Transition Barter Habit Spreads up the Severn

A guest post from Simon Topping of Transition Gloucester.

Transition Gloucester recently held its first barter market, except we called it a “barter party” to make it feel more informal and experimental in case everything went horribly wrong! In fact the event went extremely well and has encouraged us to think how we might develop the idea in the future.

There were ten stalls at the market, held at Hucclecote Community Centre. Stallholders were asked to bring goods or services for their stall, roughly equivalent to ten pounds sterling. At the start of the market each stallholder was given ten “glevums”* with which to trade. They were told that they should try to return ten glevums at the end of the market which was to last for 45 minutes. They were also told that if they returned less than ten glevums then they had probably taken more than their fair share of goods and services on offer. If they returned more than ten glevums then they would have taken less than their fair share.

There was a rich mixture of goods and services on offer: homegrown fruit and vegetables, homemade wine, cakes and bread, mint tea and dried herbs, a selection of “service vouchers”, books, vintage records, low energy electric light bulbs and much more.

By the time the market was closed the majority of traders had exchanged most of what they had brought. Also, most traders ended up with roughly ten glevums, some with a few more, some with a few less. The deadline for the closing of the market encouraged those with too many glevums to make sure they bought something with them because, once the market was closed, the glevums would have no value.

We sat around with drinks after the market to talk about how it went. There were many positives, but also some questions:

Most traders were very pleased with the rich mix of goods they ended up with. We brought a pile of oinions to our stall and went away with a range of other vegetables, two books, a bag of mint tea and a low energy light bulb.

People also appreciated the direct link (in most cases) between the trader and what they were selling. The trader was usually also the producer (even with the books). There was a sense of connectedness in the whole process of producing, trading and, ultimately, consuming.

There was also a feeling that the trading was a social activity, as well as an economic activity – conversations naturally broke out over how goods had been grown or made and how best to use or eat or preserve what had been traded. This social interaction gave added value to what had been traded.

One very practical issue was how you could act as both buyer and seller at the same time. It was hard move around the stalls to see what was on offer and also be available at your own stall to sell your own goods. Maybe each stall should have both a buyer and a seller.

Some items were in high demand - two bottles of home made wine to be precise! How does the seller decide who to sell the wine to? Should s/he sell it to the person who gets there first – this might favour the fastest movers! Should s/he increase the price of the wine until somebody decides to drop out of the auction? And if the original price of the wine is increased then should the trader remove other items from their stall so that the total value of the goods they are selling is still the same as all the other traders? If not, that trader will have more glevums to spend than everybody else. Or should the wine seller keep the same price but just decide who needs it most!

The sort of conundrums which the barter market produced helped us unmask some of the hidden dynamics of markets, in particular how we measure value. The group who particpated in our experiment in bartering felt very positive about the event and we hope to run a further market in the coming months.

*The Roman name for Gloucester Tweet

The Gift of Life

Earlier this week the Archer Report into the infection of haemophiliacs with Hepatitis C and Aids was launched. Although it had all the appearance of a report that would come out of a public enquiry it was in fact a private enquiry. In spite of the deaths of more than 2,000 people the government refused to fund an enquiry, and this one was paid for by donation.

The problem arose because haemophiliacs need regular treatment with blood-clotting factors which they do not make themselves and which have to be extracted from large quantities of blood. During the 1980s this blood was imported, bought on the open market, from the US.

In Britain blood is donated - it is considered too important or too sacred for a market transaction. As argued by Richard Titmuss in The Gift Relationship, the blood donor system is a metaphor for the nature of a healthy and communitarian social contract. This is why we see heavily emotive advertising persuading us to 'do something amazing' by enabling a celebrity to live.

In the US, by contrast a payment is made in exchange for blood. There are no prizes for guessing who gives blood: those who need the money. In the time at which the contaminated blood was imported this often meant drug-users, who unknowingly carried viruses.

This raises important questions about introducing market culture into the area of health - or in fact any vital area of human life. We can only conclude that life is too important to be bought and sold. This applies to blood, to operations, and to care itself. The vital issues of human life are in the world of love, not money. Tweet

Time for trade

There are many reasons to yearn for a relocalisation of our economies. Beyond the immediate importance of reducing the carbon dioxide emissions associated with the pointless transport of goods across vast distances when those goods could be made domestically, there is also the building of community that emerges when we engage in economic relationships, and the increased awareness of our environment that comes when we use its resources to meet our needs.

Although the barriers to rebuilding local economies seem great, they are in fact mainly mental barriers. We are no more useless than our ancestors: we could make the things we use in our everyday lives. The reasons we exploit Chinese people to do this work for us, leaving them poor and ourselves alienated and unskilled is merely because we go along with the rules of this economic game. We need to step outside the game.

One important first step is to think of what we do when we make useful things as a hobby rather than a job. If we operate according to the 'time is money' mantra of capitalism we would never do anything, since it will always be cheaper to buy stuff from a corporation that employed children poverty wages to make it somewhere in the Far East.

Next we need to decide what our role will be in the new local economy. It is no good bemoaning the loss of local economies and repeating how much you would like to buy more local products. If you are not a producer as well as a consumer the local economy will not happen. Deciding whether you are to become a forestry manager or a cosmetics manufacturer is necessarily a rather intuitive process! Go with your passions, backed up by a little smart thinking about unused local resources. If your product is made from something other people locally view as waste, so much the better.

And finally, you need to exchange with others locally. The Argentinian model of the barter market is useful for this. It is something like a table-top sale but where exchange takes place in local 'money' or coupons you have produced yourself rather than in pounds sterling. This recreates the genuine markets of old, and is a fun and sociable way to buy stuff, as well as meeting our ancesteral longing for flocking and foraging!

So get creative! Get active! And most of all: get trading!

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