The genteel subversives
WILLIAMSON, J. W.
The genteel subversives Seeking survival, swapping zucchini, finding moral uplift and profit J. W. WILLIAMSON Barter has come back, at least as buzz word. Hardly a Sunday supplement in the...
...He has always "done" for himself—his own carpentry and building, his own plumbing, his own electrical wiring...
...Barter companies even cross national boundaries...
...The Pittsburgh Trade Exchange charges a one-time membership fee of $350, plus brokerage fees of 10 per cent of each exchange...
...He is quite aware of how the IRS is beginning to stir...
...What seems to be happening is that a lot of middle-class town and suburban dwellers are discovering that their land holdings—a couple of tomato plants in the window-box, a row of pole beans out behind the garage—will not be sufficient to carry them through the next Crash...
...Much of the homage now being paid the idea of barter is an oblique acknowledgement by people who have come unstuck from the land that roots in the soil are fairly important...
...have served as red flags of rebellion...
...But she says that the Government has only itself to blame: "The complexities of our tax laws and tax forms...
...But because she joined a local "barter club"—the Useful Services Exchange of Reston, which was founded several years ago and charges a $3 sign-up fee to organize and pool the abilities of several hundred area residents—her chances of undergoing a special Internal Revenue Service (IRS) audit for 1980 have gone up significantly...
...Sylvia Porter recently characterized barter—in no uncertain terms, either—as a creeping subversion of the economic order...
...According to Arthur N. ("Red") Alderman, director of Appalachian State University's successful "Earth College," most middle-class people have to spend up to 75 per cent of their waking hours supplying themselves with the necessary cash to buy the credit line that allows them to charge the goods and services that they need to buy because they spend 75 per cent of their waking hours working for wages rather than doing for themselves what they have to pay whole platoons of service and goods people to do...
...That's the circle...
...And the modern barter revivalists are not, for the most part, cutting through that Gordian knot...
...The International Association of Trade Exchanges, for example, was formed in 1979 to promote organized barter among "business people throughout the international business community...
...In the past twelve months, students and faculty have erected a sophisticated wind turbine generator, reconstructed an old barn for living quarters and meeting rooms, sold vegetables out of an intricate and very large mountainside garden, converted an old farmhouse to solar power...
...News last summer that he was alarmed by the threat the bartering trend represents...
...I don't think it's out of any feeling of impending doom that people want to barter," he says further...
...Members of Barter Systems, Inc., in Kensington, Maryland, or the National Commerce Exchange of Springfield pay $100 or more to join, plus varying commission fees for each swap...
...The barter-for-profit enterprises that have developed—mainly in and around large urban centers—are in some ways the most peculiar expression of middle-class America's attempt to learn again how to live on the cheap...
...This is a holy myth, or at least a pious one...
...You would think that the long-awaited Greening of America had finally been found in the trade of a mess of zucchini for a poodle trim...
...Twenty people paid $15 a head to attend the first "barter party" sponsored last year by Prosperity Unlimited, a small "counseling firm" that insists you can put yourself on the road to riches "by thinking and acting prosperous...
...And they feel a little flattered— and perhaps vindicated—by that...
...You can convert what you have into what you want...
...She may not have considered the caulking of her tub as taxable income, but the IRS does...
...On a practical level, survival for suburbanites is a mundane but mysterious sphere of expertise that has somehow been misplaced...
...Commissioner of Internal Revenue Jerome Kurtz told Dan Cordtz of ABC Jerry Williamson is editor of the Appalachian Journal in Boone, North Carolina...
...That's the tie that binds...
...But after all, with Jimmy Carter behind us and Ronald Reagan in the saddle, people might be forgiven for feeling a little nervous about the future...
...There are no tax advantages or disadvantages to barter," insists Arnie Green, vice president of the Pittsburgh Trade Exchange...
...In rural western North Carolina, Appalachian State University has established an "Earth College" which is intended "to teach students to live self-sufficiently and teach others to do the same...
...You have to learn to get along...
...It is a natural thing to barter," Sorreles adds...
...He pastures a few cattle for himself on the landowner's land and sells them at clear profit...
...We never thought about it as 'barter,' " says George Sorreles, who has been a farmer himself in southern Ohio for seventeen years...
...And the IRS intends to get its share...
...Paid intermediaries...
...At least two recent IRS rulings have struck at the transactions of barter clubs...
...It's all about as far away from living on the cheap as the Earth is from the moon...
...George Sorreles in southern Ohio has noted the movement of middle-class professional types into the country—people looking for land who do not yet suspect the claims the land will have over them...
...No complaints...
...The Washington Post reports, for example, that a woman in suburban Reston, Virginia—a "sociologist" who knows how to stitch a hem but who doesn't know the first thing about hardware stores—trades her sewing skills for help in caulking the tub and sink in her home...
...Living on the cheap is even being taught in some universities...
...This man and his wife have raised two sons and sent them both through college...
...It's not an underground economy...
...Hardly a Sunday supplement in the country hasn't explored "The Subterranean Economy," "The Resurgence of Barter," or "The Pleasures and Profits of Trades and Swaps...
...But my neighbor would come in and combine, and I would help and do the hauling...
