Core Idea
Exchange vs reciprocity is the distinction between relationships organized by price and relationships organized by mutual obligation, gift, trust, or shared life.
How It Works
Varoufakis uses this contrast to show that markets did not invent cooperation. People have long shared, helped, traded, and owed one another things without reducing every interaction to a priced exchange. Reciprocity belongs to a different moral and social logic than market trade.
This matters because market society tends to rewrite human life in its own image. Once price-mediated exchange becomes dominant, it becomes harder even to notice forms of value and obligation that lie outside the market. Reciprocity then looks primitive, inefficient, or invisible, even though it remains central to real life.
Example
Some of the book's smallest examples do the most work here: favors, companionship, diving to help someone, shared life that is good without being sold. These are goods, but not market goods in the narrow sense.
Why It Matters
The concept keeps the reader from assuming that market exchange is the natural measure of all cooperation. It also supports the book's wider claim that modern capitalism narrows what counts as value by forcing more of life through price.