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u/adichkofv · 6 pointsr/Anarchy101

Here's a short rundown of some the various ways people can interact economically that might help you navigate various economic discourse:

-------Different kinds of "exchange": gift-exchange and market exchange:

Market-exchange is an exchange of alienable things between transactors who are in a state of reciprocal independence.

Noncommodity (gift) exchange is an exchange of inalienable things between transactors who are in a state of reciprocal dependence.

Market exchange establishes objective quantitative relationships (prices) between the objects transacted, while gift exchange establishes personal qualitative relationships between the subjects transacting.

Gift exchange differs from barter or market exchange because the value of the gifts is judged qualitatively, not quantitatively as in the case of commodities. Gift-exchange is based on ‘the capacity for actors (agents, subjects) to extract or elicit from others items that then become the object of their relationship’.

In his famous book Gifts and Commodities, Christopher A. Gregory (an economic anthropologist) suggests this is a general tendency.

Gift economies tend to personify objects. Commodity/market economies, do the opposite: they tend to treat human beings, or at least, aspects of human beings, like objects. The most obvious example is human labor: in modern economics we talk of “goods and services” as if human activity itself were something analogous to an object, which can be bought or sold in the same way as cheese, or tire-irons.

Gregory lays out a tidy set of oppositions. Gifts are transactions that are meant to create or effect “qualitative” relations between persons; they take place within a preexisting web of personal relations; therefore, even the objects involved have a tendency to take on the qualities of people.

Commodity exchange (market), on the other hand, is meant to establish a “quantitative” equivalence of value between objects; it should ideally be done quite impersonally; therefore, there is a tendency to treat even the human beings involved like things.

-------Some non-exchange: Demand-sharing, pooling, "everyday Communism":

It's similar to what David Graeber calls "everyday communism", which he defines as:

"An open-ended agreement between two groups, or even two individuals, to provide for the other; within which, even access to one another’s possessions followed the principle of ‘from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs’."

(‘from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs’, the old communist formula, basically means if you have a need and I have the ability to meet that need, I do it.

Keeping count or reciprocating is very frowned upon in these sort of situations.

This sort of communism is quite common (even under capitalism), in families, between friends and there's a little of it in every non-hostile relationship.)

What characterizes a sharing context comparatively is that it extends the circle of people who can enjoy the good implicated in a resource, for instance accessing a certain resource such as water. In other words, sharing food or drink is an action done for its own sake, putting the good of nourishment in the place of any specific goals that may be derivative of the transfer of food items, for instance the attempt to create obligations for the future. In this understanding, sharing is not a manifestation of an altruistic move, putting the goals of others above one's own goals, but rather one of renouncing derivative goals altogether in the face of intrinsic goods—its intrinsic value if you will. In gift-giving contexts, by contrast, goals of various kinds (whether held jointly by the exchange partners or not, whether altruistic or egoistic) override the intrinsic good of whatever it is that is being provided.

It's important to distinguish exchange, which is usually for “external” and strategic benefits such as having a network of partners, creating obligations for the future, etc. (gift-exchange) or and more impersonal and violent benefits when it comes to market-exchange – from sharing that entails the intrinsic goods of receiving a share (sharing out) and of being accepted as a member of the community of humans with recognized needs (sharing in).

Unlike what the economic fundamentalists would have you believe, sharing is not governed by either ecological need and pressure nor a diffuse notion of generosity and altruism. The ethnographic record shows that sharing takes place not only under conditions of scarcity, and that it typically takes the form of demand sharing rather than apparently generous gift-giving. In fact, a number of cultural conditions have to be in place for sharing to work. Unlike the case of exchange systems, these conditions are not formally institutionalized normative systems but, instead, complex systems of habitual practice. In the ethnographic cases (including those in capitalist societies), sharing works because people have a shared history of mutual involvements as kin, because they master numerous ways of initiating sharing through implicature and other forms of talk, and finally because they recognize the presence of others as the (often silent) demand that it constitutes toward those who have and who are in a position to give.

