People never have just one need, and you can also repay the “debt” with your labor not just other goods. He may say I need lumber, but you could say “I don’t have lumber but I can help around the farm, I can cook you some meals, I can watch your kids, take your cows to pasture, etc.”. If you are a productive member of society you or the person can find some way to repay the debt. If you are utterly useless to them then they won’t give you the chicken or may give it to you as charity, but most people aren’t useless. I can think of ten things around my house that pretty much any able bodied person could do and that would be helpful to me.

Also it doesn’t have to be immediately exchanged, again this is built off trust. Maybe the farmer doesn’t need help now but come harvest time he’ll need some extra hands. Same with the potatoes, he may not need potatoes now but he’ll probably want some eventually.

You can see this reciprocity in a lot of close relationships, especially within families. You may never exchange money with a person but you get stuff for them, make stuff for them and do stuff for them under the assumption that they’ll get you back. It may not completely even out in monetary terms but your fine with it because it simplifies a lot of things.

When I was talking about it’s communist nature I meant more the Andean civilizations. They were communist in the sense that ownership of the means of production (land) was held in common by a community or commune, in the Andean case an ayllu . Labor was organized around reciprocity and obligations to your community, and the state rather than around the market and exchange within the community. You can read more about it here

Also I was wrong about them paying tribute / taxes with produce to the state, they didn’t. They were required to work for the state / nobles a set amount each year as there tribute.

It is my understanding that meso america also had similar communal ownership, and that system is what groups like the zapatistas are harkening back to.

Also, while money as a whole isn’t natural, it develops naturally as a necessity for commodity production

Not necessarily, the inca didn’t have money but they were still able to produce commodities like cloth.

It didn’t happen in Andean civilizations like the inca and they became pretty advanced and were able to move goods across vast distances. They weren’t bartering either, they lived under a sort of communism where the people of a community shared there produce while giving a bit up to the state which would warehouse some of it for hard times and give the rest to nobles.

I don’t think meso American civilization had money either.

The concept of money isn’t natural, it’s just very viral as it spreads across trade routes, so it easily spread to all old world civilizations, which people mistakenly assume is all civilization.

Without money, I would have to go to the chicken farmer, find out that he needs lumber, go to the sawmill, find out what he needs, and so-on until I find someone along the chain that actually needs my potatoes.

No, in a system of trust you’d go to the chicken farmer and say “hey can I have a chicken, I’ll get you back however I can” and he gives you a chicken. Then you try to ways to help him out until you’ve felt you repaid your “debt”. This is how exchange worked before money under tribal systems. Not every exchange has to be transactional, that’s just something capitalism tries to instill in us.