I recently discovered this movement thru this article, there’s also a page on Wikipedia.
It seems very interesting to me since it’s basically decentralized proactive anti-capialism mutual-aid. I really think in-real-world decentralized projects like this may be the single most efficient “weapon” we have today.
Do you have any experience with this? I feel like RRFMs are more suitable in big cities and not in little ones, but happy to be wrong about it.
The main problem these sort of things are confronted with is people who take free stuff and resell it. It limits them to low value items
If I’m out there giving shit away, it’s because I don’t need it. I follow the tenant “Give what you can, never what you need.”
If you come to this event, take my item and go resell it then I just assume you needed that money more than I did. I could have resold it to but didn’t need to
That’s a totally fair mindset to have in these events.
However if your intent is to kickstart a gift economy, this phenomenon limits the possibilities of it taking off.
Fair mindset to have in these events
Kicking a dead horse a little bit but this sentiment is slightly wrong. This is a good mindset to have in your day to day life, not just at these events. Always give what you can, because when you need it, it will come back to you
How? How does what you do with the object you take from me affect me or my ability to give gifts at all?
If you give me apples, it is easier for me to give apple pies.
If you give them to someone who will sell them to me, it will be harder for me to give the pies for free.
If you are a farmer that gives away a lot of raw vegetables to people who cook them and give the meals away, including to you, it frees you time or money to give more. Someone who takes your vegetable to sell them exits them from the gift economy you try to create.
I am not saying it is useless, and it is actually inevitable that these things happen, but I am saying that this is a factor that prevents these markets to grow into something that allows people to free themselves from capitalism.
The question is whether it is more healthy in the long run to let resellers get away with it or to punish everyone by trying to implement a system that catches resellers.
That’s an empirical question, that we don’t have a lot of data for directly. We do have a lot of indirect data. On the trying to catch people side: that the current democratic-legalistic justice system is extremely counterproductive in how severely it punishes criminals, that attempts to stop fraud with government social programs typically cost more than the fraud they fights, and that fighting digital piracy negatively affects sales because pirates spread popularity through word of mouth. Meanwhile on the free association side, public libraries aren’t robbed empty; community kitchens have plenty of volunteers to get food, pay rent, and clean up; big boxes of Halloween candy can be left on someone’s porch and most of the time it doesn’t get robbed by one person; lots of countries have self-sustaining queueing cultures; etc.
I don’t really know cases of gift economies being tried and failing, but it’s possible that it often isn’t reported if it happens.
In terms of social predictive reasoning, you could make the argument that openly telling resellers “it’s fine if you resell it if you need the money but please donate or contribute if you can, and please tell people about us” is way more effective than turning it into a game of wits where resellers are too busy evading the security system that everyone else suffers under to question whether they’re making a morally just decision. For example, it seems harder for an undocumented person to prove themselves trustworthy without putting themselves in harm’s way than for a veteran reseller-scammer to fool someone.
In terms of moral red lines, AFAIK many people in this Instance are happy to have seen nothing if someone shoplifts or pirates something. Would it be worse if a reseller takes things from someone who has already decided to give it away for free?
So all in all, I would be very curious about the experiment of just letting resellers take stuff if they’re willing to withstand people being sad at them about it.
I don’t think it’s an all or nothing question, it’s a matter of knowing where you are putting the cursor. And I think we agree that thinking in terms of punishment is counterproductive. I prefer to think in terms of incentives.
According to Graebber, we do have a lot of empirical data because primitive populations were basically using either gift economy or debt/reputation economies. Contrary to popular belief, barter was not a common way of doing transactions. Thing is, that was held by some sort of xenophobia where you can’t really accept people from outside to partake in it unless they accept a ton of often pretty regressive social rules. So that’s not exactly a model, but this is a lot of data we can examine.
I don’t really know cases of gift economies being tried and failing, but it’s possible that it often isn’t reported if it happens.
Anytime a non-profit stops for lack of volunteers, that’s a gift economy that’s failing. Whether it is goods or service that you are giving, that’s part of a gift economy.
And many, many, many experiments since the 60s and the 70s have been done in that respect. And none managed to grow organically.
In terms of social predictive reasoning, you could make the argument that openly telling resellers “it’s fine if you resell it if you need the money but please donate or contribute if you can, and please tell people about us” is way more effective than turning it into a game of wits
One of the eye-opening themes that recently added a layer of depth to my views on anarchism was neurodiversity. I realized that the reasons that made me prefer anarchism and gift economies and reputation economies were mostly psychological and that not having them did not make people idiots or less moral than I am. Therefore, if I want to see a society where I am comfortable and where I fit, I have to make it work within a system where other psychological profiles are also comfortable.
