NP unless "by indirection we find direction out" Anarchism

[Mark Kohut]

the Myth per se is the Myth that First there was barter, then money...ye olde all-lines-singled-up cause & effect does not
apply, he sez...
 
In most tradiitional communities, the oweback is tacit, not separate [as an economic good/value] from the
moral and political structures of the community.....even in modern polite society, my example, I invite you
to dinner and then you invite me ...or else we stop our 'exchanges' but we don't see it as barter either way....
 
and barter exists WITH money, in fact can increase seemingly because of money. (Fishing community and
a farming community often do not value their surplus the same when they want to exchange it for the 
other's surplus until they agree on a common 'currency' [money] from salt to precious metals, etc.)
He cites evidence from many who have checked out--and did after Smith pubbed--- Smith's examples of
fish and nails and tobacco being used as money and in most cases the people WERE already using money---as
a unit of account. 
 
He quotes one Caroline Humphrey, "who has written the definitive anthropological work on barter", he thinks:
"No example of a barter economy, pure and simple, has ever been discribed, let alone the emergence from it of 
money". Graeber writes that missionaries, adventurers and colonial administrators were fanning out across the 
world with copies of Smith's [foundational] book expecting to find the land of barter. None ever did. [He gives
no footnote here, writing as if this is common knowledge. I would prefer a footnote or two but it is just an
historical footnote if true]
 
The ways that money is the medium of exchange and is--or is like--a coined synecdoche or symbol, so to speak, for a barter
exchange might all still be true, including your example, although you have also added a new element, the
very controversial concept of interest.....it is just not foundationally true in most of history and societies, he sez.
 
 
 

From: David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com>
To: Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> 
Cc: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org> 
Sent: Thursday, August 9, 2012 10:24 PM
Subject: Re: NP unless "by indirection we find direction out" Anarchism


It seems this Barter Myth's biggest point is immediate versus future exchange balancing of value.  Value for value, immediate or not, is still essentially barter.  Adding future balancing of exchanged value is today called "interest rate." So maybe his myth is based on truth.

On Thursday, August 9, 2012, Mark Kohut 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....
> 
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20120810/040e0925/attachment.html>