Trade School At The Whitney: Scenes From The New Barter Economy

by Russell Brandom

In a corner of the Whitney basement, Yuka Otani is teaching an edible glass workshop. She’s mixed together corn syrup and sugar, then she dips a metal loop into the mixture and starts to blow bubbles. They drift in the air and then plummet, hardening into something resembling plastic wrap. Twenty-five feet to her right, a philosophy professor from Brooklyn College halts a discussion of Kant to pull out a cordless reciprocating saw, a “Sawzall,” out of a garbage bag. “Rationality and critique are the philosopher’s sawzall,” she explains. Towards the front of the room, a 10-year-old boy is teaching a group of adults how to draw cartoons.

Everyone paid to be here, although not in the way you might think. It’s a barter school, so as their tuition tonight, students have brought in objects made themselves; contributions include a tie-dye shirt, a Phonekerchief, and two bouquets of white roses and anemone, bound with gaffe tape and bearing the inscriptions “#lohan” and “#tigerblood” in whiteout. Also, cookies. The school represents a new way of approaching education — and an increasingly tempting model for doing business off the economic grid. With online networks to smooth things along, barters can happen faster and on a larger scale than ever before, for anything from lighting equipment to a photography class. The goal is to make a living (or at least part of one) without dollars, banks and anything more than person-to-person transactions — a pretty radical idea, if it works.

This particular scene took place last Friday, when Trade School took over the Whitney’s downstairs cafe to highlight to their Kickstarter-funded residency at 32 Prince Street. (It’s still going through April 17th, if you want to check it out.) The final tally was 16 classes, 250 students and, most importantly, no money. Most of the teachers are friends of the founders, or a friends-of-a-friend. And since the usual professional expectations are nowhere to be found, everyone’s free to get weird. One of the most popular offerings paired famous artworks like Frida Kahlo’s Still Life with Watermelon with corresponding foods. Another, dubbed “Bad Dreams as Border Songs,” used a musical game of telephone to comment on U.S. Immigration policy. If you had paid money for this, you might feel cheated, but if all you did was bake a sheet of cookies, a quasi-educational happening might not sound so bad. It’s one of the perks of the barter economy: expectations are lower, so everyone can get away with a lot more. If you wanted to take a class in the philosophy of plumbing, this was probably the only way it was going to happen.

Getting people comfortable with that kind of barter is part of the point. The school is organized by OurGoods, a barter network that connects people in the city who want to trade just about anything. The network began as a way to supplement the budgets of artists with more time than money. (It’s a lot easier to stretch a theater’s funding if you can pay people with cake.) The site currently has almost 1,500 people on-board, a whole shadow economy that supplies goods and demands labor without any money changing hands. (Today’s offers include freelance soldering, tarot readings, and 150 track lights of varying sizes.) The only thing keeping it from getting even bigger is that most people still see this kind of commerce as, well… weird.

Most of the fun of this kind of project comes from imagining it scaled much, much larger. They’re creating a currency system, and whoever sets the rules to the system will come away with some near-magical powers. For example, as part of last year’s QEII, the Fed printed and distributed $650 billion, and almost all of it ended up with the bond departments of multinational banks. Give a fraction of the same cash-creating power to someone more interested in community-building and they could use it to fund a hospital, as some are already trying to do with Philadelphia’s Medicash program.

OurGoods isn’t as eager to play Fed as some of their colleagues, but they’re no less ambitious. The Prince Street school offers utilitarian classes, such as tutoring in DSLR cinematography and SEO optimization, alongside courses in non-Euclidean crochet. It’s not hard to imagine this kind of person-to-person skill-sharing taking over a whole portion of the education business. Why pay for a Photoshop class when all you need is a friend who can show you a few things? The difference may not matter much to you — either way, you learn a few things — but to an economist, it’s a massive, economy-destroying sea change. Things like Trade School don’t show up in GDP projections, and they don’t produce revenue. (Cookies don’t count, apparently.) They don’t get captured by larger industries because — unlike almost anything else in the capitalist world — they actively resist being worth any money. It’s a shift from marketplace to village, and good news for anyone with more time than money. And while 1,500 people might seem like a small marketplace, it makes for a pretty big village.

It strikes at the last two hundred years of industrial anthropology, which divides the world into things you have to pay for (like pork belly and gold) and things money can’t buy (like love and filial affection). Or, to put it in catchier terms: commodities and everything else. Turning something into a commodity is one of the more reliable money-making tricks in modern capitalism, whether the commodity is a social network or a South American aquifer, but it’s almost always a one-way street. Once we’re used to paying for something, we tend to keep paying for it. Barter systems are a step towards breaking down the distinction altogether. You could pay for a class in dollars, or you could pay for it with a trumpet, or by fixing the teacher’s car. In short, commerce gets a lot weirder.

Back at the Whitney, the New School Deleuze class has come down to lead a Critical Theory weaving class. Two tables of willing students are spread out before them, two to a loom, being instructed silently on weaving technique. Nearby, a woman in a striped shirt reads to the weavers in a clear, affectless tone from Deleuze’s A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia:

A fabric presents in principle a certain number of characteristics that permit us to define it as a striated space. First, it is constituted by two kinds of parallel elements…

When she’s finished, a man with a toggle sweater and a Lithuanian accent takes over where she left off. The weavers do not seem to be paying attention to the speech. After a few minutes, they lower their heads, visibly oppressed.

In the next corner, an officious woman in a black dress is teaching economics for artists, with help from PowerPoint. She pulls up slides of supply and demand curves, opportunity costs and Porter’s Five Forces. She breaks down the price of a chair, in materials, overhead and labor costs — important information for any artisans in the audience. She’s the only person in the room with both an MBA and an MFA, and she’s spent most of her class time explaining how they’re not so different. Artists need to be businesspeople, and vice versa. The world’s more complicated than deciding whether you care about money or art. As she finishes, she pulls up an Adam Smith quote: “A work of art is a new thing in the world that changes the world to allow itself to exist.” She could be describing the event, the barter system or the Whitney itself, but she doesn’t say which.

She smiles. “If anyone has any questions, I’ll be right here.”

Russell Brandom once learned to make polenta in exchange for mopping a Transylvanian woman’s floor.