Flippanarchy

Fun fact: the trade in Obsidian dates back at least 14,000 years. Some suggest there may have been obsidian trade networks dating back 700,000 years, but those may have been one off trades. Or human ancestors travelled to mine obsidian deposits in a concentrated manner. Source That would mean trade predates the human race.

Also, only last years researchers proved that significant amounts of the tin needed to make Bronze during the Bronze Agein what is now Greece, came from tin mines in Cornwall. Not enough tin locally. Source. This is why they'll find really old beads, amber and the like where you'd least expect it. Trade network spanning from Cornwall to Afghanistan, dating back up to 5000 years if not more.

It never occurred to me that people would collude trade with capitalism. I needed this comic, thanks.

For more details about this, check out the section of Graeber’s “Debt: The First 5,000 Years” called “The Myth of Barter”

In a Q&A, Yanis Varoufakis was asked something like “you say you can have markets without capitalism — if capitalism and markets are not equivalent, then what constitutes capitalism?” and his answer was “easy: anonymous transferable shares of ownership”.

I thought that was an impressively concise explanation, cuz every single word is significant.

Barter within primitive communism was literally a very early stage of commodity production, advancement and generalization of which turned into capitalism.

The act of exchange already implies a degree of private ownership (as in, whatever is being bartered isn't part of the social stock that's free for the taking if needed), there might be traces of value present within the exchange (i.e. equivalence of trade subconsciously measured by something as to prevent trading a single berry for a stone chair) and yada yada.

It wasn't capitalism because goods were mainly being produced for different reasons, but the act of barter was definitely a development towards commodity production, and by extension capitalism - after all, it'd be absurd to think that it came out of nowhere.

"can you gove me that shiny metal? thanks, i owe you one"

this has existed forever. people weren't just bartering before the invention of coins and debit cards

What if only some of the means of production are privately owned, for producing some things, but the means of producing other things are publicly owned? What's that system called?