CB:"The Neolithic or new stone age is a period in which barter and commodity exchange without money or credit probably actually existed."
NT:what basis is there for that? when you were a kid, did your parents barter with you? why would a small knit community practice barter with each other? I see no evidence for this assertion. That's the whole point of Graeber's book...
^^^^^ CB: The form of the family was very different than families today. Very different.My senior thesis in anthropology was indirectly on the fundamental difference in the nature of families. If you think of your family and project it back you will be completely off.
Marx's idea is important on this. Commodity exchange goes on between communities, on the periphery; not within. Like pottery. That's why archaeologists find pottery and probably textiles, with patterns, across communities.
"Non-monetary exchange: barter, gift, and debt http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_money
"Contrary to popular conception, there is no evidence of a society or economy that relied primarily on barter.[1]
^^^^ CB: Not true. If there is evidence of production for exchange like pottery sherds with the same pattern across a large region and in different neo-lithic settlements , and no money, that's evidence of barter. There would be specialization , division of labor , among settlements. Settlement A specializes in pottery. Settlement B specializes in textiles. Or there might be division of labor within a settlement.
^^^^^^^
Instead, non-monetary societies operated largely along the principles of gift economics[1] and debt.[2][3] When barter did in fact occur, it was usually between either complete strangers or would-be enemies.[4]
^^^^^ CB; Not necessarily enemies. War comes with civilization. and yes _between_settlements or bands.
^^^^
"With barter, an individual
^^^^^^ CB: This is off right here. These are completely communist societies with social labor and property, not individual's owning things. "Individual" is an anachronism applied to the neo-lithic.
^^^^^^
possessing a material object of value, such as a measure of grain, could directly exchange that object for another object perceived to have equivalent value, such as a small animal, a clay pot or a tool.
^^^^^ CB: Not just perceived, but based on knowing how much _labor time_ goes into making each. See Engels and Marx's "law of value". The law of value is the principle that commodities are exchanged based on the proportional labor time in each.
^^^^^
The capacity to carry out transactions is severely limited since it depends on a coincidence of wants.
^^^^^ CB: Not if there is a planned division of labor between or within settlements.
^^^^^^^^
The seller of food grain has to find a buyer who wants to buy grain and who also could offer in return something the seller wants to buy.
^^^^ CB; I don't know that there's a lot of grain in this period. This is gardening ,not agriculture in the Neo-lithic.
^^^^^^^
There is no common medium of exchange into which both seller and buyer could convert their tradable commodities. There is no standard which could be applied to measure the relative value of various goods and services.
^^^^^ CB: Ah ,yes there is: labor time. See _Capital_ . See Engels essay on the law of value in Vol. III
Capital Volume III
Supplement by Frederick Engels Introduction
Law of Value and Rate of Profit...
..Engels quoting..Marx: "The exchange of commodities at their values, or approximately at their values, thus requires a much lower stage than their exchange at their prices of production, which requires a definite level of capitalist development.... Apart from the domination of prices and price movement by the law of value, it is quite appropriate to regard the values of commodities as not only theoretically but also historically antecedent (prius) to the prices of production. This applies to conditions in which the laborer owns his own means of production, and this is the condition of the land-owning working farmer and the craftsman, in the ancient as well as in the modern world. This agrees also with the view we expressed previously, that the evolution of products into commodities arises through exchange between different communities, not between the members of the same community. It holds not only for this primitive condition, but also for subsequent conditions, based on slavery and serfdom, and for the guild organization of handicrafts, so long as the means of production involved in each branch of production can be transferred from one sphere to another only with difficulty and therefore the various spheres of production are related to one another, within certain limits, as foreign countries or communist communities."
Engels :Had Marx an opportunity to go over the third volume once more, he would doubtless have extended this passage considerably. As it stands, it gives only a sketchy outline of what is to be said on the point in question. Let us, therefore, examine it somewhat closer.
We all know that at the beginning of society, products are consumed by the producers themselves, and that these producers are spontaneously organized in more or less communistic communities; that the exchange of the surplus of these products with strangers, which ushers in the conversion of products into commodities, is of a later date; that it takes places at first only between individual communities of different tribes, but later also prevails within the community, and contributes considerably to the latter's dissolution into bigger or smaller family groups. But even after this dissolution, the exchanging family heads remain working peasants, who produce almost all they require with the aid of their families on their own farmsteads, and get only a slight portion of the required necessities from the outside in exchange for surplus products of their own. The family is engaged not only in agriculture and livestock-raising; it also works their products up into finished articles of consumption; now and then it even does its own milling with the hand-mill; it bakes bread, spins, dyes, weaves flax and wool, tans leather, builds and repairs wooden buildings, makes tools and utensils, and not infrequently does joinery and blacksmithing; so that the family, or family group, is in the main self-sufficient.
