by Melinda
Pillsbury-Foster
Imagine going into a
store where everything is free. It happened in San Francisco as the
Sixties and New Age Movement were beginning.
Free
Stores were opened in Haight-Ashbury in 1966 by the Diggers, a
community-action group made up of improvisational actors. The stores
operated from 1966 to 1968, in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of
San Francisco.
The
experiment can be viewed as the beginning of today's Gift Economy.
Traditionally, buying and selling of goods and services took place
using coin and printed 'money.'
The
stores closed, but innovations continued. The last half of the
Twentieth Century saw played out a series of innovative practices
which challenged this, and other, assumptions.
Although
barter and trade persisted locally the lack of a unit for
transactions limited the practice to very local areas. Reacting to
the abuse of money, and the Vietnam Conflict, people began reaching
out for alternatives for war and commerce.
In
1966 the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, started in Laguna Beach, was
contributing income generated from sales of LSD to fund protests
against the Vietnam Conflict with marked success.
Though
few knew it doors were reopening from a century earlier.
The
first experiments with alternative life-styles and exchange by
Westerners in North America came through the Transcendental Movement,
communalism ignited through the writings of Robert Owen, a Scottish
Socialist. Owens introduced Time Hours with the National Equitable
Labour Exchange in 1832.
These
experiments often failed. Abigail May Alcott, mother of Louisa May
Alcott, author of Little Women,
made the observation she was the commune's only domestic animal. It
was deemed inhumane to employ animals for labor during Fruitland's
existence in Massachusetts.
Communalism
did not persist. But time hours was successfully introduced in
Ithaca, New York in 1991, providing an alternative to money during
the recession then taking place. Ashtabula has a Time Hours Group
through St. Peter Church. Try it.
FreeCycling,
person to person gifting of unused items, started on May 1st, 2003 in
Tucson, Arizona, and took off as the ease and effectiveness of the
practice became obvious.
Baby
clothes, parts for appliances, furniture, things pass rapidly from
person to person through freecycling, saving money without overhead.
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