Ask an Anarchist

[caketastydelish]

Do Anarchists like to go to their backyard and cook food on the grill? Steak? Barbeque? Chicken?

 

[Borachio]

A barter system is a market, it just has no money as currency. From what you are saying one should conclude there never could have been a barter system, whereas prior to the invention of actual currency everything was bartered.

I've heard this isn't true; that in fact barter systems only emerge when a pre-existing currency system has broken down.

Apparently, I've been told, the idea of barter systems predating currency is a myth.

The precursor of currency is credit (or just plain reciprocity). Currency was invented to formalize and, if you like, regulate credit.

 

[Traitorfish]

Do Anarchists like to go to their backyard and cook food on the grill? Steak? Barbeque? Chicken?

I'm sure we've had this question before, and I said something about eating the flesh of the capitalists, which makes me think it's a set-up for a punchline I'm too dense to guess.

I've heard this isn't true; that in fact barter systems only emerge when a pre-existing currency system has broken down.

Apparently, I've been told, the idea of barter systems predating currency is a myth.

The precursor of currency is credit (or just plain reciprocity). Currency was invented to formalize and, if you like, regulate credit.

That seems to be the case. And it's more than just a technical gripe: the barter system imagines that trade occurs, fundamentally, between socially and culturally unencumbered individuals, bourgeois individuals, but in fact this sort of ahistorical freedom is achieved through long and often bloody social change. Historically speaking, being able to swap two commodities and then go about our separate ways is really weird. Even in pre-modern societies with well-developed mercantile networks, personalised relationships of trust and credit were still hugely important: in part because of the limited nature of impersonal institutions, which made such relationships a practical necessity, but also because these merchants still lived in societies dominated by self-consciously historical relationships, whether personal or institutional, so the sort of ahistorical commercial encounter we now to take to be commonplace would have made them quite anxious. And yet, Smithians discover such casual ahistoricism in the stone age!

 

[Flying Pig]

Not sure. Homer was certainly writing before the introduction of currency (he's 8th century BC at the latest; currency begins from about the 7th) and gives the values of things in terms of oxen or slaves, even while the (legendary) economy he describes is a gift economy. I do think that such systems work primarily among social elites.

 

[Traitorfish]

What function are cattle and slaves actually fulfilling, though? Goods can be used as a medium of account and exchange without ever actually changing hands. Obligations are converted into a good of generally agreed-upon value, like cattle, and then converted back into something else to be fulfilled, without any need to actually trade exchange cattle along the way.

 

[Flying Pig]

True enough, but I still think that gift economies work for elites exchanging prestige goods but not really for ordinary people doing their shopping.

 

[Traitorfish]

I don't follow; was anyone suggesting that it would?

 

[Borachio]

Gift economies are not just about the exchange of goods, though, iirc.

The same mechanism can be applicable in research fields where those contributing the most enjoy the highest status.

It seems to me that we're all very hung up on currencies for some reason. As if all significant human relationships are essentially financial ones, or, rather, mediated through financial means. I don't think this is necessarily true at all. Though at present they very often are.

 

[Gary Childress]

I saw this posted in a Wiki article regarding the Battle of Teruel.

The Battle of Teruel exhausted the resources of the Republican Army. The Spanish Republican Air Force could not replace the airplanes and arms that it lost in the Battle of Teruel.[37] On the other hand, the Nationalists concentrated the bulk of their forces in the east as they prepared to drive through Aragon into Catalonia and the Levante.[38] Franco had the edge on resupply as the Nationalists now controlled the efficiently run industrial might in the Basque Country. The Republican Government, however, had to leave the armament industry in Catalonia in the hands of the Anarchists. One Anarchist observer reported that "Notwithstanding lavish expenditures of money on this need, our industrial organization was not able to finish a single kind of rifle or machine gun or cannon...."[39] Franco's act of retaking Teruel was a bitter blow to the Republic after the high hopes engendered by its capture. The recapture of Teruel also removed the last obstacle to Franco's breakthrough to the Mediterranean Sea

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Teruel#Aftermath

My question is:

Is the quote from the article above true? Was Catalonia a primary production region for the "Republican" forces in Spain? Was Catalonia primarily anarchist and did Catalonia have difficulty in producing what the Republican army needed to win the Spanish Civil War as compared to other regions?

 

[Flying Pig]

I don't follow; was anyone suggesting that it would?

I thought the assumption was that before currency everything works like that; if you're not explicitly bartering, then you're giving 'freely' with the expectation that the recipient will give you gifts in return. My point was that such a system doesn't really work for ordinary people, and the alternative to giving without demanding reciprocation is, by definition, some form of barter.

