There are different income brackets in here, so going out to purchase items isn’t the most feasible.
If you’re trying to make a gift economy you no longer have a gift economy. Keeping tabs on exchanges is how you end up with debt and credit etc. Gift economies are a completely natural phenomenon and will appear without effort if you change the mindsets of the participants.
In order for it to work you simply need to remove expectations of repayment and root out individualistic hoarding. A high level of trust is integral. Formal contracts and currency are, by contrast, trustless systems. If you have a decent level of trust with some prosocial people a gift economy will appear out of the aether.
Maybe you have some books you want your friend to have so that you can talk about them together. Maybe share a meal to spend time with them. Maybe you’re out of gas sometime and need their help getting a couple gallons. That’s how things used to work before chain stores took over everything.
That looks like it would only work if:
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everyone was prosocial enough. Also, when conflict happens, people frequently try to ‘retract’ gifts. (Ex bad couples. Day 1 was doing laundry to be helpful, day 2 they have a fight and now it’s ‘i did laundry, so you do dishes’)
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Everyone was within 1 friend group, ex it wouldn’t be extendable to my friend’s friend group that i’m not apart of
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The supply of goods/services this would provide would be extremely limited. It would be based on if anyone had extra material, meaning most of the time people would still have to go to a capitalist store.
I mean, that’s kind of the point? You’re trying to take an anthropological concept about unselfish resource sharing in small tribal villages where everyone grew up together, and apply it to disparate people habituated to a capitalist economy where many of the norms that uphold a gift economy are very dead. In order to make it work you have to recreate the conditions that give rise to gift economies.
Now, if you want to use barter you can increase the reach of the system to people you don’t know directly. And it would be much less dependent on mutual trust.
How would barter work increase the reach?
Barter only requires trust at the point of contact that the trade will be fair, so it’s technically available to anyone, but has geographic limitations since physical items are used.
Intuitive i sorta understand that barter is better than capitalism. But I don’t really know why. Is it because there are no taxes on it?
It’s not really better or worse than using currency, it just exists.
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You don’t have to buy new stuff, you can lend out books, clothes, tools… whatever you don’t need anymore, but too good to throw away
make things from scratch
Perhaps the percentage of monthly income method could be used to determine a relative monetary impact?
@dessalines@lemmy.ml when i click xie username here, it 504s
Hrm, I’ll have to investigate.
I think this idea has potential. Can you elaborate? I’m trying to load your profile to see what other ideas you have, but it’s 504ing
Do you have a collective space to organize? If so, a freeshop in a corner is a good way to get started. Spare clothes, a fridge full of skipped food, maybe leftover bread from the local bakery?
No particularly. Each person could maintain a small inventory at home and have pictures of their stock?
