Late Capitalism and the Future Beyond Money with Anitra Nelson
Exploring practical pathways to collective well-being, ecological balance, and life beyond money.
Scholar, activist, and author, Anitra Nelson is a leading voice on nonmonetary economies and sustainable futures. She is the author of Beyond Money: A Postcapitalist Strategy and co-editor of Life Without Money and Housing for Degrowth, works that explore pathways to collective sufficiency and ecological balance. Anitra is an Honorary Principal Fellow at the Informal Urbanism Research Hub (InfUr-) at the University of Melbourne, where she advances research on postcapitalist systems and community-led alternatives.
Through her writing and advocacy, Anitra emphasizes the urgent need to transcend monetary hierarchies and embrace practices such as commoning, reciprocity, and decentralized governance. By drawing on historical and contemporary examples, she inspires individuals and communities to reimagine ways of living that prioritize ecological health, collective well-being, and equitable resource sharing.
The following conversation challenges the prevailing structures that shape much of modern life. While ideas of moving beyond money and rethinking capitalism may seem distant or radical, they invite us to rediscover ways of living rooted in ecological balance, community, and fairness.
These reflections aren't about discarding progress but about questioning what progress means. As the world faces ecological and social tipping points, new models of exchange, relationship, and responsibility emerge—not as theoretical futures, but as practices already unfolding in communities around the world. This dialogue serves as both a critique and an exploration, opening space for possibilities that honor the interconnectedness of life.
This interview has been transcribed from audio, with some revised sections.
INL: Can you share how your personal journey led you to this path? How did you arrive at the belief that a non-monetary future is not only possible but necessary?
Anitra: Yes, well my thoughts are very closely connected to my life. I'm quite a practical person. So although I've been identified with theories, in actual fact, one of the positions that I take up within a lot of theorizing is, how real is this in practice? If I relate this theory, this idea to everyday life, is it clear?
As a child, I even wondered quite a bit about money. But it was more when I was studying Latin American studies at La Trobe University in Melbourne, where I first of all was a history student, then decided that the history of Latin America basically boils down to economic history, and was fascinated by third world debt, Mexico's foreign public debt. And finally I thought, when we're looking at debt, what is money? With a lot of these societies – and now many countries have experienced austerity measures – and they're saying we're all having to pay the price for some kind of state borrowing. But what is money? Why is this power being imposed on us?
What I found really interesting about most of the analyses of Mexico's foreign public debt right back in the 1980s, is that people weren't asking: “What is money?” Why are we calculating our futures in terms of money? And later, because sustainability was an area that I built up as an area of study, again, sustainability frameworks were often boundered by doing what is seen as economic. And it disallowed us to actually institute technologies that are low tech or appropriate technology, to respect nature, to give time to things—all of these things were all being contained and constrained in monetary considerations. So, I became very much an anti-economist.
I’ve done a lot of work in economics, and that actually quite interests me, but my essential philosophical position is anti-economic. This interest in money led me to do a PhD on Karl Marx's concept of money, partly because PhDs require a very concentrated study in an area, or taking an approach, that other people haven't explored. As it so happened, when I started that PhD, Karl Marx's concept of money was one of the least looked at aspects of his work. And it enabled me to look at the growth of his concept of money in a historical sense, looking at his different works, within a context of how other people had looked at money. This enabled me to put a theoretical context around the questions that I had about money.
At the same time, as I was doing my PhD, I had actually joined as a kind of permanent visitor, but not actually a formal member, of a cooperative which functioned like a commune with one purse1. And there was considerable conflict within the commune about whether people should have their own income, and it was all about money.
That practice was playing out around me as well. All of these factors have always influenced the way that I “theorize”, coming to the conclusion that if we really want to be sustainable, and in particular if we want to be equitable—if we want fairer systems—we're all divided by the amount of income and wealth that we have. And that, at base, is a monetary division. So we can talk about all the gender problems, we can talk about race, we can talk about all the ways that people can be persecuted in systemic ways. But in actual fact, unless there are reparations—and not just reparations—we're just going to continue reproducing and regenerating inequities.
