What forms of co-operative credit do anarchists support?
Anarchists tend to support must forms of co-operation, including those associated with credit and money. This co-operative credit/banking takes many forms, such as credit unions, LETS schemes and so on. In this section we discuss two main forms of co-operative credit, mutualism and LETS. Mutualism is the name for the ideas associated with Proudhon and his Bank of the People. Essentially, it is a confederation of credit unions in which working class people pool their funds and savings. This allows credit to be arranged at cost, so increasing the options available to working people as well as abolishing interest on loans by making increasing amount of cheap credit available to working people. LETS stands for Local Exchange Trading Schemes and is a similar idea in many ways (and apparently discovered independently) — see Bringing the Economy Home from the Market by V.G. Dobson for a detailed discussion on LETS. Both schemes revolve around creating an alternative form of currency and cred