 

[Borachio]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_money#Non-monetary_exchange

In his book Debt: The First 5000 Years, anthropologist David Graeber argues against the suggestion that money was invented to replace barter. The problem with this version of history, he suggests, is the lack of any supporting evidence. His research indicates that "gift economies" were common, at least at the beginnings of the first agrarian societies, when humans used elaborate credit systems. Graeber proposes that money as a unit of account was invented the moment when the unquantifiable obligation "I owe you one" transformed into the quantifiable notion of "I owe you one unit of something". In this view, money emerged first as credit and only later acquired the functions of a medium of exchange and a store of value.

Hmm. Well.

 

[Flying Pig]

If you read a little way down the article, it talks about barter systems from 12000 BC...

 

[Borachio]

Does it?

The only reference to 12,000 BC that I've found is this:

Anatolian obsidian as a raw material for stone-age tools was distributed as early as 12,000 B.C., with organized trade occurring in the 9th millennium

I'm not really qualified to talk about this though. I think we need a really rigorous definition of what constitutes barter. If you take it as just an exchange of goods, as you seem to be doing Mr Pig, then of course bartering is what people must have been doing in the absence of a medium of exchange.

I personally think it's more likely that people "gave" each other things with the expectation of reciprocity. And it was only because this wasn't perceived as an always fair system (with everyone thinking they were losing all the time) that currency in one form or another was introduced. (Not that I think that made people think they weren't being ripped off just the same.)

 

[Traitorfish]

I thought the assumption was that before currency everything works like that; if you're not explicitly bartering, then you're giving 'freely' with the expectation that the recipient will give you gifts in return. My point was that such a system doesn't really work for ordinary people, and the alternative to giving without demanding reciprocation is, by definition, some form of barter.

I don't think that's the case. You can have systems of credit that don't depend on a logic of gifting, and that seems to be how most pre-modern people dealt with exchange. That's the thrust of Graeber's book, that credit is not only chronologically prior to barter but also it's necessary condition, because you need to develop systems of credit before people can start thinking of goods in terms of abstract exchange-values, and exchange-values aren't present in a gift economy (or, at least, not that the participants would be comfortable admitting). Personalised systems of credit are actually something we have abundant historical evidence for, while the evidence for barter systems is the purely academic conviction that they must have happened or else our economic models don't make sense, and that's not really evidence so much as bloody-mindedness.

 

[Flying Pig]

That does make sense, certainly in small fixed communities.

 

[Takhisis]

Do Anarchists like to go to their backyard and cook food on the grill? Steak? Barbeque? Chicken?

I'm sure we've had this question before, and I said something about eating the flesh of the capitalists, which makes me think it's a set-up for a punchline I'm too dense to guess.

Well… the trick, I think, is that without private property you couldn't define the yard as yours…

 

[Hygro]

I thought the assumption was that before currency everything works like that; if you're not explicitly bartering, then you're giving 'freely' with the expectation that the recipient will give you gifts in return. My point was that such a system doesn't really work for ordinary people, and the alternative to giving without demanding reciprocation is, by definition, some form of barter.

Credit existed before currency.

edit: existed after not having the patience to see the point already addressed

but it was already earlier in the thread for all those who read it.

 

[Old Hippy]

My question is:

Is the quote from the article above true? Was Catalonia a primary production region for the "Republican" forces in Spain? Was Catalonia primarily anarchist and did Catalonia have difficulty in producing what the Republican army needed to win the Spanish Civil War as compared to other regions?

would refer you to

Spoiler :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_involvement_in_the_Spanish_Civil_War

it would seem that no regions actually produced much either republican or nationalist, the US and USSR providing much of the support along with about a dozen other countries..
"At the same time, the automakers Ford, Studebaker, and General Motors provided a total of 12,000 trucks to the Nationalists. After the war was over, José Maria Doussinague, who was at the time undersecretary at the Spanish Foreign Ministry said, "without American petroleum and American trucks, and American credit, we could never have won the Civil War"

 

[Gary Childress]

would refer you to

Spoiler :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_involvement_in_the_Spanish_Civil_War

it would seem that no regions actually produced much either republican or nationalist, the US and USSR providing much of the support along with about a dozen other countries..
"At the same time, the automakers Ford, Studebaker, and General Motors provided a total of 12,000 trucks to the Nationalists. After the war was over, José Maria Doussinague, who was at the time undersecretary at the Spanish Foreign Ministry said, "without American petroleum and American trucks, and American credit, we could never have won the Civil War"

With all due respect, where are you getting the information that no regions actually produced "much"? What is meant by "much"? Were all regions equally productive or unproductive? I tried to Google something on production in Spain during the Spanish Civil War and didn't come up with anything helpful. Is there a source on this information?

 

[Traitorfish]

It seems like this discussion is better-suited to the miscellaneous history questions thread than to this thread. I get the overlap with the CNT collectivisations, but it seems like a question about wartime infrastructure and logistics rather than about anarchism.