Unless we no longer have monetary relationships at the heart of the ways that we relate to one another.
This goes to relating to Earth as well. I see that problem with money as being at the heart of what a lot of people talk about—the duality between humans and nature.
Yes, we can remove ourselves from nature even without money if we have certain ideologies. But I think we can want to be as close to Earth as possible but, while we have a monetary system which is always then overlaying the possibilities of that human–nature relationship, it becomes stymied.
INL: Moving beyond money can feel like a radical, distant vision for many. How do you respond to skeptics who believe the complexity of our current global systems makes such a transition implausible?
Anitra: I think that one of the really big problems today is that we tend to think that money is necessary and that it indeed is even natural. A lot of people will say to me that money has existed forever, that it's human beings’ first tool, all kinds of things like that—whereas Indigenous people will actually come at it much more from an angle of “you can't eat money”.
My first point is to say that money is a purely social imaginary practice, and that it's a system that we've created—a system of relationships between one another. There are many different kinds of societies, especially in the past, that have operated without using money, or where it existed, trade was marginal to the prevailing mode of production. And I even see within my own life, over 50 years living here in Australia, that we've gone from retailing being something that was pretty much 9 am-5 pm Monday to Friday, through to, with digital technology, the commercial world being 24-7. There's absolutely no let up. Capitalism is not just a global phenomenon, it's actually becoming more intense in most of our lives. And so, it’s less and less plausible that people think that you could operate your lives without money.
Indeed, capitalism is a market-based society, and it's organized around money making more money. So we just come back again and again to money being absolutely so central to everyone's lives. We have financial programs that are put in place for children nowadays. And in many ways, I actually do think that's important because it's only by understanding—it's only by having financial literacy that you can actually even understand that it's a system that we've created, that we learn, that we program ourselves around—in order to go beyond it.
Because yes, economics is an area where a lot of people, and in fact, many of the most intelligent people I find, feel that they’re way out of their depth. They're convinced that economics is something really magical and they haven't got a natural talent for it. And I say, ‘I think that you understand economics really well, because it doesn't make sense’. It does not make sense. But then we have to ask questions about why it doesn't make sense, and that helps us understand that it really is a social system.
The other aspect about the so-called complexity of our world is that, in actual fact, the system generates its own complexity because it's not capable of addressing real social and environmental issues. It's kind of creating its own complexity. When I think—and many people in social and ecological movements today think—about change, we actually think about holistic change. So we're not just looking at pulling money out of a system which is continuing to operate much how we see it. We're looking at massive different kinds of changes.
The areas that I think are most useful in learning more, and going on a journey in this direction, are intentional communities2, and my experience in intentional communities has partly been a journey. The carrot was kind of trying to understand different ways of living.
Also, I'm quite involved with the degrowth movement, and there, it's very interesting I find, to see ways in which people are collectively trying to institute different ways of living that integrate processes such as community-supported agriculture, transport primarily by bike and train, learning more about how we can repair and cut up old clothes and reconstitute them into new clothes. So, all working together.
When we're thinking about repairing, recycling, reusing and saying no to the current system, we're actually talking about an entirely different system, and if we have sustainability, and [we’re] acting democratically, fairly, and equitably, then we have, from my point of view, a more complex system.
We live in a system where monetary calculation—prices, profits, the economy, gross domestic product—money rules. What we need to do is to reappropriate the power of money—so we do all of the decision making about how we want to live, how we actually provision ourselves, and deal with all those kinds of big questions.
INL: How would you describe the current phase of money and capitalism in historical terms? Do you believe we are witnessing “the end of capitalism’s reign?”
Anitra: Look, in my writing, and when I'm talking, I tend to refer to ‘late capitalism3’, and interestingly, I recently read someone referring to very late capitalism, which I thought was innovative. I think that we are in a collapse—a collapse that's referred to as a polycrisis4—and it expresses itself on a whole series of levels. But before we talk about some of those levels, I often think that a useful metaphor is a relationship breakdown.
