stuartw2112 wrote:In the
stuartw2112 wrote:
In the narrower sense of money, ie, money as a commodity (coinage) that facilitates trade, it is as much a myth that it arises naturally out of exchange (barter) as is the idea that markets arise naturally as a result of our tendency to “truck and barter”. (There is no evidence that money or markets ever arose in this way, plenty of evidence to contradict the idea)
Whatever Adam Smith and those who followed him might have thought about money (coinage) emerging out of barter which itself emerged out of some supposed human nature to “truck and barter”, Marx for one was well aware that barter originally arose, not within societies, but between them. He says so explicitly in this passage in one of his published works A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859):
Quote:
The exchange of commodities evolves originally not within primitive communities, but on their margins, on their borders, the few points where they come into contact with other communities. This is where barter begins and moves thence into the interior of the community, exerting a disintegrating influence upon it. The particular use-values which, as a result of barter between different communities, become commodities, e.g., slaves, cattle, metals, usually serve also as the first money within these communities.
While the State obviously had a role in coinage, surely Graeber can’t be saying that the emergence of money as a “general equivalent” (i.e. a commodity that can be exchanged for all other commodities) had nothing to do with facilitating trade (the exchange of commodities)?