Online Bartering Could Be The End of Capitalism

[Outinleftfield]

People have begun bartering online. A number of websites have sprung up that facilitate these transactions for free.

Bartering online, a moneyless, nonhierarchical exchange of goods and services is emerging here. In time maybe we will see more and more organized systems of online barter emerging.

Could this be the seed of a new socialist society?

It's small now but imagine it getting to the point where people begin to be able to live off of barter relationships, even with "work" integrated somehow. Maybe some cooperative, noncommercial shops where the owners produce for themselves, take their products home, and then use them in the barter economy.

If this becomes big enough the capitalist system and its state becomes redundant, losing power as people stop participating in it, and the new set of social relations emerges to forge a new socioeconomic system.

[robbo203]

People have begun bartering online. A number of websites have sprung up that facilitate these transactions for free.

Bartering online, a moneyless, nonhierarchical exchange of goods and services is emerging here. In time maybe we will see more and more organized systems of online barter emerging.

Could this be the seed of a new socialist society?

It's small now but imagine it getting to the point where people begin to be able to live off of barter relationships, even with "work" integrated somehow. Maybe some cooperative, noncommercial shops where the owners produce for themselves, take their products home, and then use them in the barter economy.

If this becomes big enough the capitalist system and its state becomes redundant, losing power as people stop participating in it, and the new set of social relations emerges to forge a new socioeconomic system.


Interesting observation. I think there are various other developments that point in the same general direction - such as the LETS movement - which bypass the capitalist monetary system

My concern though is that barter itself is an unstable set up. Afterall a system of market prices using money as a universal equivelent developed out of barter precisely because of the inadequacies of the latter as a form of exchange. We need therefore to think beyond barter , and indeed economic exchange as such (which implies private property), to the development of a true gift economy based on generalised reciprocity.

This is what a real socialist economy is all about - from each according to ability to each according to need. Neither barter nor money would have a place in such an economy

[Amphictyonis]

Private property cannot be abolished via bartering. If you wanted to create some pre industrial agrarian society perhaps but....

[The Idler]

Barter and gifts have always existed, but since the dawn of capitalism have always remaining peripheral to the dominance of capital.

[hobo8675309]

That would be so rad!

[Acostak3]

I don't think bartering will single-handedly destroy capitalism, but it may contribute. I can't see capitalism being destroyed without some violence seeing as the bourgeois state is a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence.

It's possible that a barter economy won't necessitate money this time around due to the internet's role as a facilitator

[The Garbage Disposal Unit]

Only gifts can end the reign of capital. One gift in particular:

THE GIFT OF TOTAL DESTROY.

[SocialismOrBarbarism]

Not that related but....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MakerBot (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reprap)

I'm just waiting until we can download and print pirated physical products. :)

[Devrim]

It's possible that a barter economy won't necessitate money this time around due to the internet's role as a facilitator

I would imagine that internet battering would make a money system evolve much quicker than real physical battering would. That's why things like Paypal exist already.

Devrim

[Luís Henrique]

Bartering does not abolish value, it implies value.

So no.

But we know what will be the end of capitalism. It is called class struggle. And no, there are no shorcuts.

Luís Henrique

[Die Neue Zeit]

^^^ But there are shortcuts, damn it! Emphasize economic struggles, NIMBY struggles, identity struggles, etc. and related direct action, plus grow equally spontaneous political struggles out of them! We don't need official mass party-movements, alternative culture, or sociopolitical syndicates, only workers councils! All Power To Workers Councils!

[Sarcasm]

[S.Artesian]

Tell me: what does the agri-business corporations use to barter with John Deere for that combine? You can barter all you want online-- has nothing to do with production. Production will still be for the accumulation of value, for the expanded reproduction of capital through aggrandizement of surplus value, through wage-labor.

No matter how many are busy bartering, it can only function like a remora, cleaning the bits of torn flesh from the shark's teeth.

[28350]

what is this some gray-market anarchocrapitalism
grumblegrumblegrumble