Often in a relationship, people outside might notice massive differences between people or whatever that the people within the relationship don't recognize, and refuse to recognize, of course, until the end. That level of attachment that we have to things which might never work out. Love is something that expresses itself at all levels, and in order for us to be completely absorbed and active within society, we need to love our society at a whole series of levels and work out our roles within it. So whenever that society, that structure, is criticized, when it is challenged, we internalize that, because we're very much part of it.
There is a kind of thought, which is called collapseology5, which is quite dangerous. Collapseology, in some varieties, [has theorists] thinking our society explodes—leaving nothing behind. But most collapses are more like relationship breakdowns. We notice this in politics, economics, and culture. It's all fragmented; as much as something breaks down, there are attempts to heal it, mend it, and get it all up and going again.
So when we're talking about some concept like late or very late capitalism, I think that we can only understand it by seeing that this is not something that's clear-cut. What I know, and what numbers of Australians know, is that we live [consume] as if there were four planets6. Many Americans are in this situation as well. Because we live in inequitable societies, there are people acting as if there are twenty Earths, while others in our societies are only able to access needs as if there were half an Earth.
So, this is not just an economic situation which explains the inequities, but it is also a very material, ecological problem, and the living world has its own power, and it is fighting back. That is what global heating is all about, and why we have carbon emissions going up—because the living world itself always tries to fight back and maintain the necessary balance.
We are looking at ecological collapse, economic collapse, and, as you will have noticed during 2024, the amazing politics that is playing out, that can be very much described as a kind of collapse of a sense of reason and of logic within those even so-called democracies that we live within.
The Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index 2020 classifies a miniscule 8.4% of the world’s population living in full democracies, with the rest in flawed democracies (41%), authoritarian regimes (35.6%) or hybrid regimes (between authoritarian and flawed, 15%).
When we talk about something like very late capitalism in the same mode as relationship breakdown, people can see beyond a breakdown. They can see that things can fall apart, and that things can actually play out quite differently. Over the last few decades, in fact, I would say a characteristic of the 21st century has been the emergence of many different groups and people thinking about post-capitalism. Post-capitalism has opened up as a field—not just in people's imaginations, but people trying to practice, how they think and model (pre-figure) how things might occur in, and operate within, different kinds of societies. So, now we are experiencing all of those things. I call this late capitalism—that's just a way of typifying how I feel and reason over what we're experiencing at present.
INL: In Beyond Money, you emphasize the importance of “real values” as guiding principles for a collective well-being. Can you elaborate on what these values look like in practice?
Anitra: I use the term real values because a lot of people say, “Well, if you haven't got monetary values, if you haven't got prices, how does the system operate?”
Way back in the 20th century, there was an economist called Otto Neurath7, and he was a socialist. He argued within the socialisms that were being constructed in Eastern Europe at the time for an in-kind economy8. So, non-monetary economies within the economic discipline are often referred to as in-kind economies. I drew the concept of real values from that sense of “in kind”—in-kind meaning simply what things are. So, an apple is an apple. It's not a commodity that you've bought for two bucks at a store. Its most important values—if we're living within a non-monetary economy—are the tree that it came from, the people that picked it, the people who tended that tree beforehand.
We're looking at a world as it really is—without that monetary veil all over it—without the sense that we can only have access to an apple by going and buying it at a store. This is a good example because we also know that we can have apples on our property, in our backyard, or we can find them in public places. We get a sense also of seeing how these plants grow, and also how important they are not just for people. We can start to understand that there's a whole, in a sense, “competition” or “complementarity” of ways in which an apple is used by different living beings.
“Real values” is really simply a way of us understanding how we might start to self-provision ourselves, but using different values instead of bringing everything back to money, which has been called “a universal equivalent”. There have been economists who looked at, for instance, replacing money with an energy unit. Others are looking at digital indicators. There are all kinds of approaches.
