Most gift economies require a certain amount of trust and bonds with other people, that just isn’t possible with large amounts of people. How could decommodified exchange be implemented on a larger scale?
How large a scale is desired? Bigger than Freecycle, or the Buy Nothing folk?
I guess that would really depend on your model of society. Assuming a model where the municipality is the largest relevant body of organisation, I see several parallel system arising.
Inside those municipalities the model will probably resemble the traditional idea of gift economies the closest, but with negotiated agreements between larger craft organisations for distribution of raw materials.
Inter-municipality exchange that does not flow naturally via bartering or gifting between individuals, would probably also be done by negotiated agreement of some elected (for this purpose only) representatives.
The most commodified exchange would probably still happen between inhabitants of municipalities and surrounding farming and mining communities. I guess there would be some sort of trusted intermediatory traders that would facilitate the exchange of raw materials for specific processed goods.
so you mean that raw materials would be traded in bulk, but it would otherwise be communal?
Not sure how that would work out, but I imagine that people living in independent rural farming or mining communities (and thus are pretty self sufficient) will be more inclined to trade “between strangers” when it comes to providing their goods to municipalities.
In previous centuries they pretty much had to be forced with military and taxes to provide those goods, so I think their relationship with urban populations will stay somewhat uneasy even in an anarchic society.
Self sufficient rural farming or mining communities are not really a thing any more. They are dependent on manufactures from outside like tools, fuel and other equipment. Rural folk in my country like to pretend self-sufficiency but they drive trucks made elsewhere on roads built by non-local labor and paid for by municipal or state funds to buy things made in other countries at stores in other towns. When people are honest about the inputs to processes on which they depend, they are more open to cooperation.
This is an apt description of the status quo, in which these communities (voluntarily or not, aka forced via taxes) produce about hundred times of what they need themselves. Of course such highly industrialized farming needs a lot of external inputs.
That aside, I am not saying that they won’t have needs for urban goods and a desire for certain luxuries, but the relationship is inherently loopsided because contrary to the urban inhabitants they do not depend on it for every day survival, and that has an strong effect on trading behavior.
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I don’t know, but here’s a good place to start: https://thefearlessheart.org/the-impossible-will-take-a-little-while-experiments-in-gift-economy-part-i/
Author has also written some ideas and stories about a utopian gift economy future. Here’s an example: https://thefearlessheart.org/store/reweaving-our-human-fabric/collective-triage/
