Transcending the market economy
(from a "Foundations of The Free Market Economy" course.) It's an economy even if there is no trade! The arrangement of social relations toward the satisfactory provisioning of all the people involved is an economy. In one extreme, if every individual alone were to provide for the satisfaction of all hir (his/her) needs, that would be the "negative" endpoint of the scale. (Negative in the sense that no economy would exist.) At the other extreme, if everything went into a common pool and everyone simply drew out what they needed, that would the other endpoint. (Still, an utterly simple economy.) In fact, most hunting-gathering cultures arranged for some division of labor and some redistribution of the results of that labor, but a redistribution that involved traditional/customary status-based assignment/choice of labor and distribution patterns. E.g., both the male hunters and the female gatherers would, by customary expectation, give some of the fruits of thei