So, let us get back to the vision of a non-monetary economy. The way that I envisage it—is that we would have small communities of hundreds to maybe a thousand people, who are essentially living in sub-bioregions that provision themselves. Let's just take a figure out of the air—70 or 80 percent of their needs are satisfied locally. So, they're living off that land, and this is one way we can look at actually getting ourselves back to a stage where we're living one-planet footprints.
Of course, no small kind of, in a sense “island of land” that people living on can provision them in all the ways they want. We would need to have systems of agreements between that community and neighboring communities, even further-flung communities, so that there were various exchanges between them. We also know not only are there needs that we can't meet, but we often have surpluses. Often, the apple trees have a lot more apples than we're capable of eating. We can dry them, and we can make sure that they're transported to another community, or we can store them. All of these things are really important in economies—making sure that we've got storage and that we can also, on some form of logic, exchange with other communities.
The ways that the community within itself operates is by thinking—what are the needs of the people within our community? How can we satisfy those needs? Most efficiently and effectively in the ways that we want to, and then plan to provision for themselves? In that planning, they are going to be using social and ecological values—real values. They're going to be able to see what the earth they live with is really capable of offering them without them destroying that earth.
In that planning, they are going to be using social and ecological values—real values. They're going to be able to see what the earth they live with is really capable of offering them without them destroying that earth.
They're going to be looking at one another and how one another can use the talents, knowledge, and effort that they have without wearing them out, making them feel better about their lives—because we all love “doing things”. So, it's a matter of us working out how to do things together in ways that we feel happiest doing them.
One of the reasons that I speak also about real values is that, in my experience living in intentional communities, the ways that many of those communities—the communities that I was attracted to—“self-provisioned” meaning that they were always dealing with social qualities and measures, and ecological qualities and measures. In-kind economies rely on seeing that apples can be weighed, apples can be seen as outputs of numbers of trees. So we're talking about measures—instead of them all coming back to one single kind of indicator [a universal equivalent]—having multiple indicators, and, in very complex ways, weighing up what is appropriate for earth in the form of the fruit that we eat and that kind of thing.
INL: In what ways can "commoning" and "collective sufficiency" serve as alternatives to our current economic models?
Anitra: Well, I think with the situation that we find ourselves in now, especially in terms of housing, people can see the really disastrous impacts of conceiving of everything in terms of private property. As capitalism has spread all over the world, it's like everything is owned by someone. And one of the real problems of this system is that ownership of land and other kinds of resources brings with it an individual control over that land and those resources that a lot of other people feel uncomfortable with. And so, we have people protesting about extraction from the point of view that it's impacting on Indigenous lands. A lot of the conflicts that we have are around the fact that we have divided up the world and fragmented it in this kind of way.
The 21st century is characterized by numbers of different people working in another direction—and that is commoning9. What they're saying is: “None of us own this particular resource. We can share it between ourselves in fair and respectful ways.” Commoning is absolutely critical in terms of thinking about the way that I see a non-monetary world working. It would mean that absolutely no one owned Earth, we wouldn't have any concept of property in that way, and it would not mean that you would not have security of knowing that you had access to certain things.
For instance, one might expect that everyone has the right to at least a room in terms of housing, and when I've lived in intentional communities with dozens, come hundreds of people, everyone has that security of knowing that they always have a right to a bed, and they always have a right to come to the communal dinner (to food), all of these kinds of things, and there is no reason why we should feel that those kinds of rights are threatened—and yet we do under capitalism.
There's one extra thing I'd like to bring in here. I've been editing a handbook on de-growth, which is coming out next year, 2025. The Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights has written a chapter that turns on its head a lot of arguments that are made by people who criticize degrowth as a movement. Degrowth, being a movement that recognizes that we should be living within one planet, with one-planet footprints, and that we should be treating one another equitably, and that we should be much more democratic in the ways that our societies are constructed.
