Barter is hell

Most economists believe in barter as the first form of economic exchange. Aristotle imagined this moneyless world, which later inspired Smith, Jevons and, finally, most economists. There is not a single anthropological, archeological or historical evidence that supports this thesis However, it is very important for the typical economist, because it offers a justification for our use of money. Imagine a market without money. It would be almost impossible to match the reciprocal desires of any two people. We could not exchange future goods, like the coming harvest. We would not know how to establish equivalences between exchanged goods. There would be no saving, no lending. Barter is hell. Without money our exchanges would be poor, nasty, brutish and short. Money would save us from immediacy, from the most stupid way of exchanging the fruits of our labor. There is, however, a second reading. Barter appears as chaotic because it involves the terrible problem of politics, namely, to reach an agreement. In barter I have to negotiate the very equivalence of subjective values; we are faced with incommensurability and the need to reach an agreement. Money is the magical tool that makes the conflictive subjectivity disappear. With money there is nothing to argue. There are not even subjects, but a system that assigns prices to things as if they were their properties. Even exchange value has disappeared, i.e. the relationship between definite quantities of good A for definite quantities of good B. We only see A and B as independent beings, carrying the sign expressing their price. Politics and subjectivity have disappeared. Instead, we find a new, a second nature, as impersonal as the original one. This nature is only accessible to us; we are its creatures, but not as conscious and willing beings. We only exist as particles, moved by objective laws, dreaming of freedom and desire. In the end this is the trick of the neoclassical economist: he claims that value is subjective, that only individuals exist, that freedom is the ground of markets; but suddenly, he speaks of a priori and necessary laws of those very markets, that individuals know nothing about it, that it corrects itself without knowledge or human will, and that all subjective intervention would only corrupt its natural order.