The Club de Trueque appears as a pioneering complementary scheme to make an income in a period of economic hardship. The notion of a group of neighbours making their own money to exchange commodities in a suburb of Buenos Aires sounds extraordinary. However, the CT was the final outcome of a series of small innovations achieved by trial and error. The process included considerable hesitation and frustration on the part of the organizers.

This chapter looks at the CT as an example of a social network that made its own market institutions to exchange goods and services. The monetization of their system of payments with scrip was part of that construction. The CT is hence presented as a scheme that combined small innovations with overall continuity in the line of Argentine history.

All over the world market institutions are being organized as clubs to trade an endless variety of commodities, from new financial instruments in New York to maize and potatoes in the Andes to unwanted Christmas presents through Internet auction sites. Complementary currency systems, as presented in Chapter 2, are another example of these organizational efforts. The owners of the commodities search for an institutional infrastructure where their goods can change hands, and in circumstances when it does not exist, agents can elaborate it. Those fit in the category of designed institutions. Markets are defined as a mode of coordination under scarcity in which transactions are mediated by prices over which buyers and sellers compete and reach agreements.

The Social Organization of Exchange

Modern societies are characterized as market societies, with monetarized exchange of goods and services dominating circulation and organizing the social order. Markets are a mode of coordination, in the sense that they present relatively stable relationships of otherwise disparate activities or events. Coordination means that tasks and efforts are made compatible, while bottlenecks and other disjunctures are eliminated. Agencies are ordered, balanced, brought to equilibrium.