...When a job was too big, there were always relatives and neighbors to share the work...
...All of this is passing strange—and somehow wonderful—to our couple in west Texas...
...They have lived on the cheap and done all right...
...In this crowd, barter doesn't look so much subversive as collusive...
...These people understand "barter" inside and out, but they would never use that word...
...He and his wife have always kept a big garden and chickens and a milk cow and a couple of hogs...
...That may be too strong a word, although for some middle-class professionals, among whom bartering is a serious affair right now, there is the sense that to swap with one's neighbor is not only morally uplifting but also subversive—deliciously so...
...They're looking for glamour, romance, and many of them return to town...
...In Briscoe County in the Panhandle of west Texas, a man who has worked other people's land all his life as hired hand and as tenant has nevertheless earned a comfortable living for himself and his family—through bartering...
...Organized barter...
...it is a strange accretion on top of'the cash-and-credit economy...
...Rebellion...
...you just hear about trades and swaps, work parties, canning bees, "poundings...
...This is why the IRS is alarmed and taking "more than a casual interest in bartering" (as a recent district IRS office circular informed tax-preparers, lawyers, and accountants...
...For David Tobin of the Barter Project—an informal clearinghouse in Washington, D.C., which supplies information and support to about fifty non-profit bartering groups nationwide—the neighborliness that organized barter clubs can nurture is their principal value...
...The first irony in all of this is that while the IRS has managed to create the impression that barter is subversive, the media have tended to popularize the return of barter by romanticizing it...
...The Pittsburgh Trade Exchange, for example, is a million-dollar corporation with fourteen salaried employes who are "brokers" for barter exchanges among a rather select club of 2,000 "business owners and professionals...
...And Kurtz promises increased vigilance, especially for the self-employed...
...They are thinking soberly about survival, and they are examining their ways of life...
...But it is only a myth: In this country and in this century, bartering never ceased to animate those Americans who take little part in the mainstream of middle-class culture—those farmers, laborers, and mechanics for whom depending on neighbors and "living on the cheap" is a necessary (and not very romantic) fact of life...
...You never hear the word barter among these people...
...If there is anything among the upwardly mobile middle class that is more intimidating than the Shroud of Turin, it is the specter of imminent disaster in the way the world presently works...
...And they are somewhat bemused to hear that suburban doctors and lawyers and college professors— and a sociologist in'Reston, Virginia— are trying their damnedest, through clubs and lectures and feature articles in the local newspapers, trying their damnedest to recover what was never lost...
...That means, simply, that Kurtz wants more field auditors and investigators to ferret out the back-fence bar-terers in Reston and elsewhere...
...They're also looking for ultimate security in a chancy world, and the first requirement is access to land—the very thing that is in short supply in and around our American cities...
...But we never paid each other...
...It's just that it's a terrific way to get rid of excess capacity...
...Most of the new people who go to the country haven't been there before," Sorreles says...
...He would take off seed-beans, keep them in his bin, have them cleaned, and we'd plant them back on my farm for the next year...
...After all, there are no records, no traceable transactions, and as long as you deal square, no finger-pointing...
...The curriculum includes organic ("French intensive") gardening, food preservation, uses of alternative energies, and carpentry...
...Private, for-profit corporations like the Pittsburgh Trade Exchange are springing up all over...
...Neighborliness that is subscribed to, like a book or record club...
...Gradually bartering went the way of outdoor plumbing and became just a memory...
...The IRS wants one thing clearly understood: Bartered goods and services are taxable income...
...Still, the suburban traders hold on to the belief that, somehow, cooperation can be bought and sold like so much aluminum siding or frozen yogurt...
...There's no way you can live without knowing your neighbors...
...We are not, as a nation!, getting back to a neighborhood economics that George Sorreles might recognize...
...And students entering the program are allowed to barter their talents and skills—cooking, electrical wiring—for tuition and fees...
...But this induced neighborliness masks another fact that may account for the sudden appeal of cashless trade...
...You hear, "You scratch my back and I'll scratch yours...
...Sounds like I could be a professor there," the man says, without a trace of irony...
...Much of our new urban and suburban barter is not a subversion of the cash-and-credit economy...
...Examples of moneyless exchanges stack up like cord-wood gathering against a coming winter...
...He has never been paid more than $5,000 a year in cash as salary, but he has been given farmhouses to live in rent-free (and to fix up, too, sometimes at his own expense but sometimes at the expense of the landowner...
...Family Circle magazine, which millions of middle-class shoppers buy every week at the grocery checkout, recently opened one of its features on barter this way: "For years many people, particularly those in rural communities, coped with very little cash by trading directly for most goods and services...
...Kurtz considers barter a tax dodge, pure and simple, and he has asked Congress for an additional 200 "technical staff years" in salaries to devote to the Unreported Income Program...
...This is the plainest of facts, but it is precisely the sudden neighborliness that has most impressed the new suburban barterers as something that links them—romantically—to a forgotten and almost lost past...
...So pervasive has bartering become among middle-class and professional Americans that the IRS has launched the Unreported Income Program to "identify and select returns in need of examination that are associated with organized barter exchanges, including returns of barter exchanges, owners and operators, and members of such exchanges...
Vol. 45 • April 1981 • No. 4
