https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/02/barter-...
People did something before money was invented, right? Parent's raised kids, kids helped parent's when they were older, families banded together, items were traded between villages, across continents, etc.
80,000 year old grave goods have been discovered, consisting of shells of a consistent size, with holes drilled in them, a few hundred kilometers from the ocean. We know from ethnography of societies which existed until very recently that these collectibles served the same purpose as money.
A good complement to Graeber's book is the work of Nick Szabo, I would start here:
https://fermatslibrary.com/s/shelling-out-the-origins-of-mon...
You can find most of the rest of his writing on the subject on his blog: http://unenumerated.blogspot.com
The early mesopotamian cilivilazations got debt and credit before there was coinage. Farmers bought goods on credit, the debt set in grain for example, to be payed on harvest season. Grain, would be as good as money since that's what you paid your taxes in. The whole region had a sophisticated credit culture and the effects of debt were pervasive. That's why the old testament has provisions against usury, the jubilee, etc.
He's meaningfully wrong about a lot of things, and he's missing the 75,000 years prior to his story beginning completely.
I strongly suggest reading some Szabo to fill that picture in. Shell money (ivory money sometimes) was a lot more money-like than Yap stones are.
> Communities of Iroquois Native Americans, for instance, stockpiled their goods in longhouses. Female councils then allocated the goods, explains Graeber. Other indigenous communities relied on “gift economies,” which went something like this: If you were a baker who needed meat, you didn’t offer your bagels for the butcher’s steaks. Instead, you got your wife to hint to the butcher’s wife that you two were low on iron, and she’d say something like “Oh really? Have a hamburger, we’ve got plenty!” Down the line, the butcher might want a birthday cake, or help moving to a new apartment, and you’d help him out.
> On paper, this sounds a bit like delayed barter, but it bears some significant differences. For one thing, it’s much more efficient than Smith’s idea of a barter system, since it doesn’t depend on each person simultaneously having what the other wants. It’s also not tit for tat: No one ever assigns a specific value to the meat or cake or house-building labor, meaning debts can’t be transferred.
> And, in a gift economy, exchange isn’t impersonal.
My original reply in this thread was to mention that there have been functioning societies that don't use money. I was replying to a post that couldn't imagine such things. Maybe I'm misunderstanding why you brought up barter economies?
I'll have to get back to your first Nick Szabo reference, it doesn't format readable in the browser I'm in front of at the moment (overlapping text). The second link, the blog post, seems to discuss the history of money as opposed to alternatives (like the Iroquois and gift economies mentioned above).
[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/02/barter-...
I bet in many cases if someone got a reputation for not reciprocating "gifts" they'd soon find themselves not receiving anything. Hardly a gift.
And why are people "hinting" at things in this economy, and why this is presented as something different from a direct request. How often have you come across people "hinting" at what they really want, when really they are demanding. Sounds like something out of a cliche mobster scene, "lovely tanks you have there Colonel, it would be a shame for anything to happen to them".
> No one ever assigns a specific value to the meat or cake or house-building labor, meaning debts can’t be transferred.
If the bakers wife were to "hint" to the butcher that their friend could do with some extra "iron", whilst simultaneously saying "did you enjoy those scones i gave you" (wink), then the debt is transferred. We can pretend that it wouldn't have happened, but people are people the world over. Some would be nice and help others because they like to help, others would use what leverage they have to get ahead in life.
This gift based economy just sounds like a passive aggressive debt based economy, and it doesn't sound real.
I saw that same connection myself. Gifts, aka favors, aka "you owe me one", aka debts.
> This gift based economy just sounds like a passive aggressive debt based economy, and it doesn't sound real.
I brought this up initially (near the top of this thread) in response to someone who couldn't imagine an economy without without money. Such things have existed, as per anthropologists.
Stupidly I had misunderstood what was being written, and then I attacked that imagined position by making the same argument as they were actually making :facepalm:
Had wampum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wampum
Which was absolutely used as trade goods between Iroquois bands, between the Iroquois and other natives, and between the Iroquois and settler colonialists. Standardized trade goods, portable and of a broadly recognized value: in other words, money.
Money which was good enough that the English, being kept short of coin by the Crown, adopted it for their own internal trade. Leading to the expression "shelling out", and the slang term "clams" for the dollar.
Single Iroquois bands may not have done much if any internal trade, but the same is true of my nuclear family. I would expect some wampum changed hands for things like marriages, though I don't have a source on that and it might not be true in this specific case.
I'm fairly certain the Iroquois didn't need to trade wampum with other bands to get the dishes washed? Just like you said you don't need to pay someone in your family to do the dishes, families (and friends, and Iroquois villages, etc) help each other without needing money.
