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The prosumer and work culture

L'équipe TAOA

 

The prosumer and work culture

« The gist of barter clubs is work culture (…), the purpose of exchanging is not purchasing and selling but producing » José Sandler (coordinator for Globido Azul, Viedma- TAOA interview 23.01.2011)

« In a barter club, one has to work » Beatriz Riveiro ( Coordinator for Nodo Estrella, Buenos Aires, TAOA interview, 05.12.2010)

« The RGT is a network to swap goods and services by and for people who believe that money is not the essential condition determining the true value of a being. Nobody is going to save us, except our own work: the secret is working and showing and proving to oneself that exchanges create a value that complements the traditional economical system. (from the paragraph about the 12 RGT principles)

The barter clubs’ ferias are not ordinary business where sellers and purchasers meet. They are the reunion of prosumers! The prosumer is the contraction of two words: producer and consumer (from Alvin Toffler in “the third Wave”)

Producer but also consumer, it is equally important to get creditos and to spend them so that money circulates between the various members.

 

How does it work in fact ?


The best example is no doubt food production since these goods were the most looked for. For instance, many people prepared traditional empanadas ( sort of meat pies, vegetable pies, cheese pies…)The prosumer gets the ingredients he needs inside the nodo, and what he can’t find there on a traditional market. Then, at the next feria, he swaps empanadas for creditos.

Another example is about the numerous services offered: plumber, barber, carpenter, painter, and accountant….everyone presents the fruits of his work at the nodo.

Among some nodos that are still active, we visited San marcio De Sierras, popular for the quality and the diversity of its prosumers’ products: milk-jam, olives stuffed with goat cheese, homemade liqueurs, corn cakes, bags …

What would happen if there was no prosumer ?

 

  1. The barter club would become a club of retailers, where you can buy wholesale on the traditional market, to retail in the nodos. We would immediately fall back in a very commercial approach: anything goes when one wants to make profit, even if it means to sell stolen goods, or to purchase products from one nodo to sell it in another one with high profit…
  2. The barter club will turn into a «nodo de cosas viejas» (barter club of old things). Indeed, the poorest and the least enterprisers clear their homes to buy food, they are then salesmen/purchasers, rather than producers/consumers. If at every feria, the only things to swap are always the same old, ugly, worn out and dirty things, the nodo is rapidly deserted and closed. But chiefly, in this configuration, when the house is empty, we are back to square one, and no income. Let’s not forget that the barter clubs were created within the context of the Program  of Regional  Self-sufficiency they are not a stopgap measure to the crisis, but a solution to transform and improve everyone’s quality of life on  the long term. The concept of presuming is above all everyone’s emancipation through work.

 

Do not mistake work for job

 

Many interviewed people told us that there might be no job but there is still work. And the absence of jobs doesn’t mean it is forbidden to work. The lack of money must not act as a brake on working.

«Inside the network of collective bartering, work is the priority since we exchange the products that we produce. Work brings us wealth and satisfaction, making our human condition worth it. Work enables the club members to value their strengths and their abilities to do something and to be someone.

For ages, we needed our good will, both hands and a tool to work, nothing else. These last years, there has been a radical change and the products needed on the market are far from human work ”This work”, which, in our society, has no value and is never claimed, is the principal axis and the incentive of the proposal of Collective Barter  Network”. Javier Cortesi (Representative of the experience of Collective Barter Network , from Trueque y Economia Solidaria, Susana Hintze)

Bartering offers new job opportunities, and more creditos. It is a complementary market of goods and services.

“I did not believe in it but I went to the barter club with homemade products, bread, cakes, soups. I was very surprised when everybody enjoyed them. One day, at the nodo, I notice soya milanesas I found them quite expensive and decided to cook some to sell them at a better bargain at the nodo de la Boca and in other nodos in the Capital City. Someone from the nodo of Bernal taught me how to cook them (I will never forget this person) and I decided to have a go. People liked them and I started to get a maximum of things in the network that I used to make milanesas for business .Rapidly, I decided to innovate and started to stuff them.

Today, it is my special, I stuff them with ricotta, greens, many different things. Then I went to a personal fulfillment course, then a business course; I just did not know they existed. Now, I am learning micro-business to be a caterer and I am applying for micro-credit”.(From Francisca, Nodo La Boca Oblisco Trueque del Nodo Obelisco 1999)


Rediscovering self-esteem

 

Apart from reintegrating an economical activity, working and bartering is also regaining its self esteem.

When you lose your job, the consequences are not financial only. Joining a barter club was a sort of therapy for some members, a remedy to emerge from breakdown. Several prosumers accounted for that.

“At the barter club, what I liked best was welcoming newcomers, and showing them how useful they could be. Some unemployed people came totally depressed, persuaded they could do nothing and had nothing to offer. So I asked them ‘can you drive?’ ’Can you paint?’’ could you do some housework?’ ‘Can you cook?’ ‘Can you give math lessons?’ Then we would put a price to each service and they realized they could make several thousand creditos a month. « Then I told them about my experience. Before coming to the club, I was jobless too. I put up windows (my former job) but I also taught kids chemistry , I gave driving lessons….The first month, I made more money than in my former job and I did not feel depressed anymore; I had a good life. I had never been so happy to work. I liked to do so many different things again.” Julio Irigoitia (coordinator, san Salvador deJujuy)

 

The loss of ideology


In other respects, many blame the welfare plan ( Jefes y Jefas) for being responsible for the decline of barter clubs. They say that many stopped going to the clubs because they were allowed these new benefits. For them, the plan killed work culture.” Without work, no barter club”.

To go a little further, we’ll say that it is rather the lack of support to the clubs’ ideology, the lack of understanding for the concept of nodo and mainly of prosuming that lead people to leave the clubs as soon as money was back with the economic recovery and the various government plans.

 

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