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 mutial-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
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.
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.
Is this what you expect would happen, or what you actually observed in such events?
I have 3 anecdotal evidence from France:
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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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
This; sell require also time and effort.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.