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Title: Give It Away Author: David Graeber Date: 2008 Language: en Topics: economics, gift economy Source: Retrieved on 14 November 2010 from http://www.freeebay.net/site/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=52&Itemid=34 Notes: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ for details.
Have you noticed how there aren’t any new French intellectuals any more?
There was a veritable flood in the late ’70s and early ’80s: Derrida,
Foucault, Baudrillard, Kristeva, Lyotard, de Certeau ... but there has
been almost no one since. Trendy academics and intellectual hipsters
have been forced to endlessly recycle theories now 20 or 30 years old,
or turn to countries like Italy or even Slovenia for dazzling
meta-theory.
Pioneering French anthropologist Marcel Mauss studied “gift economies”
like those of the Kwakiutl of British Columbia. His conclusions were
startling.
There are a lot of reasons for this. One has to do with politics in
France itself, where there has been a concerted effort on the part of
media elites to replace real intellectuals with American-style
empty-headed pundits. Still, they have not been completely successful.
More important, French intellectual life has become much more
politically engaged. In the U.S. press, there has been a near blackout
on cultural news from France since the great strike movement of 1995,
when France was the first nation to definitively reject the “American
model” for the economy, and refused to begin dismantling its welfare
state. In the American press, France immediately became the silly
country, vainly trying to duck the tide of history.
Of course this in itself is hardly going to faze the sort of Americans
who read Deleuze and Guattari. What American academics expect from
France is an intellectual high, the ability to feel one is participating
in wild, radical ideas demonstrating the inherent violence within
Western conceptions of truth or humanity, that sort of thing but in ways
that do not imply any program of political action; or, usually, any
responsibility to act at all. It’s easy to see how a class of people who
are considered almost entirely irrelevant both by political elites and
by 99 percent of the general population might feel this way. In other
words, while the U.S. media represent France as silly, U.S. academics
seek out those French thinkers who seem to fit the bill.
As a result, some of the most interesting scholars in France today you
never hear about at all. One such is a group of intellectuals who go by
the rather unwieldy name of Mouvement Anti-Utilitariste dans les
Sciences Sociales, or MAUSS, and who have dedicated themselves to a
systematic attack on the philosophical underpinnings of economic theory.
The group take their inspiration from the great early-20^(th) century
French sociologist Marcel Mauss, whose most famous work, The Gift
(1925), was perhaps the most magnificent refutation of the assumptions
behind economic theory ever written. At a time when “the free market” is
being rammed down everyone’s throat as both a natural and inevitable
product of human nature, Mauss’ work which demonstrated not only that
most non-Western societies did not work on anything resembling market
principles, but that neither do most modern Westerners is more relevant
than ever. While Francophile American scholars seem unable to come up
with much of anything to say about the rise of global neoliberalism, the
MAUSS group is attacking its very foundations.
A word of background. Marcel Mauss was born in 1872 to an Orthodox
Jewish family in Vosges. His uncle, Émile Durkheim, is considered the
founder of modern sociology. Durkheim surrounded himself with a circle
of brilliant young acolytes, among whom Mauss was appointed to study
religion. The circle, however, was shattered by World War I; many died
in the trenches, including Durkheim’s son, and Durkheim himself died of
grief shortly thereafter. Mauss was left to pick up the pieces.
By all accounts, though, Mauss was never taken completely seriously in
his role of heir apparent; a man of extraordinary erudition (he knew at
least a dozen languages, including Sanskrit, Maori and classical
Arabic), he still, somehow, lacked the gravity expected of a grand
professeur. A former amateur boxer, he was a burly man with a playful,
rather silly manner, the sort of person always juggling a dozen
brilliant ideas rather than building great philosophical systems. He
spent his life working on at least five different books (on prayer, on
nationalism, on the origins of money, etc.), none of which he ever
finished. Still, he succeeded in training a new generation of
sociologists and inventing French anthropology more or less
single-handedly, as well as in publishing a series of extraordinarily
innovative essays, just about each one of which has generated an
entirely new body of social theory all by itself.
Mauss was also a revolutionary socialist. From his student days on he
was a regular contributor to the left press, and remained most of his
life an active member of the French cooperative movement. He founded and
for many years helped run a consumer co-op in Paris; and was often sent
on missions to make contact with the movement in other countries (for
which purpose he spent time in Russia after the revolution). Mauss was
not a Marxist, though. His socialism was more in the tradition of Robert
Owen or Pierre-Joseph Proudhon: He considered Communists and Social
Democrats to be equally misguided in believing that society could be
transformed primarily through government action. Rather, the role of
government, he felt, was to provide the legal framework for a socialism
that had to be built from the ground up, by creating alternative
institutions.
The Russian revolution thus left him profoundly ambivalent. While
exhilarated by prospects of a genuine socialist experiment, he was
outraged by the Bolsheviks’ systematic use of terror, their suppression
of democratic institutions, and most of all by their “cynical doctrine
that the end justifies the means,” which, Mauss concluded, was really
just the amoral, rational calculus of the marketplace, slightly
transposed.