Many acts of sharing took place, and continue to take place, because they are initiated by the taker and social strategies are in place that decouple giving from receiving. Sharing may therefore take place (as said before) without the provider enacting and expressing charity. Often it takes place in a way that downgrades the act of giving as part of leveling any potential attempts of the giver to take political advantage from his or her economically advantaged position. Demand sharing not only inverts the sequence of action but also the tone of the transaction that is known as “charitable giving.” There is no sharing without a demand. The demand need not be uttered, and it need not be the demand of a specific interlocutor since it is a demand for provisioning that emerges as a consequence of moral role relationships or as incurred by a particular situation of copresence, as I would prefer to call it. We need to recognize that one’s mere bodily presence, underlined by addressing the other person in particular ways, is always a demand for being acknowledged as a partner, a personal being with legitimate needs. An appropriate definition of demand sharing is therefore much broader than the use of explicit demands such as “Give me . . .” leading to the appropriation of what one may think one is entitled to. The explicitness of the demand may differ and it may be entirely implicit very much like a “silent demand”. Humans are sufficiently able to put themselves into the situation of others to be able to know what the intrinsic goods of shared objects are for fellow humans without any demand being uttered.

Sharing is generally characterized by the preparedness to suspend measuring objects against one another (which means that sharing does not necessarily entail that everyone gets the same) in that situation and by the unwillingness to hang on to something in a particular situation.

You can read more about this in Thomas Widlok's book "Anthropology and the Economy of Sharing": https://www.amazon.com/Anthropology-Economy-Sharing-Thomas-Widlok/dp/1138945552

​

If you're interested in reading about Libertarian Marxist theories of post-capitalism I recommend taking a look at:

The Beginning of History: Value Struggles and Global Capital by Massimo de Angelis.

Omnia Sunt Communia: On the Commons and the Transformation to Postcapitalism by Massimo de Angelis.

Crack Capitalism by John Holloway has the best take on abstract labor vs what he calls concrete doing.

Rupturing the Dialectic: The Struggle against Work, Money, and Financialization by Harry Cleaver has a very good analysis of the labor theory of value and the abolition of money.

u/shiprole · 3 pointsr/BreadTube

If you want a best understanding of what Graeber provocatively calls everyday communism, I suggest you take a look at this book:

Anthropology and the Economy of Sharing by Thomas Widlok.


Thomas Widlok's book is the only book that I know of that talks about the issue of communism in any detail. He edited two books on the ethnography of equality that are also useful.

The anthropological term for that communism is "demand-sharing".


Demand-sharing is distinct from the gift, by the way. Demand-sharing is NOT a form of exchange (Widlok deals with this very well).

For Gifts, I would direct you to The World of the Gift by Jacques T. Godbout and Alain C. Caillé and Gifts and Commodities by C. A. Gregory.

Alain Caillé is the expert on the question of the gift.


P.S:

/u/LitGarbo

You deserve way more subscribers, this is some good quality stuff.

u/vextors · 3 pointsr/Anarchism

Look you seem to have good intentions but you're completely immersed in the neoclassical economics bullshit.

So, I recommend taking at this particular book:


The Dismal Science: How Thinking Like an Economist Undermines Community by Harvard Economics Professor Stephen A. Marglin, who is also a reformed/ former neoclassical economist.


Philip Mirowski's book Machine Dreams: Economics Becomes a Cyborg Science, his book More Heat than Light: Economics as Social Physics, Physics as Nature's Economics and his latest The Knowledge We Have Lost in Information: The History of Information in Modern Economics deal with a lot of the bullshit coming from economics.


You can find a more anti-capitalist critique in [The Beginning of History: Value Struggles and Global Capital](http://www.lamarre-mediaken.com/Site/COMS_630_files/Beginning%20of%20History.pdf
) (I included a PDF to it).


As for books on what communism might look like:


u/tamirikimsa · 2 pointsr/LeftWithoutEdge

If you're interested in reading more radical perspective on the commons, I recommend reading the work of Massimo De Angelis:

Start with his book The Beginning of History: Value Struggles and Global Capital, here: http://gen.lib.rus.ec/book/index.php?md5=62F323FC4073EA6CF2C6586F50806911

Then his most recent book on Commons: Omnia Sunt Communia: On the Commons and the Transformation to Postcapitalism, here: http://gen.lib.rus.ec/book/index.php?md5=961FEA9AF31094CA0280E0F92B353AF7



As for good non-market stuff, I recommend taking a look at:




Anthropology and the Economy of Sharing by Thomas Widlok:

https://www.amazon.com/Anthropology-Economy-Sharing-Thomas-Widlok/dp/1138945552

The World of the Gift by Jacques T. Godbout and Alain C. Caille:

https://www.amazon.com/World-Gift-Jacques-T-Godbout/dp/0773517510

http://www.mit.edu/~allanmc/godbout1.pdf

u/[deleted] · 2 pointsr/Anarchism

Thomas Widlok's book Anthropology and the Economy of Sharing is a book solely devoted to the concept of "demand-sharing" which the practical instantiation of ​‘from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs’:

https://www.amazon.com/Anthropology-Economy-Sharing-Thomas-Widlok/dp/1138945552

u/byuneec · 2 pointsr/Anarchism
  • Gifts and Commodities by Christopher A. Gregory, (the new edition with a new foreword by Marilyn Strathern).