A lot of people will naturally abide by rules that are given, even if they have no teeth. Some people like us will infer rules from a really free market about the fact that one should not resell things that are given. But I have met enough people to know that there is also a very common profile that considers that if you can get away with free stuff, you are smart. And the people who made these rules are dumb. And it’s totally fine to “win” by taking away what you can.
These people exist. And it’s not a rare profile. They are not going to be stopped by a sign that just says “please”. And I don’t want a system where we have policemen chasing them and beating them up if they don’t obey the rules. It’s unavoidable, we have to play their game of wits to some extent.
It is a constraint, but it is the same type of constraints that you have when you have to design something for colorblind people or to make it accessible to wheelchairs.
Anytime a non-profit stops for lack of volunteers, that’s a gift economy that’s failing. Whether it is goods or service that you are giving, that’s part of a gift economy.
Most non-profits aren’t gift economies. They’re places where “volunteers” come together to give to “recipients” not in the non-profit. They have no infrastructure for the volunteers to be gifted things, and usually having such an infrastructure is a violation of the law. In a gift economy, volunteers and recipients are all the same class of people, exchanging gifts between all of them.
When you include this criterion, are there still experiments in the 60s and 70s that qualify?
But I have met enough people to know that there is also a very common profile that considers that if you can get away with free stuff, you are smart. And the people who made these rules are dumb. And it’s totally fine to “win” by taking away what you can.
These people exist. And it’s not a rare profile. They are not going to be stopped by a sign that just says “please”. And I don’t want a system where we have policemen chasing them and beating them up if they don’t obey the rules. It’s unavoidable, we have to play their game of wits to some extent.
You’re making one big leap of logic here. Yes, selfish behavior is unavoidable. But you can’t just assume that that makes fighting selfish behavior worth it. Paranoid schizophenia is unavoidable but that doesn’t make lobotomies worth it. If you’re introducing the neurodiversity lens, then consider that we typically don’t treat people who need accommodations with hostility and threat of violence.
Selfish people will take more stuff than they deserve, but if you post a guard to stop them, you’re losing the guard being able to do something more beautiful with their life, you’re losing the joy and comfort of everyone who gets inspected or questioned, you’re creating a culture of suspicion, you’re creating an opportunity for the guard’s prejudices and biases and possible harmful tendencies to harm innocent people, and you have to take into account that the selfish person will either outwit the guard or find a place that is unguarded. Possibly because it’s more vulnerable.
Before you know it, you have more guards than selfish people, all sitting around doing nothing useful with their lives and forming a toxic culture in their idleness, you have hundreds of normal people per selfish person going through difficult processes to demonstrate that they aren’t selfish, dozens of false positives who get treated as selfish and get pigeonholed into a selfish lifestyle, while a handful of people who can’t manage to attract a guard still get fucked over by the selfish people and those selfish people still end up with a similar amount of stuff.
It’s like anti-homeless infrastructure. It doesn’t seem like a big step to remove the bench next to your shop, but next thing you know nobody can sit anywhere, every street looks hostile and barren, and homeless people still find some underpass to sleep under, except now they’re more likely to get sick and require expensive medical care so they might turn to organized crime to get the money they need for the operation they wouldn’t have needed if there had still been benches.
I would sooner believe that the existence of selfish people means gift economies can’t work (because they lose too much to non-participants) than that their existence means gift economies are viable if and only if there’s a sufficiently oppressive gatekeeping system to prevent selfish people from taking more than their fair share.
Okay, I do see your point now. It is slow-down but not a showstopper, I’ll agree.
Don’t ever let a slow-down stop you, though.
This; sell require also time and effort.
One of the forums I’m on has a sales section. Being semi private there’s simply no time wasters. I’ve sold a heap of stuff under value there because there’s no screwing around.
Is this what you expect would happen, or what you actually observed in such events?
I have 3 anecdotal evidence from France:
- Not at this exact same type of event but there has been a trend for a few years in France to put old fridges in the street and transform them into drop-off bookshelves where people can drop and take books. They are not powered, but being watertight allows book to survive outside. Very quickly the books in a good state are removed and resold on second-hand online shops.
- There is a gift economy group in the city I go to to work. When you join you have to promise to not resell the things you get, because they had too much of it in the past.
- In flea markets, you will see some regulars at the opening times. They come and get all the good deals quickly in order to resell them online.
Don’t mark me wrong: I am a huge proponent of the gift economy, but I think that within a capitalist society, in order to exist it has to be paired with some sort of reputations economics.
It would have to be a sort of reputation-economics with teeth, not just mere-opinion…
Parasitism, whether scalpers of event-tickets, or gunmen who appear to sell the water from the oasis, etc, who do it for their faction’s profit, instead of “this is a communal-resource: & we’re limiting the single-user exploitation, & we’re making-certain that the commons isn’t trashed by any faction” type thing…
is a rude fact of life, among humankind.