Mauss’ essay on “the gift” was, more than anything, his response to
events in Russia particularly Lenin’s New Economic Policy of 1921, which
abandoned earlier attempts to abolish commerce. If the market could not
simply be legislated away, even in Russia, probably the least
monetarized European society, then clearly, Mauss concluded,
revolutionaries were going to have to start thinking a lot more
seriously about what this “market” actually was, where it came from, and
what a viable alternative to it might actually be like. It was time to
bring the results of historical and ethnographic research to bear.
Mauss’ conclusions were startling. First of all, almost everything that
“economic science” had to say on the subject of economic history turned
out to be entirely untrue. The universal assumption of free market
enthusiasts, then as now, was that what essentially drives human beings
is a desire to maximize their pleasures, comforts and material
possessions (their “utility”), and that all significant human
interactions can thus be analyzed in market terms. In the beginning,
goes the official version, there was barter. People were forced to get
what they wanted by directly trading one thing for another. Since this
was inconvenient, they eventually invented money as a universal medium
of exchange. The invention of further technologies of exchange (credit,
banking, stock exchanges) was simply a logical extension.
The problem was, as Mauss was quick to note, there is no reason to
believe a society based on barter has ever existed. Instead, what
anthropologists were discovering were societies where economic life was
based on utterly different principles, and most objects moved back and
forth as gifts and almost everything we would call “economic” behavior
was based on a pretense of pure generosity and a refusal to calculate
exactly who had given what to whom. Such “gift economies” could on
occasion become highly competitive, but when they did it was in exactly
the opposite way from our own: Instead of vying to see who could
accumulate the most, the winners were the ones who managed to give the
most away. In some notorious cases, such as the Kwakiutl of British
Columbia, this could lead to dramatic contests of liberality, where
ambitious chiefs would try to outdo one another by distributing
thousands of silver bracelets, Hudson Bay blankets or Singer sewing
machines, and even by destroying wealth sinking famous heirlooms in the
ocean, or setting huge piles of wealth on fire and daring their rivals
to do the same.
All of this may seem very exotic. But as Mauss also asked: How alien is
it, really? Is there not something odd about the very idea of
gift-giving, even in our own society? Why is it that, when one receives
a gift from a friend (a drink, a dinner invitation, a compliment), one
feels somehow obliged to reciprocate in kind? Why is it that a recipient
of generosity often somehow feels reduced if he or she cannot? Are these
not examples of universal human feelings, which are somehow discounted
in our own society but in others were the very basis of the economic
system? And is it not the existence of these very different impulses and
moral standards, even in a capitalist system such as our own, that is
the real basis for the appeal of alternative visions and socialist
policies? Mauss certainly felt so.
In a lot of ways Mauss’ analysis bore a marked resemblance to Marxist
theories about alienation and reification being developed by figures
like György Lukács around the same time. In gift economies, Mauss
argued, exchanges do not have the impersonal qualities of the capitalist
marketplace: In fact, even when objects of great value change hands,
what really matters is the relations between the people; exchange is
about creating friendships, or working out rivalries, or obligations,
and only incidentally about moving around valuable goods. As a result
everything becomes personally charged, even property: In gift economies,
the most famous objects of wealth heirloom necklaces, weapons, feather
cloaks always seem to develop personalities of their own.
In a market economy it’s exactly the other way around. Transactions are
seen simply as ways of getting one’s hands on useful things; the
personal qualities of buyer and seller should ideally be completely
irrelevant. As a consequence everything, even people, start being
treated as if they were things too. (Consider in this light the
expression “goods and services.”) The main difference with Marxism,
however, is that while Marxists of his day still insisted on a
bottom-line economic determinism, Mauss held that in past market-less
societies and by implication, in any truly humane future one “the
economy,” in the sense of an autonomous domain of action concerned
solely with the creation and distribution of wealth, and which proceeded
by its own, impersonal logic, would not even exist.
Mauss was never entirely sure what his practical conclusions were. The
Russian experience convinced him that buying and selling could not
simply be eliminated in a modern society, at least “in the foreseeable
future,” but a market ethos could. Work could be co-operatized,
effective social security guaranteed and, gradually, a new ethos created
whereby the only possible excuse for accumulating wealth was the ability
to give it all away. The result: a society whose highest values would be
“the joy of giving in public, the delight in generous artistic
expenditure, the pleasure of hospitality in the public or private
feast.”
Some of this may seem awfully naïve from today’s perspective, but Mauss’
core insights have, if anything, become even more relevant now than they
were 75 years ago now that economic “science” has become, effectively,
the revealed religion of the modern age. So it seemed, anyway, to the
founders of MAUSS.
