Abstract
Eight years have passed since the publication of this Japanese edition, and the economic and social situation in Japan and the world has changed considerably. Such changes are still driving, not reversing, the trends of internalization of the market and globalization described above and seem to reinforce the validity of our discussion here. Besides, in the midst of these changes, community currencies have begun to offer the new possibility one again. Let’s confirm these points in this final chapter.
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Notes
- 1.
It is consistent with the materialistic historical view in that it recognized the underlying basis of the economic foundation that the substructure determines the superstructure, but since it relies on the concept of “thing” as product and “production” as in production relationship and productive power, deindustrialization and financialization in globalization will lead to rethinking the meaning of “economy” with an emphasis on the concept of replication and variation of knowledge and information, not on production of products as things. It means that money is not a thing, but information. We would like to discuss these methodological and philosophical issues in a separate book.
- 2.
The meaning of the word “community” seems to have changed significantly in the 2010s. From the 1990s to the 2000s, even if the same term “community” was used, there still remained the old meaning of “community” which was a closed and exclusive group, such as blood relations of families and relatives, regional ties of neighborhoods, villages based on agricultural collaboration and mutual cooperation monitoring, and trade unions and guilds sharing craftsmanship skills. However, the appearance and popularization of SNS in the 2000s changed the meaning and reality of the community considerably. With the advance of globalization, communities such as families and regional ties have become increasingly sparse. Now, it’s not even “community of interest” as a group of people sharing the same interests, but it’s just a group of nominal recipients of information, followers called “friends,” and such a community seems to be back to the masses. They do not intend to talk about their real interests, but to increase the number of followers and “friends,” they turned into a social, commercial group that offered food and travel topics of interest to everyone and shared good-looking photos. The community, in this sense, can be said to be another name for the market. Although money is not directly used or circulated there, Facebook’s “like” is widely used as reputed money, a measure of popularity. It seems necessary to reconsider the meaning of the community in comparison with the market.
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Nishibe, M. (2019). Afterword: The New Possibility of Community Currencies. In: Whither Capitalism? . Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-0704-1_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-0704-1_6
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