The little that such a family had to obtain by barter or buy from outside, even up to the beginning of the 19th century in Germany (evidently Engels has evidence of barter in 19th Century Germany; he and Marx don't make statements like this without empirical evidence to support -CB) consisted principally of the objects of handicraft production — that is, such things the nature of whose manufacture was by no means unknown to the peasant, and which he did not produce himself only because he lacked the raw material or because the purchased article was much better or very much cheaper. Hence, the peasant of the Middle Ages knew fairly accurately the labor-time required for the manufacture of the articles obtained by him in barter. The smith and the cartwright of the village worked under his eyes; likewise, the tailor and shoemaker — who in my youth still paid their visits to our Rhine peasants, one after another, turning home-made materials into shoes and clothing. The peasants, as well as the people from whom they bought, were themselves workers; the exchanged articles were each one's own products. What had they expended in making these products? Labor and labor alone: to replace tools, to produce raw material, and to process it, they spent nothing but their own labor-power; how then could they exchange these products of theirs for those of other laboring producers otherwise than in the ratio of labor expended on them? Not only was the labor-time spent on these products the only suitable measure for the quantitative determination of the values to be exchanged: no other way was at all possible. Or is it believed that the peasant and the artisan were so stupid as to give up the product of 10 hours' labor of one person for that of a single hours' labor of another? No other exchange is possible in the whole period of peasant natural economy than that in which the exchanged quantities of commodities tend to be measured more and more according to the amounts of labor embodied in them. From the moment money penetrates into this mode of economy, the tendency towards adaptation to the law of value (in the Marxian formulation, nota bene!) grows more pronounced on the one hand, while on the other it is already interrupted by the interference of usurers' capital and fleecing by taxation; the periods for which prices, on average, approach to within a negligible margin of values, begin to grow longer.
The same holds good for exchange between peasant products and those of the urban artisans. At the beginning, this barter takes places directly, without the medium of the merchant, on the cities' market days, when the peasant sells and makes his purchases. Here, too, not only does the peasant know the artisan's working conditions, but the latter knows those of the peasant as well. For the artisan is himself still a bit of a peasant — he not only has a vegetable and fruit garden, but very often also has a small piece of land, one or two cows, pigs, poultry, etc. People in the Middle Ages were thus able to check up with considerable accuracy on each other's production costs for raw material, auxiliary material, and labor-time — at least in respect of articles of daily general use.
But how, in this barter on the basis of the quantity of labor, was the latter to be calculated, even if only indirectly and relatively, for products requiring a longer labor, interrupted at regular intervals, and uncertain in yield — grain or cattle, for example? And among people, to boot, who could not calculate? Obviously, only by means of a lengthy process of zigzag approximation, often feeling the way here and there in the dark, and, as is usual, learning only through mistakes. But each one's necessity for covering his own outlay on the whole always helped to return to the right direction; and the small number of kinds of articles in circulation, as well as the often century-long stable nature of their production, facilitated the attaining of this goal. And that it by no means took so long for the relative amount of value of these products to be fixed fairly closely is already proved by the fact that cattle, the commodity for which this appears to be most difficult because of the long time of production of the individual head, became the first rather generally accepted money commodity. To accomplish this, the value of cattle, its exchange ratio to a large number of other commodities, must already have attained a relatively unusual stabilization, acknowledged without contradiction in the territories of many tribes. And the people of that time were certainly clever enough — both the cattlebreeders and their customers — not to give away the labor-time expended by them without an equivalent in barter. On the contrary, the closer people are to the primitive state of commodity production — the Russians and Orientals, for example — the more time do they still waste today, in order to squeeze out, through long tenacious bargaining, the full compensation for their labor-time expended on a product.
Starting with this determination of value by labor-time, the whole of commodity production developed, and with it, the multifarious relations in which the various aspects of the law of value assert themselves, as described in the first part of Vol. I of Capital; that is, in particular, the conditions under which labor alone is value-creating. These are conditions which assert themselves without entering the consciousness of the participants and can themselves be abstracted from daily practice only through laborious, theoretical investigation; which act, therefore, like natural laws, as Marx proved to follow necessarily from the nature of commodity production. The most important and most incisive advance was the transition to metallic money, the consequence of which, however, was that the determination of value by labor-time was no longer visible upon the surface of commodity exchange. From the practical point of view, money became the decisive measure of value, all the more as the commodities entering trade became more varied, the more they came from distant countries, and the less, therefore, the labor-time necessary for their production could be checked. Money itself usually came first from foreign parts; even when precious metals were obtained within the country, the peasant and artisan were partly unable to estimate approximately the labor employed therein, and partly their own consciousness of the value-measuring property of labor had been fairly well dimmed by the habit of reckoning with money; in the popular mind, money began to represent absolute value.
In a word: the Marxian law of value holds generally, as far as economic laws are valid at all, for the whole period of simple commodity production — that is, up to the time when the latter suffers a modification through the appearance of the capitalist form of production. Up to that time, prices gravitate towards the values fixed according to the Marxian law and oscillate around those values, so that the more fully simple commodity production develops, the more the average prices over long periods uninterrupted by external violent disturbances coincide with values within a negligible margin. Thus, the Marxian law of value has general economic validity for a period lasting from the beginning of exchange, which transforms products into commodities, down to the 15th century of the present era. But the exchange of commodities dates from a time before all written history — which in Egypt goes back to at least 2500 B.C., and perhaps 5000 B.C., and in Babylon to 4000 B.C., perhaps to 6000 B.C.; thus, the law of value has prevailed during a period of from five to seven thousand years. And now, let us admire the thoroughness of Mr. Loria, who calls the value generally and directly valid during this period a value at which commodities are never sold nor can ever be sold, and with which no economist having a spark of common sense would ever occupy himself!
Full at: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/supp.htm