15.09.2026
A sustainable trade proposal
In May 2011 the public squares of Spain were full of people. I wrote a proposal then and sent it to the 15-M movement: that we should make the LETS system known — trading goods and services without money in the middle — which was already working in other countries.
I explained it with a story, because it was quicker.
There were some lads who played football with a leather ball. The problem was the boy who owned it: every time anything had to be decided he threatened to take it home if they didn’t do as he said. This was years ago, when a leather ball was a luxury.
Fed up, one day they decided to make themselves a ball out of rags. Each brought old socks from home and somebody’s mother sewed it. Anyone who has played with a rag ball knows it plays quite well. From then on they played with no interruptions and no sulking.
And I ended the story by saying that after a while the boy with the leather ball, alone and bored, told them he’d lend it with no conditions.
Fifteen years on, let me point out the part that doesn’t hold: the ending.
That doesn’t happen. The one with the leather ball doesn’t get bored, and if he does he buys something else. I put it in because it rounded the story off nicely and because in May 2011 everybody was convinced the whole thing was about to change. The squares emptied and the financial system is exactly as it was.
What does hold is the middle, which is the part nobody looks at: the rag ball worked. They played.
I lived like that for years. As a monk I had no money of my own: everything collected each day went in whole, and whatever you needed came from whoever had it. Food, clothes, somewhere to sleep, a train ticket. It worked, and it worked well.
But it worked because we knew each other. That’s the limit, and it’s better said out loud than dressed up: exchange without money doesn’t survive anonymity. You need to know who the other man is and to run into him again tomorrow. In a village it works. In a city of a million, it doesn’t.
The text says it with a word that isn’t gentle:
In charge of the various necessities of life, the demigods, being satisfied by the performance of yajña [sacrifice], supply all necessities to man. But he who enjoys these gifts, without offering them to the demigods in return, is certainly a thief.
Bhagavad-gītā 3.12. 1972 edition.
A thief. Not greedy, not selfish. A thief, and it’s talking about the man who takes and gives nothing back.
You don’t need a parallel currency for that, or for the squares to fill up again. It’s enough not to be the boy with the ball.