#barter systems

Starting the next chapter is always the hardest part even when I know what's gonna go there

Where there is no money people have to barter rather than buy and sell, and the word ‘barter’ is itself stamped with a colonial image of beads and trinkets changing hands in savage lands. This is one of the comfortable myths by which modern people distance themselves from the past and regard their world as being not only much better but a different kind of place altogether.

Sometimes to accept is also a gift. The anthropologist David Graeber points out that the explanation that we invented money because barter was too clumsy is false. It wasn't that I was trying to trade sixty sweaters for the violin you'd made when you didn't really need all that woolliness. Before money, Graeber wrote, people didn't barter but gave and received as needs and goods ebbed and flowed. They thereby incurred the indebtedness that bound them together, and reciprocated slowly, incompletely, in the ongoing transaction that is a community. Money was invented as a way to sever the ties by completing the transactions that never needed to be completed in the older system, but existed like a circulatory system in a body. Money makes us separate bodies, and maybe it teaches us that we should be separate.