Making it systemically-illegal, with teeth is possible, but … that is far far far from the ideology of the gift-economy, isn’t it…
( like the difference between being a Healer vs being a doctor: 1 is centered in others’ healing, the other is centered in their own authority * status
( dad was a medical-researcher, doctor, & later prof of medicine, ttbomk: any doctor who wants to claim that those aren’t the motivations can go read the book by researchers Logan, King, & Fischer-Wright, on the 5 culture-levels “Tribal Leadership”, & notice that doctors are centered in the zero-sum-game of narcissism. Still reject my claim of evidence? Go walk into any normal hospital, & see what percentage of the lower-staff people have enough human-validity left in them, to meet your gaze, if you walk-in wearing a suit. It’ll be close to none, because their human-validity is already corroded by the doctors. THE most-spectacular narcissism-bodylanguage I’ve ever seen, consistently is on doctors. The difference between a Healer & a doctor is significant. They are not the same kind of thing, at all. ) )
I actually suspect that both paradigms are necessary, for any actual-world-economy…
Who would do the nastiest-jobs except for pay?
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I don’t know if I would call it teeth, but I think a sufficient incentive can simply be access. You want to participate in a gift economy? Yes? then welcome. You are partaking action that would destroy it? Then no, you’re stuck to the less efficient capitalist system then, and we are only going to sell things to you that we have would have given to other people.
Thing is it requires some sort of tracking of the people or some sort of in-group.
Who would do the nastiest-jobs except for pay?
On that specific subject, I think that the question is biased. I think that some jobs developed to be particularly nasty because we have no shortage of people who are desperate to accept minimum wage. Otherwise, the nastiest job would be very high pay. I mean, it is more fun to be a programmer than a sewer cleaner. In theory, that would mean that the sewer cleaner’s job would have higher pay.
If on the other hand we switch the question in terms of how can we attract volunteers, things change radically. I have been to a rice harvest event that were basically the social event of the village and that ended up with a party where everyone is exhausted but happy looking at the rice dry.
Many people take pride in their work and it doesn’t take a lot to make it attractive to volunteers. Strangely, the highest paying jobs are often the most desirable and the most enjoyable to do.
who would do the nastiest jobs if not for pay?
There are good people who will see a need and fill it, even if it’s unpleasant. I’m thinking of all the wonderful people that showed up to provide care for aids patients during the 80’s when it was still unknown how it spread and intensely stigmatized. That was a hard job but amazing people stepped up because it was important. If someone feels like their work is valued and useful you can get help doing almost anything without money coming into it. We just need to make sure the helpers have their own needs met while they’re doing what is needful.
But i agree that most doctors are bastards lol
Elle est belle notre France… Joke aside, this might be cultural. I’ve not seen these behaviours being so widespread in other countries I lived in (the UK, Finland, Germany, Japan). Maybe thinking about putting some sort of collective monitoring in place to limit the impact of these?
I don’t have access to a marketplace like this but I do a lot with our local free groups. Between my household and helping some neighbors cleaning out their homes, and relocating a fair bit of corporate ewaste, we’ve given away thousands of items. We’ve also obtained quite a bit of stuff we would have otherwise had to buy.
We’ve definitely run into resellers a few times, especially with electronics and big-ticket items. With an online group I can vet them if I’m really worried about the fate of the item - sometimes for something really nice that a lot of people want, I’ll check someone’s profile and if it’s nothing but them claiming expensive electronics, I might pass it to the person who gives at least some stuff away. But I also recognize that the folks who are asking for lots of stuff and aren’t offering up much might just be in hard times and need groups like this the most. So I try to err on the side of giving stuff to whoever can take it.
Most of the time I just want the thing gone and as long as I’m not worried they’ll throw it out themselves, if a reseller will take it and find a home for it, that’s fine by me. For a handful of items, like special brackets for wireless access points, I deliberately gave them to someone I suspected was reselling because I knew they’d do a better job finding a destination for them on eBay than I would in our local free group.
In the end of the day, my goal is to keep stuff out of the landfill, and I suppose resellers are a just a scammy, middleman part of the stuff-moving ecosystem that gets these items to someone who wants them. Even at a reseller’s markup, having this stuff circulating in communities instead of sitting in a landfill reduces demand for new products and hopefully diminishes - even just a little - how much has to be extracted.
In the end of the day, my goal is to keep stuff out of the landfill
A commendable goal and indeed you don’t care much if people reuse or resell in that context. However if your goal is to create and grow a bubble of non-merchant economy, the problem becomes different.
I recognize that it is unavoidable that some people may resell and it should not be a show stopper, but it should be part of the thought around how to set it up.
This is what founders of burning man were about
