Commerce is just the exchange of goods and services. If we all stop exchanging goods, in what sense would we have a civilization? What would you or anyone accomplish if you had to grow your own food, make your own clothes, build your own house…?
Currency is a natural evolution of commerce. Direct barter only works if the person selling what you need wants something you have.
Say you want to buy flowers. If the florist wants shoes and you only have bread or hammers to spare, then tough luck.
Any large society cannot function with such a clunky way to exchange goods/services. Currency is merely a proxy that allows both sides to trade their goods using a tool they both value similarly. Hell, some civilisations used giant boulders as currency… it’s hardly a new concept.
An exchange of goods and services means you get nothing unless I get something. Maybe OP means everything is given as you take what you need with nothing expected in return.
You grow carrots, you bring them to town once a week. Other lady raises chickens, brings eggs once a week. If you need either you take some. You use the eggs to make cookies, you have extra, you give them away to anyone you see for the day.
This works at a feudal technology level. Who makes the trains? They train makers need steel and literally no one would work in a forge or a mine for fun/preference.
Who makes computer chips?
In a communist society, say Soviet Russia, were the goods for a train really exchanged?
Like yeah, the ore comes from the mine, gets smelted, coked, forged, brought to another factory for machining, another factory for assembly.
So does it fulfill the definition requiring exchange of goods? I argue not, The goods were transported, but the ownership remained with the government.
People with the skills show up and collectively make chips, there may be less than produced by typical “blood from a rock” endless growth pacing, but there would at least be enough chips for hospitals, emergency services.
And without the profit motive, the products made would actually be built to last and engineered to be serviceable because there’s actually incentive for them to NOT be disposable.
