The myth of bartering

You're just playing word games at this point.

The concept of a bartering economy being something where people trade goods for goods instead of goods for money is the basis for economic concepts such as "the double coincidence of wants."

Those concepts are then used as an explanation for why monetary systems and markets that used currency as the medium of exchange rather than goods were created. The argument goes that problems such as "the double coincidence of wants" made it difficult to bring your goods to market and trade for the things you wanted, because you had no way of knowing whether the person who had the shoes you wanted to trade for would want the apples you brought to market in exchange. And even if both parties wanted what the other had, you weren't necessarily guaranteed a fair exchange, because you might really need those shoes because your feet are raw and bleeding because of how worn out your old pair is, but the person with the shoes maybe only tolerates apples, and has plenty of other offers food they like more.

This explanation continues by arguing that bartering by trading goods directly was so inefficient and ran into problems like "the double coincidence of wants," that monetary systems and markets organized around using a standardized currency as the medium for exchange were created in response to this problem because because the use of a currency as specialized commodity with a universal exchange value (i.e. a commodity that you could bring to market and exchange for anything that was accepted by everyone) solved problems like the double coincidence of wants.

And this sounds like a rational argument. If you did have this problem that bartering economies are said to fall prone to, then creating a currency as a medium of exchange sounds like it would be a rational solution to that problem.

The reason why this sounds like a convincing argument is because any society trying to organize their economy as a battering economy defined in this way would logically suffer from all of the pitfalls that are described. The Econ 101 argument says that bartering economies suck for reasons x y and z, and therefore market economies developed as a natural response in order to solve these problems.

In reality, the Econ 101 argument is correct to say that bartering economies would suck for x y and z reasons, which is why no human society ever organized their economic activity as a bartering economy.

The reason why this distinction is important is because the way a bartering economy is defined is a crucial part of the Econ 101 argument, and we have no evidence that bartering economies defined in that way ever existed, or that bartering ever represented any meaningful portion of the economic activity of any historical society. What we do have evidence and records of is what we refer to as gift economies, not bartering economies.

Whether or not you personally believe that gift economies share enough similarities to what your idea of a bartering economy is that you feel comfortable with calling a gift economy a type of bartering economy is irrelevant to that discussion. Because the point is to show that when you substitute a gift economy in the place of how the econ 101 argument defines a bartering economy, the Econ 101 argument falls apart because the problems that are claimed as being solved by market economies didn't actually exist. You can play word games and decide that you want to call gift economies a type of bartering economy, but that is merely a semantic point that doesn't have any bearing on the overall critique, which is that the way we are taught how our current economic structure developed is wrong.

And this is an important critique to make, because there is an ideological agenda hidden in what I'm referring to as the "Econ 101 argument." The econ 101 serves to create the impression that the way our society is currently organized is merely the result of a natural historical progression from less developed to more developed, in a process that is logical and rational, and the myth of bartering economies as this earlier stage of economic and societal development that was plagued with all of these problems which needed the creation of a market economy to solve is a lie that's told to support and justify that world view. The impression that our current state of affairs is the result of a natural and rational process is essential for those who disproportionately benefit from the current status quo to maintain the power and privilege that they currently enjoy. It's a myth that exists to justify that status quo, because the econ 101 argument is used to transform any opposition to the current state of affairs into an opposition to nature and logic itself by naïve malcontents who simply don't know any better.

In reality, the structure and economic organization of our society is not simply the neutral process of progressing from less developed to more developed. The organization of our society is the result of a long history of competing sets of class interests struggling against one another with varying degrees of organizational proficiency, success, and institutional stability used to advance their class interests in opposition to any competing class interests that would hinder them.

The current result of that ongoing class struggle is a form of economic organization that we refer to as capitalism, which has two primary groupings of class interests. There is a working class, who does all of the labor that creates the wealth of a society, and a capitalist class, who uses their ownership of capital as a mechanism of authority over the workplaces where the labor of society takes place in a way that allows the capitalist to organize the labor of society that benefits the capitalist, regardless of what might be in the best interests of the workers who actually do the labor that is creating that wealth.

It is possible for the interests of the workers and the interests of the capitalist class to overlap on occasion, but this relationship is primarily an antagonistic one because in order to maximize their profits the capitalist is trying to keep as much of the value created from the labor of those they employ. What that means is in order to pursue their interests the capitalist must use whatever leverage they can to depress wages and/or demand more intense/more efficient labor from the people they employ, and those demands are backed by the threat of poverty/destitution if that employee is unable to maintain employment with one of the class of people who privately own the economy.

This economic system is not natural or rational, rather it is maintained with the backing of incredible violence on a global scale primarily by the national military of one of the most powerful and deadly military empires to ever exist in human history up till this point, namely the United States military. This form of economic organization is inherently unstable, because even though under capitalism the economic activity of society is organized by and for those who own capital, the capitalist class requires and depends on the labor of the working class to generate that wealth. That reality gives the working class tremendous amounts of leverage to advance their own class interests and to demand a greater share of the fruits of their own labor, but only on the condition that those demands are made in an organized way that fully takes advantage of the leverage we hold as a class in order to advance the common interests we hold as a class.

This kind of mass organization is difficult, but becomes easier and easier as our tools for communication become more and more advanced. And even despite this difficulty, we see throughout the contemporary history of capitalism examples of spontaneous organization of workers through things like the trade union movement were workers joined together in solidarity with one another to demand fair wages and fair treatment for their work. And at every turn this self-organization of the working class into structures like unions was fiercely opposed by the capitalist class, who would use every method of sabotage and union-busting at their disposal in order to keep the working class unorganized and at each others throats, forced to compete with one another for the wages they need to survive by selling themselves piecemeal on the labor market to employers who used that competition as leverage by using the threat of replacing you with someone who is more desperate and willing to work for scraps in order to keep your wages low. In the most extreme examples, the historical record shows that capitalists were willing hire what were essentially private mercenaries like the Pinkertons to attack striking workers and to even murder union organizers and elected union leadership in their attempts to bust up unions. And in the countries that make up the formerly/recently colonized world where the exploitation of capitalism is still much more raw with fewer safeguards put in place the use of what is effectively mercenary armies to murder workers that try to organize their workplaces is still a reality today.

The point of all this rambling/bird's eye view of history is to show that our current state of affairs is not the result of a natural, neutral, and rational process like the Econ 101 story would have you believe. Our current state of affairs is the result of intense and often incredibly violent class struggle that has been fought in a very strategic way to create institutions and legal structures that organize our society around satisfying the interests of those who own capital, regardless of the interests of the general public. That is the context for why debunking the myth of bartering economies is important. Not because it matters whether or not you call gift economies a type of bartering economy, but because the bartering economy myth is used to promote a logical sounding but ultimately misleading impression about how economic organization developed through history that conveniently side-steps schools of thought with far more explanatory power that are far more rooted in reality which challenge the status quo rather than reinforcing it, such as class analysis and dialectical materialism.