    (Chris A. Gregory's book is one of the most important books in economic anthropology. If you want to know anything about economic anthropology, that book has to be on your reading list).


  • David Graeber's Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams critiques/shows the discrepancies inherent in various market-based bullshit philosophies.

  • Anthropology and the Economy of Sharing by Thomas Widlok, (this one rips into/destroys the usual economic logics based on exchange, like those coming from market people).

  • Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber.


  • Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture by E.P. Thompson.


  • The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia by James C. Scott.






  • The World of the Gift by Alain Caillé and Jacques T. Godbout.


  • The Anthropology of Economy: Community, Market, and Culture by Stephen Gudeman.


  • Virtualism: A New Political Economy edited by James G. Carrier and Daniel Miller.











    Edit:


    Commercialism/markets is just as bad a system of social relation as Capitalism.

    Markets on their own are just as socially destructive and individuality-crushing as capitalism.

    Markets may be distinct from capitalism, but they're inextricably linked to States.

    I don't think markets CAN even exist without States.

    The historical shows that they pretty follow each other.

    Abolishing states would take markets and the commodity relation with it, which is why I think it's absurd to speak of them here, unless you're for some form of state to accompany the legalism and all the bullshit that comes with markets.

    That's why most anarchists are very anti-market.
u/pieneunedare · 1 pointr/mutualism

> he's a Tuckerite. Completely false. Carson made it explicitly clear that his views did not change.




This is Completely false. Carson's views changed a lot after he incorporated into it the work of Elinor Ostrom on Commons, Michel Bauwens and P2P people, and some Autonomist Marxists.

He eclectically uses the work of anarchist-communists like Peter Kropotkin, Colin Ward, Paul Goodman and Ivan Illich.

He also uses the work of the (aforementioned) David Graeber.

He even incorporated some of the ideas of non-anarchist libertarian municipalist Murray Bookchin.

"Anarchist without adjectives" is a real historical school of thought, it's not just a word.


I must remind you that I said that he was "decent". I never said that he was right or that I agreed with him.

> You keep throwing this "disgusting" buzzwords around.

You're the one who's throwing buzzword.

You've repeated three times the bullshit myth about "voluntary exchange".

You whole ideology is based on old ahistorical and fictional stories about "markets" which you always speak about in abstract terms and never check to see or they work in reality, their history or their actual effects on people.

Other the simple fact that if you turn something like health into a commodity means that one's access to it is based on how much money one has instead of being based one one's need for it. That's already pretty disgusting and I haven't even mentioned the social effects markets have on people and their relations.

Markets as such, whether "free", "monopolized", blue or whatever are forms of impersonal domination.

(For their history, read the books mentioned above).

There are non-markets modalities we use that already exists ever under capitalism.

Here's a short summary of market and non-market forms:


Here's a little list of characteristics of 1.gift-exchange, 2.market-exchange 3. demand-sharing:

gift-exchange and market exchange:

Gift exchange differs from barter or market exchange because the value of the gifts is judged qualitatively, not quantitatively as in the case of commodities. Gift-exchange is based on ‘the capacity for actors (agents, subjects) to extract or elicit from others items that then become the object of their relationship’.

In the famous book Gifts and Commodities by Christopher A. Gregory (an economic anthropologist) suggests this is a general tendency.

Gift economies tend to personify objects. Commodity/market economies, do the opposite: they tend to treat human beings, or at least, aspects of human beings, like objects. The most obvious example is human labor: in modern economics we talk of “goods and services” as if human activity itself were something analogous to an object, which can be bought or sold in the same way as cheese, or tire-irons.

Gregory lays out a tidy set of oppositions. Gifts are transactions that are meant to create or effect “qualitative” relations between persons; they take place within a preexisting web of personal relations; therefore, even the objects involved have a tendency to take on the qualities of people.