The Special Rapporteur argues that: “We cannot address poverty without degrowth”, whereas most people advocating for de-growth will say: “But if you don't have growth, we're never going to overcome poverty.” This is a very good example of ways in which we're not only looking at collapse at the moment, we're looking at massive change.
We're looking at massive change that's coming from the very heart of the system of people who, for instance, the European Union has been having forums on de-growth and these kinds of things and post-growth, which has certain alliances with the concept of post-capitalism, but doesn't necessarily always mean the same thing.
Collective sufficiency is the aim of commoning, which is much more about relationships. Collective sufficiency is about us collectively deciding what we need and how those needs are met, because needs for food can be met in so many different ways. Needs for housing can be met in so many different ways. The idea is that we must start to collectively decide more about determining what collective sufficiency is, and in particular areas.
These are really important universal or global principles about us creating a world in which our power is based on a principle called ‘autonomy’—which basically means respecting everyone's decision-making capacity over how they live.
In many ways, this gives us a sort of new canvas on ways of living. It's probably these new canvases that are the best ways to have a perspective on what post-capitalism is about. There are certain people who argue that digital technology offers us a kind of ladder or platform for being more democratic, for healing the social distances that have been created. Whereas people like me think that digital technologies are good in certain ways—but I think we have to be really careful about how we integrate them in our schemes of thinking about collective sufficiency.
With commoning and collective sufficiency, we're looking at doing things in very different ways. People who are setting up what they call prefigurative hybrids—ways of thinking about how we can bring in different forms of transport, but we know that we're doing that in a world which has lots of cars and air flight, and that kind of thing. People are experimenting with how, as organizations, they adopt more one-planet-footprint ways of living.
The whole area of commoning and collective sufficiency is around these kinds of experimentations and ideas—visions which are sometimes referred to as “imaginaries”—but it's really just a vision.
INL: Which experiments, such as eco-villages or intentional communities provide useful blueprints for a life beyond monetary systems?
Anitra: The example that I think stands out in North America is Twin Oaks10. I stayed at that community back in 2012. It had already been in existence for decades and is still a very active community today. I think that this community shows the potential of collective sufficiency and how commoning works. Twin Oaks is in Virginia, and it occupies a few hundred hectares of land. There are around a hundred or so people who live there regularly, including children. So, it's completely intergenerational, from 0 to 100.
There are a number of buildings in Twin Oaks that show a really useful way of occupying housing. When you move there, everyone has a room, and you might only get a small room, but as you stay longer, there will be opportunities for you to maybe move into something that's a little larger. Your room is your haven, but everything outside that is all commoning and sharing. There are a number of bikes, and people use a bike and then they might just leave it somewhere, and someone else will pick it up. There's a bike shed where things are repaired. There's food making: tofu, greens, orchards. There are chickens and cattle, and making cheese, a dairy. There are also a few activities that are to make money, and they include hammocks, doing indexing for books, and a range of floristry, seeds, all kinds of things. People can go to the Twin Oaks website and find all these amazing things. But the way that the work is divided up is that, in essence, you give a certain number of hours per week to the community, and all your needs are satisfied—or most of them. The vehicles are all shared. All of these things require time-tabling. This is done by people, and they use spreadsheets, and some digital technologies, but it's not exceptionally high-tech or anything.
That experience that I had for the month living there was really useful for me to see how you can do things, because all of these things are done in non-monetary ways, except that you do have various inputs and outputs that are entering the economy from outside—the monetary economy outside. Because we don't live in a non-monetary world, this will always be the case for experiments that you build up today. If you and I, as individuals, are looking at changing our lives, there will always be these two frames [today/tomorrow]. What they [Twin Oaks] try and do, like most people who are involved in ecological and social movements, is that in those relationships that they have at the edges—of having to purchase soybeans, and of selling and making hammocks—they do those activities, those exchanges, that trading, in as fair ways as possible: fair to the environment and fair to people.
