NP unless "by indirection we find direction out" Anarchism

[Ian Livingston]

It's still often the case even in rural American communities. Not fully,
but as a tacit sort of part of getting along when it's 55 miles to the gas
pump, as Annie Proulx says.


On Thu, Aug 9, 2012 at 3:58 PM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:

> In the aforementioned DEBT by Graeber, he hits hard at what he calls a
> basic economics
> "myth' (meaning untruth)....
>
> The Barter Myth. Te reduce to oversimplicity, he argues that economists
> from Smith on,
> argued without historical, anthropological evidence that First there
> was--musta been--barter
> then came money....
>
> Instead he argues with scholarly buttressing of his own and from others,
> that all the evidence
> suggests that in extended kinship--family--and small village ways of
> survival, people 'exchanged' fer sure--
> lots of good examples--but almost always more like an informal 'tab' was
> kept even just mentally
> ...you had extra early tomatoes,you gave some and later got, say,
>  a pumpkin.....'borrowing', getting in advance many non-food things--then
> debts
> settled at harvest time...
>
> One reason this distinction is so important is that economists soon
> equated bartering with immediate exchange
> what economists call "spot trades'---because that is how money works or
> came to work....
>
> Contrary to the Myth, he writes, barter has always been there with other
> ways of exchange--still there with insti
> tutionalized money---and is more done as between strangers than village
> kin...............
>
> When people know each other in their daily lives, there is a whole
> different cutural way of "owing', paying back, balancing what is
> due between people.
>



-- 
"Less than any man have I  excuse for prejudice; and I feel for all creeds
the warm sympathy of one who has come to learn that even the trust in
reason is a precarious faith, and that we are all fragments of darkness
groping for the sun. I know no more about the ultimates than the simplest
urchin in the streets." -- Will Durant
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20120809/754e6f58/attachment.html>