Local exchange trading systems (LETS) are often conceptualized as a form of social innovation, aimed at exchanging goods and services within a given group without the intermediation of money. From the standpoint of alternative economics, they are viewed as manifestations of anti-capitalism and anti-monetary systems, while often also carrying a strong political dimension, as analyzed by the literature on social mouvements. We build on these two existing bodies of work and the particular case of French LETS – its specific literature and empirical vignettes for illustration – to discuss the organizational and everyday paradoxes underlying the fight against Ploutopia, the reign of money and neoliberal capitalism. LETS appear as socially beneficial arrangements, attempting to foster alternative practices within the mainstream economy. Our working paper explores the difficulties faced by LETS by our analysis of four paradoxical mechanisms underlying their everyday practices: 1) meaning duality, 2) substitution reasoning, leading to 3) moral ambiguity and 4) purpose ambiguity. These reveal not only paradoxical uses of language and significations, but also a paradoxical purpose of LETS. Rather than a strong opposition and radical alternative to Ploutopia, they appear as emergent forms of organization, struggling to perform spaces for alternatives not so much to economic mechanisms themselves, but rather to the social links that go with neoliberal capitalism. Thus, Money, market and monetary logics are not so much refused and replaced as they are reinterpreted and enriched both in practice and at the conceptual level through discourse in view of reinforcing social ties in a world linked predominantly by commercial ones.