The idea for MAUSS was born in 1980. The project is said to have emerged
from a conversation over lunch between a French sociologist, Alain
Caillé, and a Swiss anthropologist, Gérald Berthoud. They had just sat
through several days of an interdisciplinary conference on the subject
of gifts, and after reviewing the papers, they came to the shocked
realization that it did not seem to have occurred to a single scholar in
attendance that a significant motive for giving gifts might be, say,
generosity, or genuine concern for another person’s welfare. In fact,
the scholars at the conference invariably assumed that “gifts” do not
really exist: Scratch deep enough behind any human action, and you’ll
always discover some selfish, calculating strategy. Even more oddly,
they assumed that this selfish strategy was always, necessarily, the
real truth of the matter; that it was more real somehow than any other
motive in which it might be entangled. It was as if to be scientific, to
be “objective” meant to be completely cynical. Why?
Caillé ultimately came to blame Christianity. Ancient Rome still
preserved something of the older ideal of aristocratic open-handedness:
Roman magnates built public gardens and monuments, and vied to sponsor
the most magnificent games. But Roman generosity was also quite
obviously meant to wound: One favorite habit was scattering gold and
jewels before the masses to watch them tussle in the mud to scoop them
up. Early Christians, for obvious reasons, developed their notion of
charity in direct reaction to such obnoxious practices. True charity was
not based on any desire to establish superiority, or favor, or indeed
any egoistic motive whatsoever. To the degree that the giver could be
said to have gotten anything out of the deal, it wasn’t a real gift.
But this in turn led to endless problems, since it was very difficult to
conceive of a gift that did not benefit the giver in any way. Even an
entirely selfless act would win one points with God. There began the
habit of searching every act for the degree to which it could be said to
mask some hidden selfishness, and then assuming that this selfishness is
what’s really important. One sees the same move reproduced so
consistently in modern social theory. Economists and Christian
theologians agree that if one takes pleasure in an act of generosity, it
is somehow less generous. They just disagree on the moral implications.
To counteract this very perverse logic, Mauss emphasized the “pleasure”
and “joy” of giving: In traditional societies, there was not assumed to
be any contradiction between what we would call self-interest (a phrase
that, he noted, could not even be translated into most human languages)
and concern for others; the whole point of the traditional gift is that
it furthers both at the same time.
These, anyway, were the kind of issues that first engaged the small,
interdisciplinary group of French and French-speaking scholars (Caillé,
Berthoud, Ahmet Insel, Serge Latouche, Pauline Taieb) who were to become
MAUSS. Actually, the group itself began as a journal, called Revue du
MAUSS a very small journal, printed sloppily on bad paper whose authors
conceived it as much as an in-joke as a venue for serious scholarship,
the flagship journal for a vast international movement that did not then
exist. Caillé wrote manifestos; Insel penned fantasies about great
international anti-utilitarian conventions of the future. Articles on
economics alternated with snatches from Russian novelists. But
gradually, the movement did begin to materialize. By the mid-’90s, MAUSS
had become an impressive network of scholars ranging from sociologists
and anthropologists to economists, historians and philosophers, from
Europe, North Africa and the Middle East whose ideas had become
represented in three different journals and a prominent book series (all
in French) backed up by annual conferences.
Since the strikes of 1995 and the election of a Socialist government,
Mauss’ own works have undergone a considerable revival in France, with
the publication of a new biography and a collection of his political
writings. At the same time, the MAUSS group themselves have become
evermore explicitly political. In 1997, Caillé released a broadside
called “30 Theses for a New Left,” and the MAUSS group have begun
dedicating their annual conferences to specific policy issues. Their
answer to the endless calls for France to adopt the “American model” and
dismantle its welfare state, for example, was to begin promulgating an
economic idea originally proposed by American revolutionary Tom Paine:
the guaranteed national income. The real way to reform welfare policy is
not to begin stripping away social benefits, but to reframe the whole
conception of what a state owes its citizens. Let us jettison welfare
and unemployment programs, they said. But instead, let us create a
system where every French citizen is guaranteed the same starting income
(say, $20,000, supplied directly by the government) and then the rest
can be up to them.
It is hard to know exactly what to make of the Maussian left,
particularly insofar as Mauss is being promoted now, in some quarters,
as an alternative to Marx. It would be easy to write them off as simply
super-charged social democrats, not really interested in the radical
transformation of society. Caillé’s “30 Theses,” for example, agree with
Mauss in conceding the inevitability of some kind of market — but still,
like him, look forward to the abolition of capitalism, here defined as
the pursuit of financial profit as an end in itself. On another level,
though, the Maussian attack on the logic of the market is more profound,
and more radical, than anything else now on the intellectual horizon. It
is hard to escape the impression that this is precisely why American
intellectuals, particularly those who believe themselves to be the most
wild-eyed radicals, willing to deconstruct almost any concept except
greed or selfishness, simply don’t know what to make of the Maussians
why, in fact, their work has been almost completely ignored.