I didn't say that one can construct a modern economy without money, just that the dishes could still get washed, like a lot of other small scale transactions, in response to someone who may have thought that such things are not possible.
Are you trying to prove me wrong, that humans cannot possibly organize activities amongst themselves without wampum of some sort? You mentioned families doing things for each other, which might be a better example than I brought up.
(I do appreciate the discussion though, I've learned a couple things along the way. But I'm not sure if we disagree, or are going on tangents.)
My thinking is that lack of money wouldn't stop the dishes from being washed, but would stop bigger projects.
Yes, insofar as every band of humans has edges, and on those edges money is a hard prerequisite. We've coevolved with it since the dawn of anatomical modernity, the burden of proof is very much on anyone who wishes to claim that that we can get along without it.
I guess I consider the existence of activities, even economic ones which don't involved the exchange of money, to be trivial? Like it's obvious they exist, it isn't saying very much to point them out?
I spent a lot of my youth in an ashram with up to about 10,000 people in it, and the dishes got washed. The breakdown of that kind of basic uncompensated labor in small (usually flat/anarchist) communes says more about their inability to escape atomization than about the possibility of doing so.
I don't get the sense we're disagreeing about much if anything here, though. Perhaps choosing to emphasize different pieces of the puzzle.
Has some information relating to Australian Aborigines.
13 Distribution and consumption
Fundamentals of distribution were also quite similar in the seven regions, especially in the contrast between the distribution of women’s product to their immediate camp and to certain other relatives such as sons and mothers, and of men’s product to the wider residence group and to wives’ and potential wives’ parents. Specific obligations to certain relatives, processes of ‘demand sharing’ (Peterson 1993), and generalised reciprocity combined to determine patterns of distri- bution (see Keen, in press, chapter 11). In spite of the similarities, the study has revealed some variation in patterns of distribution. Kûnai and Ngarinyin men had specific obligations to provide meat to their parents as well as wife’s kin. Yuwaaliyaay and Pitjantjatjara men provided food to the prospective wife to ‘grow her up’. Obligations on the part of sister’s son to mother’s brother have been recorded in only in two cases (Kûnai and Yolngu); among Sandbeach people the senior of a MB-ZS pair did the giving (including senior sister’s son to junior mother’s brother). Kûnai and Pitjantjatjara husbands gave food to their wives indirectly through the wife’s parent. Consumption prohibitions according to age, gender, initiation and reproductive status were wide- spread, although the uneven data make comparisons difficult. Senior Yolngu men could impose ad hoc pro- hibitions by making production implements (such as canoes) or food itself sacred, and to make certain resources available only to them.
14 Exchange
People were able to produce various kinds of valued items which they exchanged for other valued items, according to gender, age, and structural position (such as birth order). In all regions ‘inalienable pos- sessions’ (Weiner 1992; Godelier 1999) included land, waters and related sacra. Inalienable posses- sions had a ‘sacred’ character which enhances their value, making them immune from exchange. In at least some regions inalienable possessions were related to ‘inalienable gifts’ in the forms of sacred objects and ceremonies. These are gifts that retain a connection with the donor such that the gift creates a relationship between donor and recipient (Gregory 1982; Godelier 1999). People exchange inalienable gifts for everyday objects, and in marriage exchange. Movement through the field of exchange relations varied between kinds of society and between individ- uals. Older brothers in the highly polygynous soci- eties had greater opportunities than their younger brothers to accrue control of resources associated with marriage. (see Keen, in press, chapter 12). Marriage exchange articulated both with produc- tion and distribution through marriage gifts and the reproduction of kin networks, and highlights the most obvious contrasts in exchange networks among the seven regions. In contrast to the shifting webs of Kûnai, Pitjantjatjara, and Sandbeach people, and reciprocal exchange among Yuwaaliyaay and Wiil/Minong people, the asymmetrical forms of mar- riage among Ngarinyin and their neighbours, and to an extent Yolngu people, reproduced very structured regional systems of exchange. In the wurnan exchange system of Ngarinyin people and their neighbours, marriage exchanges joined the exchange of foods, raw materials and sacred objects along ‘paths’ linking patri-groups in established sequences. Yolngu probably did not have quite such a neat and tidy system, but they did think in terms of paths of exchange, and items moved in customary directions. The high and very high levels of polygyny among Ngarinyin people and their neighbours and Yolngu people placed certain men at the nodes of exchange networks where they received gifts from intending and actual daughters’ and sisters’ husbands, and made gifts to intended and actual wives’ relatives. These same men (or some of them) led powerful and growing patri-groups, and controlled patri-group sacra.
2 chickens for a lamb would be bartering, but that doesn’t happen.