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 their labor --meat or vegetables-- to relatives and neighbors, who would pass some on to other relatives and neighbors. Early agriculture, with its new potential for storage of overproduction, resulted in a great increase in hierarchical relationships, differentials in relative power, and opportunities for changing the traditional patterns of labor allocation and product distribution. Butactual trade (you give to me and I give to you in exchange) is not a necessary principle of distribution; distribution by status-right is quite sufficient for operating an economy.
The institutionalization of exchange as the major principle of labor allocation and product distribution is the invention of the free-market system. Sharing can occur without trading, without any formalized exchange as such. (The almost-inability of people in industrialized economies to think that way is the major new cultural idea that we find in free-market economies.) Reciprocal gifting is the closest we usually are able to come to thinking in the old way. . . . Bringing a bottle of wine to a dinner party, or party favors . . . if there is no normative expectation of return . . . is perhaps even closer. I guess that potluck dinners are really a survival, though, of the older non-market economic behavior! (When you go down to your local Occupy Wall Street demonstration, be sure to bring a food item or something else to share! That's a start at setting up an alternative economy.)
Get it? . . . Sharing without trading. Sharing!
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 their labor --meat or vegetables-- to relatives and neighbors, who would pass some on to other relatives and neighbors. Early agriculture, with its new potential for storage of overproduction, resulted in a great increase in hierarchical relationships, differentials in relative power, and opportunities for changing the traditional patterns of labor allocation and product distribution. Butactual trade (you give to me and I give to you in exchange) is not a necessary principle of distribution; distribution by status-right is quite sufficient for operating an economy.
The institutionalization of exchange as the major principle of labor allocation and product distribution is the invention of the free-market system. Sharing can occur without trading, without any formalized exchange as such. (The almost-inability of people in industrialized economies to think that way is the major new cultural idea that we find in free-market economies.) Reciprocal gifting is the closest we usually are able to come to thinking in the old way. . . . Bringing a bottle of wine to a dinner party, or party favors . . . if there is no normative expectation of return . . . is perhaps even closer. I guess that potluck dinners are really a survival, though, of the older non-market economic behavior! (When you go down to your local Occupy Wall Street demonstration, be sure to bring a food item or something else to share! That's a start at setting up an alternative economy.)
Get it? . . . Sharing without trading. Sharing!
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