Confession of a Freecycle Virgin

Mighty Neighborly, a regular feature on the Precipitate blog, explores how everyday, local decisions impact a larger community and the environment.

I don’t know, man. I think the bartering thing could work, at least on a small scale.

A friend of mine brought up the idea the other day. He said he didn’t like to engage in conversations about the economy because he wasn’t a capitalist. Bartering services, he said, was fair, because everyone has the same amount of time. That’s cute, I thought. Let’s trade lunches.

In most of my thinking about bartering, I’ve been considering it a trade: I give you something, you give me something. Apparently, the IRS even wants you to track bartering for your taxes. Ha. Yeah. There are a few problems with the IRS system, other than that it comes from the IRS. Their idea is that each person has sold one item and has used the money to buy another item.

However, one problem in their understanding is that there is no real way of reckoning the amount of money exchanged. Fair market value is one thing, but what if you got the item at cost? What if, like me, you received a microwave from your dad that had been purchased for your mom’s office and was gathering dust in the basement, and you wanted to get rid of it more than anything? What is the value of that microwave? The amount it cost me (nothing?) The amount it cost my dad more than 5 years ago? The amount it would cost to replace?

The other things that the IRS forgets, and likes to pretend doesn’t exist, is that bartering is less like the imaginary, arbitrarily valued money they demand from us regularly and is more like the gift economy. The gift economy and I have not been friends. Its continued existence in the arts is the reason that people who think music and poetry are so desperately important continue to think it’s OK to require me to produce these things for no pay. When poets and other artists had patrons who paid for their upkeep, making art without pay made sense. If one lives in Europe where artists are funded, one can live. Here in the States, we make art, and then we go in to work and really make…something.

A gift economy with goods and services that have an agreed upon value are easier to reckon, and might make help us transition into a economy that’s a little more fair, or at least makes us feel more like good people. On September 9, I blogged about making jam with my mom. I love cooking, obviously, enough to produce more than I can eat.

Two jars of strawberry jam made their way to the music store around the corner from my apartment. To my surprise, a jar of concord grape jam was given to me the next week. I was (and I rarely use this word) delighted. I didn’t require or expect it; it just showed up.

Similarly, when I used freecycle to get rid of the microwave, I learned that I was going to have to let go of expectations. It took a day of standing by on the internet, being stood up and reading misspelled emails, but finally, the thing was out of my apartment in less time than it would have taken me to figure out how to purge it without a car. The woman who got it was so happy, and I was (there’s that word again) delighted to have it gone.

This is the way exchange should feel, but working for money rarely does the trick. Not only am I cranky that I have to work sixty hours a week, I even feel resentful when I get my paycheck. It’s a reminder that there are people doing less work for more money. Those same people like to tell me how “lucky” I am to have a job which, if they were less cheap, could be divided nicely between me and another person.

I don’t see the Occupy people getting a coherent platform together any time soon, so I know I’ll have to keep putting on my big girl pants and go to The Desk for the next few years. But all of the free hummus they’re passing around makes me think that giving things away, with love, is the surest way to piss off the people making new microwaves.

H. V. Cramond, Staff Blogger