Beth Connors-Manke

A friend who grew up in West Virginia and has lived for the past several years in eastern Kentucky, remarked once about all the yard sales her area. On the first of the month, the time when government checks traditionally made their way to mailboxes, sales were everywhere. Some houses had racks and table tables permanently stationed in the yard. At least one place had a sign advertising “Indoor Yard Sale”; “indoor” meant in an outbuilding on the property.

I asked my friend, a native Appalachian and self-proclaimed “junk monkey,” to speculate about that type of economy. Her answer began like this: “Poor people end up with the burden of the cast off stuff in a capitalist society. Goods filter down until the worst crap is in the poorest places, and the poor people have to deal with it. A culture of stuff, of pack-ratishness ensues.”

She continued on to paint the economic picture in her home place: in poor and isolated areas, there are fewer commercial stores offering goods. Material items get circulated, instead, through yard sales that have used goods and, as she has recently noticed, new items like unopened 12 packs of pantyhose. Unsure if the sales brought any substantial profit, she wondered if the practice of yard sales and flea markets was a “cultural habit or a socio-economic necessity.” She saw that for some “goin’ tradin’” was a pastime or employment if one was out of work for injury or disability. Thinking of her own family and friends, she saw that the perpetual cycle of goods trading was rooted in a belief in “trading up”—parlaying something relatively worthless into something weighty. Like Kyle McDonald, the guy who between July 2005 and July 2006 traded a red paperclip and eventually got a house, they could make something out of almost nothing.

Well, we’re here in Lexington and, despite the economic downturn, we’ve got no shortage of pristine, never-before-been-used retail goods. But if you’ve looked in your wallet, at the property value of your house (at least this isn’t Cleveland), or at your business ledger, you may have noticed a lack there. In earlier issues of this esteemed paper, Danny Mayer took a long look at what he calls “The Basil Economy”: how food locally grown can be distributed without that stuff absent from your wallet (cash). My look here is at two instances of how services (need to go to the dentist?) and hardier, less perishable stuff than basil (like mannequin heads) get traded.

Art SWAP
On the evening of the June 19th gallery hop, my housemate, helpmate, husband, and generally better-half started scurrying around as if to go somewhere. We were supposed to spend a rare evening in, so I was irked. A canvas in his hand, he said he was going downtown to trade some of his art for other stuff. As much a junk monkey as my friend from Appalachia, I figured I’d join the fun so I grabbed a woven bag from my closet. The site of the exchange was the Downtown Arts Center where Bill Santen’s and Bruce Burris’s “SWAP” was on exhibit—or kindof. I’m not sure something is an exhibit if you can touch it, take something from it, and shove something else in. The installation is a large shelving unit, with cubicles containing things like a gourd, an old Minolta camera, paper lanterns, some joker’s business card, a big jar of nails, and a mannequin head. The idea is to bring something to trade for something already on the shelves.

My better-half traded a piece of his art for some drum mallets, and my bag took the place of an old munitions box. Bruce Burris was on hand so I cornered him, asked him what “SWAP” was all about.

“Bill Santen and I were talking about the Digger Free Store in San Francisco in the 1960s. I happened to live near one of the old Digger Stores, near Haight-Ashbury. We were talking about that, and the present economy, the history of swap meets, and people making exchanges. We created this piece, particularly in this building, because we wanted to encourage a couple different things: free exchanges and consideration of how this building, a public building, is used.”

“There’s a particular public that doesn’t use this building. So what if we encouraged use through providing an activity or an exchange—for an economic reason—for people who normally may not use it? In these boxes are things anyone could use: beans, shoes, broken equipment.”

What I liked about “SWAP” was the participatory aspect of the art: anyone who could grab something from somewhere could trade. But the question was who would come into the Downtown Arts Center to do it? Would the people who hung out in Phoenix Park all day participate in “SWAP”? Or, would it only be the generally white, liberal art hop crowd? Burris had already considered these limitations and realistically assessed, “there was nothing before and now there’s a little.” (Burris told me later that a group of about 20 kids from Camp Carnegie swapped items at the installation.)

“We really wanted to comment on the economy, the nature of exchange,” Burris said. Watching the early trades, Burris was interested in how some people were troubled by the question of equal value—feeling their item wasn’t equal in value to the one they wanted to take. “What are those feelings all about? Really these shelves are filled with things that someone didn’t want. If you replace it with something that is, in your mind, of lesser value—well, what is that all about exactly? So these are the sorts of things we’re really looking at here.”

“SWAP” addresses the issue of cultural habits that my Appalachian friend had noted. The installation begged the questions: What’s fun or interesting about trade? How does it link us to others in ways that are not explicitly capitalistic? What does it say about our personal and collective values?

Without money mediating the exchanges in “SWAP,” one assessed the worth of an object in an entirely different way. When I left my hand-woven bag, it wasn’t in exchange for the box; rather, I had offered it to some future swapper who wanted simply to enter the fun, to participate in an artistic interpretation of circulation of material goods.

In terms of the socio-economic side of barter, “SWAP” couldn’t fulfill pragmatic needs of Lexington residents. Someone may have really needed that green ketchup in one of the cubicles, but that person would be an anomaly. One couldn’t very reliably shop “SWAP.” But Burris’s comment about the Diggers pointed to fuller attempts at barter that had, however provisionally, been tried in other places, at other times.

