Chapter 1: What is Mutual Credit?

Mutual aid refers to the voluntary, reciprocal exchange of resources and services among groups of people (communities, networks, societies) for mutual benefit and is one of the oldest forms of cooperation among people.

To summarize this view, the foundation of the human economy is built on bartering and swapping for mutual benefit: it makes us human, and let us specialize. Money and coinage evolved as an abstract representation of scarcity, in order to facilitate that bargaining. And then credit and banking evolved on top of that.