Perhaps the main project of this blog is to put non-market anarchism on a solid theoretical footing. While I’m excited to find that many people envision the supplanting of the exchange paradigm by the gift paradigm, there seems to be no underlying theory that hopelessly left-brained me can latch onto. Also, the implementation doesn’t seem to have gone far beyond the Free Store stage. Oh, and of course software. But you can’t eat software. Three identifiable clusters of interest in the gift paradigm are in feminist anarchism (this link being to what is probably the closest thing to a theoritical understanding of gift economy that I have found), Christian anarchism (where gift economy might be attributed to “agape”) and Venus Project types.
I’m not sure how important gift theory is or should be to anagorist theory. I’ve been thinking mainly in terms of dreaming up alternatives the market as a method of allocation. It seems that in gift-giving, the giver (or in economese, the supplier?) does all the thinking…what to give, when, how much, to whom. Perhaps this authority is some kind of compensation for a “negative” “profit” on the “transaction?” But this “analysis” doesn’t escape conventional economics, does it? Oh well, I continue to brainstorm, as hopefully do others. It’s encouraging that no less than two commenters here have expressed at least some frustration with the agorism expressed by certain left libertarian tendencies.
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