etc., the interest charged by all the factors of production mentioned above.

So, below goes the money obtained by purchasing, and above goes all the money obtained by selling. Everything sold, everything offered goes in the numerator, and everything that can be acquired from the numerator goes below.

The two letters, M and H, he says: a well balanced economics has the same numerator as the denominator, therefore the result is 1. If there is more merchandise than money to buy it then the fraction is more than 1. If there is more money to buy than merchandise, the denominator is higher that the numerator, therefore there is less than 1, its value is zero come or whatever. Then, when it is above, there is more merchandise than money to buy there is inflation, and when there is more money than merchandise there is inflation.

When there is too much money and not enough merchandise, a lot is produced. Instead, we call deflation when the economy deflates, when there is more merchandise than money, and since it is not bought production is stopped and the economy goes low. This is the evil or goodness of an economy, depending on its balance or lack of balance. We can only know these two numbers by applying Chalaux's currency. With our present currency there is no way to know. There is too much black money and money out of control, money you do not know what it is for, there are also goods moved in the black market. It is the total calamity.

There is no way to know. Then, creating a currency to buy goods that exist is a good thing, while inventing a currency when there are goods in excess, this is, when there is too much money and not enough goods, is bad. Therefore, the popular idea that inventing money is bad, is a power reserved to the State, no! Inventing money is good if it is invented for a fair purpose, for the fraction result to be 1, to balance numerator and denominator.

Since the number of people grow, and production grows, normally the numerator grows and the denominator, which is the money to buy the numerator has to increase with time. With the gold they were drown because without gold they could not buy more, whereas with paper one can buy anything. Here is what Chalaux says about this: The denominator, which is the treasury, plus the money that has to be invented because of the growth of the economy, is a balance.

Whose is this money? The money invented so that economy has a good end belongs to the people, it is public, it is the source of capitalization of a community and for this reason it is communitarian capitalism. Then the question is: didn't this money exist before? Because people think that this money called communitarian surplus value gets mixed up with private plus value, this is to say, in the Treasury, the companies and all the work, all the private economy produces benefits and the Marxists, and the socialists are the ones who always have fought with the capitalists as to who kept more, the capital, the entrepreneur, the worker, the invention, and so on, and the end of all the social movement is to keep to itself more money of the private surplus value.

Well, the foreseeable volume between private surplus value and communitarian surplus value draws an enormous quantity. In other words, the socialists fought over a ridiculous amount, in comparison with the quantity of money there is, that is more manufactured, communitarian that belongs to all and must be used to finance the State without need for taxes, to finance the private, the financial social salary for example for people for the simple fact of existing, which today is called basic income, to give an example.

This money exists to finance all that the people want to finance, all this money exists which the economists and econometrists, who do not have a good measurement of the market because the money is not well done, in the end consider is enormous.

I will give you some amazing examples: what happens to this money that comes from Heaven? Because money is always the result of something that has grown, which is merchandise but, why does merchandise grow? Look, it is not the same to carry a bunch of stones on a cart than to carry them on one's shoulders. It is much more economic to carry them on a cart. Therefore, the person who invented the wheel should have received royalties for this invention. A salary for the inventor of the wheel, in the Neolithic. Does anyone pay something nowadays for using wheels? No one pays anything because it was paid for thousands of years ago. Everything that the wheel makes easier for the economy goes to the communitarian Treasury, this is to say, it supports the communitarian Treasury as merchandise.

Here's something amazing: the wars. In a country that is at war the economy costs much more than in a country that is at peace. Peace is a communitarian wealth that generates communitarian surplus value. Health, culture, education. And then he said something surprising that shows the ethical nature of Agusti Chalaux: he said that that which produces more communitarian capital or communitarian capitalism is love. And everybody stood startled.

What is this man saying? For example, a mother with a child who has fever, phones the Social Security service and they come and pick him up and take him away? Or does she keep the child at home and looks after him all night long? This is love. What does she charge for it? Nothing. Isn't this a service? It is, therefore she should have a salary so that the fraction number does not break. For her offer to receive a payment, the Treasure should pay her.

