The prominent anthropologist Dave Graeber studied this extensively and concluded (most accessibly in his book Debt) that the kind of barter economy that we were taught about in elementary school probably never really existed like that, and that there have always been means of exchange (like money). So even if there was a societal collapse, you might barter individual things with neighbors once in a while, but even in a modestly sized group or one they regularly trades with others you’d almost immediately implement a better system.
I’m just going to spam this fact in this thread, but there is no evidence that bartering has ever been a stepping stone to a currency-based economy in any culture. Bartering only arises in cultures that are accustomed to money, but run into issues with currency supply (deflation, hyperinflation, etx).
Maybe bartering as the primary system, but there are definitely historically and currently many examples of “real” bartering (like in-kind work, or even the nonsense going on with trading out datacenter capacity right now, I’d argue)
I haven’t read his book but my understanding is that while there were means of exchange in many societies, the foundation of most pre-historic economies was the gift economy.
Unless you are counting that as a form of exchange? It was typically reciprocal in many ways.
A gift-based economy does feature reciprocity, but it is very different from one based on bartering. In a gift economy it is implicit that those that lack the ability to contribute as much are also not expected to reciprocate to the same degree.
What all such cases of trade through barter have in common is that they are
meetings with strangers who will, likely as not, never meet again, and with whom one
certainly will not enter into any ongoing relations. This is why a direct one-on-one
exchange is appropriate: each side makes their trade and walks away. It’s all made
possible by laying down an initial mantle of sociability, in the form of shared
pleasures, music and dance—the usual base of conviviality on which trade must
always be built. Then comes the actual trading, where both sides make a great
display of the latent hostility that necessarily exists in any exchange of material
goods between strangers—where neither party has no particular reason not to take
advantage of the other—by playful mock aggression, though in the Nambikwara case,
where the mantle of sociability is extremely thin, mock aggression is in constant
danger of slipping over into the real thing. The Gunwinggu, with their more relaxed
attitude toward sexuality, have quite ingeniously managed to make the shared
pleasures and aggression into exactly the same thing.
Recall here the language of the economics textbooks: “Imagine a society without
money.” “Imagine a barter economy.” One thing these examples make abundantly
clear is just how limited the imaginative powers of most economists turn out to be. 21
Why? The simplest answer would be: for there to even be a discipline called
“economics,” a discipline that concerns itself first and foremost with how individuals
seek the most advantageous arrangement for the exchange of shoes for potatoes, or
cloth for spears, it must assume that the exchange of such goods need have nothing
to do with war, passion, adventure, mystery, sex, or death. Economics assumes a
division between different spheres of human behavior that, among people like the
Gunwinngu and the Nambikwara, simply does not exist. These divisions in turn are
made possible by very specific institutional arrangements: the existence of lawyers,
prisons, and police, to ensure that even people who don’t like each other very much,
who have no interest in developing any kind of ongoing relationship, but are simplyinterested in getting their hands on as much of the others’ possessions as possible,
will nonetheless refrain from the most obvious expedient (theft). This in turn allows us
to assume that life is neatly divided between the marketplace, where we do our
shopping, and the “sphere of consumption,” where we concern ourselves with music,
feasts, and seduction. In other words, the vision of the world that forms the basis of
the economics textbooks, which Adam Smith played so large a part in promulgating,
has by now become so much a part of our common sense that we find it hard to
imagine any other possible arrangement.
From these examples, it begins to be clear why there are no societies based on
barter. Such a society could only be one in which everybody was an inch away from
everybody else’s throat; but nonetheless hovering there, poised to strike but never
actually striking, forever.
The basic idea is that our modern economic system has had the humanity stripped out of it in order to be an engineerable system at all. The natural way for things to work is for personal relationships and cultural conventions to come first, to the point where the way to make impersonal trade work was to make it more personal; for instance the text right before the quoted passage describes a culture whose barter meets were also swingers parties. The book has lots more examples of the ways material relations have fundamentally contradicted the idea that the natural way is to appraise things down to a numerical value and play an optimization game, for instance cultural practices of certain types of goods only being used for specific types of things like blood and marriage debts, and cultures which have strong taboos against ever refusing to give a person food.
The problems OP is talking about are specific to capitalist society and the way people in it are conditioned to think. You don’t need a “system” that takes that way of thinking as its core assumption and constrains people thinking that way to act pro-socially, the much simpler solution would be to permit and enable the entanglement of personal and economic relations that naturally happens.
The prominent anthropologist Dave Graeber studied this extensively and concluded (most accessibly in his book Debt) that the kind of barter economy that we were taught about in elementary school probably never really existed like that, and that there have always been means of exchange (like money). So even if there was a societal collapse, you might barter individual things with neighbors once in a while, but even in a modestly sized group or one they regularly trades with others you’d almost immediately implement a better system.
I’m just going to spam this fact in this thread, but there is no evidence that bartering has ever been a stepping stone to a currency-based economy in any culture. Bartering only arises in cultures that are accustomed to money, but run into issues with currency supply (deflation, hyperinflation, etx).
Maybe bartering as the primary system, but there are definitely historically and currently many examples of “real” bartering (like in-kind work, or even the nonsense going on with trading out datacenter capacity right now, I’d argue)
This post is definitely about bartering in a primary sense though
I haven’t read his book but my understanding is that while there were means of exchange in many societies, the foundation of most pre-historic economies was the gift economy.
Unless you are counting that as a form of exchange? It was typically reciprocal in many ways.
A gift-based economy does feature reciprocity, but it is very different from one based on bartering. In a gift economy it is implicit that those that lack the ability to contribute as much are also not expected to reciprocate to the same degree.
Yeah I’m not saying it’s barter, but OP’s comment didn’t mention it at all so I thought it was important to talk about.
Yep, I have a dramatic oversimplification problem. But it’s hard to describe 50,000+ years of economic proclivities in a tweet :)
A passage from the book:
The basic idea is that our modern economic system has had the humanity stripped out of it in order to be an engineerable system at all. The natural way for things to work is for personal relationships and cultural conventions to come first, to the point where the way to make impersonal trade work was to make it more personal; for instance the text right before the quoted passage describes a culture whose barter meets were also swingers parties. The book has lots more examples of the ways material relations have fundamentally contradicted the idea that the natural way is to appraise things down to a numerical value and play an optimization game, for instance cultural practices of certain types of goods only being used for specific types of things like blood and marriage debts, and cultures which have strong taboos against ever refusing to give a person food.
The problems OP is talking about are specific to capitalist society and the way people in it are conditioned to think. You don’t need a “system” that takes that way of thinking as its core assumption and constrains people thinking that way to act pro-socially, the much simpler solution would be to permit and enable the entanglement of personal and economic relations that naturally happens.
Yeah Debt is a great book and I highly recommend it to anyone curious about it