I think Twin Oaks is a good example because this allows people who are listening and are interested to go off and read a lot more about it.
INL: As we look toward the future, what shift do you hope to see in the coming decades, both personally and on a collective scale?
Anitra: Well, I think that we are really in the depths of very big struggles at the moment. One of the ways in which we could organize to try and address some of these big issues would be to say that the ways in which money is used at the moment could be changed.
If we brought in regulations around the market, such as you cannot produce and/or trade in military equipment – many people are feeling seriously undermined and disturbed about and insecure about our futures, just given the level of what seems to be completely illogical violence, which is institutionalized by countries. I see violence as being something that we all need to be taking a stand on, from domestic violence (very intimate violence), right through to those kinds of [institutionalised] levels of violence. And you might ask, “Where does that really fit into something being no money?” My argument is that we need to be reappropriating the decision-making and freedom-giving aspects of money, and using that power ourselves. We would be restricting, and we could keep on restricting, ways in which markets and money are decision-making over people. One way of reigning in money is to say, we don’t think that these kinds of things can be part of the market economy.
I personally think that there is no way we can become sustainable without going beyond money. At the heart of it are those matters of power. So, it is very much holding hands, listening to other people, expressing exactly how you feel, us really building up our skills in politicking ourselves, thinking about self-provisioning and other ways of commoning, and of pushing forward on all of these different levels.
We're going to have a lot of pressures on us; we're already experiencing a lot of ecological pressures and disturbance, and social ones in the form of wars, and people regulating how we live. I think that we just have to see that the struggle is a necessary part of our lives, and to engage in struggle, to sort of, in a sense, let go. But at the same time, as I said before, we need to hold hands, because we are facing numbers of disasters, and we need to be working together.
You can learn more about Anitra Nelson and her work here, and her book Beyond Money: A Post Capitalist Strategy here.
“One purse” represents the concept of collective resource sharing, where resources are pooled together for the common good. It symbolizes mutual support, collaboration, and the idea of shared ownership within a community or group.
Intentional communities are groups of people who live together based on shared values, often focusing on sustainability, cooperation, and collective resource management.
Late capitalism is a term used to describe the advanced stage of capitalist development, characterized by the concentration of wealth, globalized markets, commodification of nearly all aspects of life, and the intensification of economic inequality.
Polycrisis refers to the interconnected and compounding nature of multiple, overlapping crises that collectively exacerbate systemic instability.
Collapseology is the interdisciplinary study of the potential decline and collapse of modern industrial societies, focusing on ecological, economic, and social vulnerabilities.
The concept of "living as if we have multiple Earths" is based on the idea of ecological overshoot, where human consumption exceeds the planet's regenerative limits.
Otto Noirat was a political economist and theorist known for his contributions to early 20th-century discussions on economic cycles, state intervention, and the vulnerabilities of capitalist systems.
Otto Noirat suggested that an in-kind economy could serve as a response to the limitations of monetary systems, particularly in times of economic instability. He argued that in-kind exchanges, where goods and services are traded directly, offer a way to maintain community stability and ensure the availability of essential resources without relying on a fluctuating currency.
Commoning is the collective stewardship and governance of shared resources, emphasizing cooperation, reciprocity, and community care. It sustains the commons—land, water, or knowledge—ensuring their accessibility and renewal for future generations.
Twin Oaks is an intentional community in Virginia, founded in 1967, that operates based on the principles of income-sharing, cooperative labor, and ecological sustainability. They emphasize voluntary simplicity, communal living, and environmental stewardship, aiming to create a sustainable and egalitarian way of life.
when you read through and scroll nodding.. yes yes.. this is not only possible - despite the old system not wanting us to know that - it is essential... and it can be achieved.. too many keep saying that it is an unrealistic / idealistic dream but it is natural / universal law
Is this the same vision as the world economic forum? You will own nothing and be happy? We will own nothing and be happy. That means everyone. Would mean all those millionaires and billionaires would have to hand over some cash to the poor. Nice idea