Isn't this paid for? Communitarian capitalism. This has to do with the essential. Think of the fraction number I explained before. It can be applied between different States and different countries. Importations can be in the numerator and exportations in the denominator, so that for countries not to become imperialists or imperialized, or economically conquered as today, the fraction number should always be 1.

In other words, the relationship of my country with other countries should never be either of their domination or our domination. In other words, there should not be more importations than exportations or vice versa. Each country may choose its own rhythm; one country may be very progressive, the other paradisiacal, an island on the Pacific may wish to stay as it was before, for it is all the same as long as the result is 1.

6. Conclusions.
In order to finish I would like to go over three flashbacks. The first one is the French Revolution. We have not reflected enough on this event, the causes that led to it. There were no political parties yet because they had not been invented. It was not an army that conquered a country. Nothing had been foretold; it sprang out like a mushroom, which shows up in the forest when one less expects it. In fact there was a reason. It was the preparation that took more than a century: the age of Enlightenment.

The Enlightenment, with its philosophy and rationalism, substituted reason for authority, and faith, and myths and beliefs. Reason, rationalism, counted on an important tool: the French Encyclopedia. The first Universal Encyclopedia more important in the world where every concept was reviews from the eye of rationalism, that is to say rationality, and they studied the stars, chemistry, poetry. Lavoisier was one of the great ones in the social environment at that time, as well as Montesquieu and others. Society studied politics, democracy, the division of power, and a number of things that made people start to think, that were persecuted by despotic kings who prohibited the reading of the French Encyclopedia which came out in booklets that were read in hide and so on.

All this began to change people's mentality and there was a moment when people had a very good model in the head but a very bad one in life. The strength of the good model overthrew the bad one. Thus, monarchy fell, so did the Church's authority, they got rid of all that meant ancestral beliefs and put a rational world in its place instead. This model is what is called modernity, based principally on science. Science applied to nature, but also to society. We had said that science needs a certain element in order to be considered as such. This element in social sciences is the human being. This element, each person a vote, human rights, the famous Universal Rights of Man in the French Revolution is to save this piece, which is the human being.

This, which is debatable nowadays after almost three centuries was then very clear and was an incredible evidence of progress. But this progress was made thanks to science. And we have said that currency is not scientific. Agusti Chalaux presents a scientific type of currency at the level of the Enlightenment, a truly modern type of currency.

The third flash has to do with Gandhi's revolution. In The Capital, Marx explains that during the two or three centuries that the British were in India, they took away all the treasures accumulated for the last two or three thousand years. Only playing with this idea of the surplus value that we mention without saying it, seemed as if they bought and sold a little, just as the Spaniards in Cuba or Haiti gave small mirrors and collar beads to the indians in exchange for their gold, since the indians did not know the real value os what they were giving away. Well, the British did the same in a more clever manner. This is imperialism: economic, cultural exploitation, and so on.

Well, Gandhi was able to persuade the Indian people, and this is no joke, that they were six, seven, eight hundred million people, not like us, we are seven million. Well, he convinced them that the dignity of a people is above greedy interests and oppression, and is above any possible difficulty.

Also, in Chalaux's proposal is an ethical dimension that it has to be attained through peaceful means, and based on responsibility and love. Thus, Gandhi is a forerunner of this concept.

Finally, we find in Chalaux a proposal that offers something different from others: a technical tool; and he said something rather interesting; he said that it is very hard to change customs. For example, Jesus, two thousand years ago said a number of ethical things, which were important, yet we are at the same point we were then.

We haven't earned much since the times of Jesus. Why? Because the direct preaching of ethics sometimes does not move people, whereas if you give a tractor to a peasant who usually goes to bed at seven or eight in the evening, end tell him that he has to pay it by installments, he will go on working even at night, which he wouldn't do otherwise. But there is a tool in between, and this tool is the tractor. If he wants to keep it he will have to work long hours. He wouldn't have done this before. A peasant would not go to bed so late because he was tired, but the television, acting as a tool, has changed the habits.

Agusti Chalaux says that this tool could have been applied in the process of changing to the euro and has not been taken advantage of. It would have passed almost unnoticed, it would have meant a transformation in the economic, the ethical, and the scientific fields.