Commodity exchange (market), on the other hand, is meant to establish a “quantitative” equivalence of value between objects; it should ideally be done quite impersonally; therefore, there is a tendency to treat even the human beings involved like things.

Demand-sharing:

It's similar to what David Graeber calls "everyday communism", which he defines as:

"An open-ended agreement between two groups, or even two individuals, to provide for the other; within which, even access to one another’s possessions followed the principle of ‘from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs’."

(‘from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs’, the old communist formula, basically means if you have a need and I have the ability to meet that need, I do it.

Keeping count or reciprocating is very frowned upon in these sort of situations.

This sort of communism is quite common (even under capitalism), in families, between friends and there's a little of it in every non-hostile relationship.)

What characterizes a sharing context comparatively is that it extends the circle of people who can enjoy the good implicated in a resource, for instance accessing a certain resource such as water. In other words, sharing food or drink is an action done for its own sake, putting the good of nourishment in the place of any specific goals that may be derivative of the transfer of food items, for instance the attempt to create obligations for the future. In this understanding, sharing is not a manifestation of an altruistic move, putting the goals of others above one's own goals, but rather one of renouncing derivative goals altogether in the face of intrinsic goods—its intrinsic value if you will. In gift-giving contexts, by contrast, goals of various kinds (whether held jointly by the exchange partners or not, whether altruistic or egoistic) override the intrinsic good of whatever it is that is being provided.

It's important to distinguish exchange, which is usually for “external” and strategic benefits such as having a network of partners, creating obligations for the future, etc. (gift-exchange) or and more impersonal and violent benefits when it comes to market-exchange – from sharing that entails the intrinsic goods of receiving a share (sharing out) and of being accepted as a member of the community of humans with recognized needs (sharing in).

Unlike what the economic fundamentalists would have you believe, sharing is not governed by either ecological need and pressure nor a diffuse notion of generosity and altruism. The ethnographic record shows that sharing takes place not only under conditions of scarcity, and that it typically takes the form of demand sharing rather than apparently generous gift-giving. In fact, a number of cultural conditions have to be in place for sharing to work. Unlike the case of exchange systems, these conditions are not formally institutionalized normative systems but, instead, complex systems of habitual practice. In the ethnographic cases (including those in capitalist societies), sharing works because people have a shared history of mutual involvements as kin, because they master numerous ways of initiating sharing through implicature and other forms of talk, and finally because they recognize the presence of others as the (often silent) demand that it constitutes toward those who have and who are in a position to give.

Many acts of sharing took place, and continue to take place, because they are initiated by the taker and social strategies are in place that decouple giving from receiving. Sharing may therefore take place (as said before) without the provider enacting and expressing charity. Often it takes place in a way that downgrades the act of giving as part of leveling any potential attempts of the giver to take political advantage from his or her economically advantaged position. Demand sharing not only inverts the sequence of action but also the tone of the transaction that is known as “charitable giving.” There is no sharing without a demand. The demand need not be uttered, and it need not be the demand of a specific interlocutor since it is a demand for provisioning that emerges as a consequence of moral role relationships or as incurred by a particular situation of copresence, as I would prefer to call it. We need to recognize that one’s mere bodily presence, underlined by addressing the other person in particular ways, is always a demand for being acknowledged as a partner, a personal being with legitimate needs. An appropriate definition of demand sharing is therefore much broader than the use of explicit demands such as “Give me . . .” leading to the appropriation of what one may think one is entitled to. The explicitness of the demand may differ and it may be entirely implicit very much like a “silent demand”. Humans are sufficiently able to put themselves into the situation of others to be able to know what the intrinsic goods of shared objects are for fellow humans without any demand being uttered.

Sharing is generally characterized by the preparedness to suspend measuring objects against one another (which means that sharing does not necessarily entail that everyone gets the same) in that situation and by the unwillingness to hang on to something in a particular situation.

You can understand this better about this by reading Thomas Widlok's recent book "Anthropology and the Economy of Sharing":

https://www.amazon.com/Anthropology-Economy-Sharing-Thomas-Widlok/dp/1138945552











u/uniliederene · 1 pointr/Marxism

No offense, but you seem to have a knowledge of communism that does not go beyond the level of a youtube video or Wikipedia entry (maybe not even that).

