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Comment by etqwzutewzu | Hacker News Reader

I remember one thing in "Se questo è un uomo" (If This Is a Man) by Primo Levi. In Auschwitz camp, where money, trade and basically private property rights were abolished and where they tried to destroy all what makes people human, Primo Levi mentioned there was always trading. More than that even some informal "stock exchange". Every object (food, cigarettes, shoes, etc) had a price and it was fluctuating based on the laws of supply and demand. This makes me think how exchange is deeply engraved in human nature.

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There is an interesting article on this subject "The Economic Organization of a P.O.W. Camp" by R.A. Radford [1].

    This makes me think how 
    exchange is deeply engraved 
    in human nature.

Or maybe the inmates had all been socialised in exchange based systems, and understood that the advantages of exchange remain important even in other circumstances?

[1] http://icm.clsbe.lisboa.ucp.pt/docentes/url/jcn/ie2/0POWCamp...

The problem here is that you are dealing with people who grew up in a trade based enviornment and recreate it. This doesn't mean that the "natural" state of humanity is trade or that trade is at all engraved in human nature. Presumably if you had a functioning communist society and took some people from it and put them into a capitalist society their instinctive reaction would be to create a miniature communist collective. That doesn't mean that communism is engraved in human nature, just that people recreate what they know.

This could also be an argument from the opposite side. In a dehumanising place only a market of self-interest survived. People only cared about themselves and would not share any food or other products unless they got something for it.

This argument suggests that everybody has the same preferences, which is ... a daring assumption. For example sharing your meat with a vegetarian isn't exactly useful.

Your argument suggests that people could still have the luxury of "preferences" in a setting like Auschwitz, and even exchange stuff that they didn't particularly like.

It's not like they served different courses for various tastes there...

The existence of trade is a strong indication that preference and choice was still available -- for why bother exchanging things otherwise.

I suggest reading the R. A. Radford paper that I linked in another answer, it's really fascinating.

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