#the commons

"I had to come back to thank you."

"Thank me? For what?"

The Commons

By @thesunpersists and @mollywog on AO3

Huge thank you to @thesunpersists for commissioning me!

This logic extended outward, to neighbours, to the village, to the wider community, for most of human history. The commons wasn’t a formal institution imposed from above, it was the natural shape that cooperation takes when people live closely together and depend on the same land.

Scholars used to assume, following Adam Smith, that before money there was barter, that people traded wheat for shoes and meat for pots in a primitive version of the marketplace. The anthropologist David Graeber spent years looking for ancient evidence of this barter economy and couldn’t find any. No society has ever been documented that organised itself primarily through the exchange of goods between individuals. What actually existed, everywhere, were systems of mutual obligation, gift, and reciprocal support. The shoemaker didn’t trade shoes for wheat, the community fed the shoemaker, and the shoemaker kept everyone’s feet dry. Debts were social rather than financial. Memory and relationship did the work that money later claimed to do.

This matters because the standard story, that markets are natural and ownership is instinctive and competition is the default, is not history. It’s a story told backwards, projecting the assumptions of the present onto a past that worked very differently."

Season 1 Episode 5 - The Commons

A celebrity visitor prompts a mystery. Meanwhile Beetee and Prim disagree on a drink name.

This happened to me and my good friend @mollywog

Context: a very creative fanfic