[ThomasWinwood]

> It has always existed. When men collected food and survived they shared. If there is an surplus of something you do not need, what do you do with it? Eventually, I guess, they started bartering. Bartering is a primitive way of trading. That trading is possible accumulating enough, otherwise you would need it all for yourself.

This is Adam Smith's just-so story, but he was wrong - no society has ever been shown to survive on a barter economy. Anthropologists have shown that what existed before trade was the same as what exists today when trade collapses: informally held debt. Alice knows how to work leather, Bob knows how to work wood; Bob needs a pair of shoes; Alice gives Bob a pair of shoes to satisfy his need and both Alice and Bob remember that; later, when Alice's house needs repairs she knows whose shoulder to tap on.

This is "barter" in the sense that Alice's and Bob's services have been transacted through time, but you'd be moving the goalposts since you just defined barter as Alice and Bob sitting down and determining precisely how much wood-labour equates to a fixed quantity of leather-labour at the point of purchase.

If you'd like to learn more, then David Graeber's book Debt: The First 5,000 Years, is something of a standard reference on the subject. It's on the Internet Archive.

[germandiago]

Thanks for the pointer. It is an interesting point of view indeed.

However, I think bartering has always existed for a reason, and when it did not or trading was forbidden, what you end up is with poorer or more violent societies.

This is the same reason why we specialize our labour and we do not do all things: shoes, food, blankets, bridges, roads, trains, planes, computers. Because if we had to self-supply fully, our lives would be much more miserable. From there it follows that trading is a natural choice: I can give something valuable and someone else can give me something valuable in exchange. Of course that gets mixed with debt and other stuff (I did not read your reference yet so I cannot assess how true it is in my very limited opinion) but the alternative to bartering, trading, etc. is violence. Every time.

There is an analysis from a well-known spanish philosopher that died short ago, his name is Antonio Escohotado, well-known for having written a book about the history of drugs that was translated to many languages.

He wrote a 3-volumes book that is called "Los enemigos del comercio" (The enemies of trade).

He researched the topic with unusual passion, since when he was young he used to be a communist. He wanted to explain to himself why he was so communist at some point. He spend around 15 years writing that. One of his main conclusion is that the alternative to trading is trading people (slaves) and the conquer of the other (violence). I really think it is true. He establishes some relationships between the amount of trading and the violence in societies (military vs trade societies). I think it is a nice read, but I am not sure it is translated to other languages as of now. The one for the drugs it is.

Greetings.