Digger Economy
The Diggers was a group with roots in guerrilla street theatre and West Coast counterculture active in the mid to late 1960s. In residence in the Haight-Ashbury area of San Francisco, the anarchists distributed free food and used goods to the young people who had flocked to the Bay Area and Golden Gate Park for social and political revolution. Their name harkened back to the English Diggers of the mid 1600s who tried to reclaim common land to farm, eschewing private property. An extensive online archive (www.diggers.org) makes available some of the documents circulated by the San Francisco group.

One Digger manifesto exhorts all to give up their money, Digger style:

Money Is An Unnecessary Evil

It is addicting.
It is a temptation to the weak (most of the violent crimes of our city in some way involve money).
It can be hoarded, blocking the free flow of energy and the giant energy-hoards of Montgomery Street will soon give rise to a sudden and thus explosive release of this trapped energy, causing much pain and chaos.
As part of the city’s campaign to stem the causes of violence the San Francisco Diggers announce a 30 day period beginning now during which all responsible citizens are asked to turn in their money. No questions will be asked.
Bring money to your local Digger for free distribution to all. The Diggers will then liberate it’s [sic] energy according to the style of whoever receives it.

In a later article entitled “The Post-Competitive, Comparative Game of a Free City,” the Diggers envision a different way of life: a “Free City” with a free food storage and distribution center, a free garage and mechanics, a free bank and treasury, free housing, and a free “medical thing.” Eventually, the movement morphed and disseminated to other parts of the country. In no way short on ideas and cultural precepts, the Diggers and their fellow travelers couldn’t turn the tide of American capitalism. If governmental resistance hadn’t squelched it first, the Free City eventually would have had to face the practical issue of scale: is barter possible on a large scale, when it’s not just people without resources scrounging and swapping? The Free City seemed an economy meant to be overwhelmed by greater powers.

Genesis Trade Exchange
Who could successfully spread the gospel of alternate economy in capitalist America?

Oprah, of course.

Kristie LaLonde, with her husband Mark and father Keith Nally, started Genesis Trade Exchange in Lexington after she saw an Oprah Winfrey show about a woman who paid for her wedding by bartering. Kristie is not unique in making her Oprah inspiration into reality. Use Google: you’ll find more stories of women who started trade exchanges after watching that Oprah show.

I asked Mark LaLonde, president of Genesis Trade Exchange, to give me his pitch for the company, which has been in Lexington for ten years and whose membership is 95% locally owned businesses: “The whole idea is using what you’ve got to get what you want. And what we all want is more cash paying customers as small business owners.”

Genesis takes as its primary goal driving business to its members. Mark’s job is to find businesses in Lexington and the surrounding communities to join his trade exchange. His member businesses include “anything from publicly held companies to your everyday, good ole boy electrician and plumber.” Network members have an account (an offering of goods or services with a monetary value attached to them) with Genesis that they use to barter for goods and services from other members.

For example: when a plumber needs to see a dentist, he can use $100 from his Genesis account to purchase the dental work. At checkout time, the plumber and dentist fill out a transaction form that is forwarded to Genesis, which acts as a third party record keeper. Then the dentist can use that $100 to barter for goods available on the exchange, such as carpet cleaning, advertising, or lawn care. In Mark’s words, “The dentist took an unsold billable hour in a place where he didn’t have a client, and he turned it into a client. And then he took the hundred dollars and cut expenses with it.”

Genesis’s 460 members have traded everything from facelifts to automobiles. Although it has some aspects of a financial institution (Mark can give members a line of credit in the exchange), Genesis is mostly a marketing tool. According to Mark, “A trade exchange makes business sense—it makes sense for everybody. It doesn’t only make sense for the service industry; it makes sense for the retail industry. Everybody needs new business.” While there are no tax advantages for members (Genesis submits 1099s for all sales that are done on trade), there are no tax disadvantages either, Mark says.

Mark had been generous with his time, but later I was a little disappointed. I realized I had developed my own idea about trade exchanges that was rooted in an ethical desire to transform economic systems that didn’t work. Trade exchanges like Genesis are pragmatic and all business (apparently Donald Trump even uses them). They are an alternate economy in the sense that they don’t use federal currency and, to a limited degree, allow members to circumvent cash transactions. But, obviously, the goal of a small business is to be a business. Far from radical, the trade exchange is about capitalist economic necessity, pure and simple.

So while Genesis doesn’t seem to be about changing cultural habits, Mark’s business does witness the way economic strife forces people into new patterns of consumption and exchange. He notices that, in a bad economy, members are more willing to change service providers and more flexible about their goods and services. His members show creativity in how and when they purchase items when money is tight.

Barter isn’t a panacea for all our economic woes. It takes time and energy, and sometimes it is just shuffling lots of stuff around within the same system of poverty or lack. I doubt trade, as an alternate economy, really challenges the fundamental problems we have in our current system. It may be an adventure that brings us unexpected items or experiences, like my munitions box. Barter may have Cinderella stories like the red paperclip into a house, or a $40,000 wedding paid for through trade. But the dream of “tradin’ up” that my Appalachian friend described isn’t likely to bring the poor out of poverty. However, as the Diggers showed, it may feed and clothe people for one more day.