The Utopian World Championship

T.R.O.Y. : The New World Disorder a global network of direct democracy and community currency

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Summary

The free market economy collapsed in the year 2007. Along with it went traditional governments and institutions that were based on it. In the vacuum that reigned grassroots organizations emerged to fill the functions that the nation-state had previously been assigned.

The World Social Forum, along with many other NGOs, gathered up the remains of the United Nations and formed the Global Alliance (GA) - a network of international organizations representing a large chunk of the world and organized along the principle of direct democracy. Some of its central documents are the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Agenda 21. Now, with the force of the world behind the GA, these documents are being enforced. Both nuclear weapons and national armies have been banned.

No longer is the United States in control. In fact, the United States no longer exists. It, as well as the vast majority of nation-states, has been replaced by Community Networks -networks of small communities. Thousands of these Community Networks (or Networks for short) have taken the place of what used to be countries. Along with political pluralism and direct democracy came a pluralism of economic democracy.

Where the traditional economy failed to function, systems based on community currencies such as LETS and interest-free exchange began to thrive. Now there have been two additional forms of currencies added. One is the global TERRA system which is an electronic currency with a negative interest rate thus preventing the hoarding of wealth while encouraging cooperation and long term investing. The third form is the Aqua which functions regionally as an eco-centric paper currency. It has its greatest value in the region that produces it and loses value slightly the farther it goes from its point of origin. This encourages local commerce, community development, and environmental sustainability.

"Today's great opportunity is that any community -any community- can, with access to knowledge, develop a technology perfectly appropriate to its needs and moreover, perfectly appropriate to its resources....It has been my observation that when people begin to take a new active part in any segment of their lives, it becomes a self-feeding passion, urging a person on for more and more responsibility, more and more self-reliance, more and more action as a whole person and not merely as a spectator."
-Karl Hess, Community Technology

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IT'S THE END OF HISTORY AS WE KNOW IT

"The commodity description of labor, land, and money is
entirely fictitious. Nevertheless, it is with the help of this
fiction that the actual markets for land, labor, and money
are organized."
Karl Polanyi

"People are the experts; they know what it is they need.
It's just that nobody listens."
Jean Trickey

Another World is Possible
Nobody saw it coming. Few thought it possible. And yet it happened. It seemed to be sparked by a similar spirit to the one that had brought about the end of the Soviet Empire in 1989. After little more than a decade of free market dominance spearheaded by the United States and powerful trans-national corporations it was capitalism's turn. The Great Fall of capitalism came nearly as suddenly as its Iron Curtain counterpart. The very market of hyper-capitalism got a global aneurysm and it imploded. When the international economic collapse came about in 2007 national governments, bureaucratic armies, and state institutions were ill-prepared for the chaos that ensued. Their authority suddenly vanished.
It was necessary to find new ways of organizing the society and, ultimately, the power of local communities overcame the brutality of bullets and the manipulation of money-based organizations. While the former centers of power quickly disintegrated, local organizations and networks had to fill the vacuum that was left in its wake. There was an inevitable power struggle between the haves and the have-nots, between those who had power and those who lacked it but as the rules for the game were suddenly changed, the former underdogs gained the upper-hand.
Who were the underdogs? What was the power struggle about? Kevin Danaher, in the book "Democratizing the Global Economy" put it like this: "The mass media talk about globalization as if it were a unified, all-encompassing entity. But there are two kinds of globalization: elite globalization and grassroots globalization. The top-down globalization promoted by the big corporations is characterized by a constant drive to maximize profits...people are encouraged to pursue an unsustainable pattern of resource consumption; and social inequality has reached grotesque proportions. In the face of this predatory type of globalization, there is another kind of globalization being forged; a globalization that reaffirms the primacy of the ethical principles that form the foundation of true democracy: equality, freedom, participation, human diversity, and solidarity. This grassroots movement is made up of many large movements: the fair trade movements, micro-lending networks, the movement for social and ecological labeling, sister cities and sister schools, trade union solidarity across borders, and many others."
It was these socially active groups who, through their person-to-person contact across the world developed counter-institutional networks that sowed the seeds for future forms of organization.

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