Domesticating Money and Prices in Postcapitalism: the Example of Commonism

Abstract

This article reviews Commonism, a postcapitalist model developed by Stefan Meretz and Simon Sutterlütti (2023; 2025; Gerdes et al. 2023) based on a decentralized network of commons. As this model puts forward the idea that a postcapitalist economy should avoid using money at all, we focus specifically on how economic coordination can be realized in Commonism. We first present how we understand the functioning of Commonism, to then underline issues generated by the absence of the money form. These issues are about human volition, information, social arbitration and temporality. We end by suggesting a way to domesticate money that would resolve the problems we’ve identified without doing much harm, in our view, to the main features of the model.