For a better understanding of what Marx means by "value", I think you should check out the relevant chapters of Harry Cleaver's Reading Capital Politically while with re-reading Das Kapital:

https://libcom.org/library/reading-capital-politically-cleaver

You seem to be hinting at Commons and Common-pool resources, so maybe you should take a look at the book:

Omnia Sunt Communia: On the Commons and the Transformation to Postcapitalism by Massimo de Angelis:

http://gen.lib.rus.ec/book/index.php?md5=961FEA9AF31094CA0280E0F92B353AF7


Since you're posting in Marxist sub, I'm going to give you a take Marx's Communism leaving (Peter Kropotkin's and the anarchists' communism aside):


Marx doesn't thinks of communism in terms of ownership form of the means of production but in terms of the (social) relations of production.

This is one of many of the difference he has with the latter Leninist bullshit.

Paresh Chattopadhyay talks about this at length in his work:

https://libcom.org/library/socialism-marx-early-bolshevism-chattopadhyay


Marx's Associated Mode of Production: A Critique of Marxism:

http://gen.lib.rus.ec/book/index.php?md5=D06B95D8E25C74E8B16BEFB5C4B9C165


He talks about about "associated mode of production".


Speaking of wikipedia entries, here's one on that subject:


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_association_%28communism_and_anarchism%29


I think you should also look into the concept of "demand-sharing", Thomas Widlok explain this concept in detail in his book "Anthropology and the Economy of Sharing":

https://www.amazon.com/Anthropology-Economy-Sharing-Thomas-Widlok/dp/1138945552


What anthropologists call "demand-sharing" is a kind of an open-ended agreement between two groups, or even two individuals, to provide for the other; within which, even access to one another’s possessions followed the principle of ‘from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs’.

(‘from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs’, the old communist formula, basically means if you have a need and I have the ability to meet that need, I do it.

Keeping count or reciprocating is very frowned upon in these sort of situations.

This sort of communism is quite common (even under capitalism), in families, between friends and there's a little of it in every non-hostile relationship.)





u/gifaears · 1 pointr/Socialism_101

The credit situations he was referring to were gift exchange situations:

https://www.amazon.com/World-Gift-Jacques-T-Godbout/dp/0773517510

http://www.mit.edu/~allanmc/godbout1.pdf


There's also the non-market and non-gift stuff he calls "communism", or as Widlok calls it simply sharing:

https://www.amazon.com/Anthropology-Economy-Sharing-Thomas-Widlok/dp/1138945552

u/boldbandana · 1 pointr/Anarchism

Sharing economy might help. It pretty much shows how ridiculous the whole "no one else in the world can ever use these resources" is. Keep in mind sharing economy is distinct from gift or exchange.

Here's a book on it https://www.amazon.com/Anthropology-Economy-Sharing-Thomas-Widlok/dp/1138945552

u/vespahinel · 0 pointsr/Socialism_101

First of all, that's not a dictionary nor does it deal with question of authority or hierarchy (the OP is not asking about "economics"), and secondly it's a terrible book with very uninformed takes on anarchism. At least two of the contributors (Albert-Hahnel) are not anarchist at all (they're anti-communist, in the anarchist sense of communism) and have very bad take on economics as they ground their theory on assumptions from neoclassical economics. Their model of postcapitalism is based on a Walrasian model of capitalism.



If you want to talk about anarchist economics I would rather direct you to:




Debt:The First 5000 Years by David Graeber.


Massimo de Angelis' The Beginning of History: Value Struggles and Global Capital

Massimo de Angelis' Omnia Sunt Communia: On the Commons and the Transformation to Postcapitalism.

Crack Capitalism by John Holloway.

Thomas Widlok's Anthropology and the Economy of Sharing.

David Bollier: http://www.bollier.org/commons-resources/commons-bibliography




Edit:

On anarchist theory, there's very good books like:



Anarchism: A Documentary History Of Libertarian Ideas (Volumes 1, 2 & 3) edited by Robert Graham:

https://libcom.org/library/anarchism-documentary-history-libertarian-ideas-volume-1-2


Anarchy Alive!: Anti-authoritarian politics from practice to theory - Uri Gordon:


https://libcom.org/library/anarchy-alive-anti-authoritarian-politics-practice-theory-uri-gordon-0


Anarchy Works - Peter Gelderloos:

https://libcom.org/library/peter-gelderloos-anarchy-works