August 8, 2003
Awakened Woman's Circle is working for peace
Why we need the gift economy
by Genevieve Vaughan
This talk will be presented at the World Women's Social Forum sponsored by Femattac, Austria, September, 2003
The purpose of this panel is to offer an analysis which could justify the unity of the feminist movement in opposition to patriarchal capitalism and claim leadership for the values of women in the movement for social change. An analysis that links different levels and areas of life on the basis of an alternative paradigm can suggest that much of what patriarchy has put into place is artificial and unnecessary. An alternative paradigm that sees women as the model of the human and patriarchy as founded on males' rejection of their own (female) humanity can provide the basis of a political program beyond present divisions. A radically different frame would make different strategies possible, and eliminate some solutions that would otherwise bring us back under patriarchal control in different forms.
In order to make this analysis we make a basic distinction between gift giving on the one hand and exchange on the other as two distinct logics. In the logic of exchange a good is given in order to receive its equivalent in return.There is an equation of value, quantification and measurement. In gift giving, one gives to satisfy the need of another and the creativity of the receiver in using the gifts is as important as the creativity of the giver. The gift interaction is transitive and the product passes from one person to the other, creating a relation of inclusion between the giver and the receiver with regard to what is given. Gift giving implies the value of the other while the exchange transaction which is made to satisfy one's own need is reflexive and implies the value only of oneself. Gift giving is qualitative rather than quantitative, other- oriented rather than ego oriented, inclusive rather than exclusive. Gift giving can be used for many purposes . Its relation-creating capacity creates community, while exchange is an adversarial interaction that creates atomistic individuals. Our society has based distribution upon exchange, and the ideology of exchange permeates our thinking. For example we consider ourselves human 'capital', choose our mates on the 'marriage market', base justice on 'paying for crimes, motivate wars through 'reprisal' and teeter on the brink of nuclear 'exchanges'. Indigenous cultures, based more on gift giving, had very different world views.
Exchange now determines the context in which gifts are given, and therefore distorts the character of gift giving, making it appear dysfunctional of itself. Exchange and gift giving are the basis of two world views or paradigms that are locked together in competition and conflict but are also complementary. Since competition is one of the values of the exchange paradigm while cooperation is a result of coordinated gift giving, the exchange paradigm 'wins' the struggle. However gift giving is much more life enhancing and practical than is exchange, and it is therefore necessary for exchange to create scarcity so that gift giving will be difficult. The abundance provided by the gifts of nature and culture would allow the gift paradigm to become generalized and the practice of the gift logic to provide creatively for everyone. It is therefore necessary for the exchange paradigm to create a context of scarcity whereby some exchangers maintain a leverage over the gifts of all. This is the basis of the parasitism of the few upon the many. By over priveleging a few the market is able to drain the resources which would allow an alternative to its domination. The globalizing market finds more and more areas of previously free resources which it can make scarse. To this we can add the waste of wealth on (phallic symbolic) armaments and wars, waste caused by over-consumption and the draining away of the gift capacity especially of women under control of their husbands, their religions, their bosses and local and international capitalism.
In fact because women are socially assigned the job of mothering they usually have to practice the gift logic for some years as adults, even when the society they live in is dominated by exchange. In fact young children cannot exchange by giving back an equivalent of what has been given to them and they must be cared for by adults who are giving unilaterally. It is not a biological mandate that women nurture children, but a biological dependence of the children that makes unilateral gift giving towards them necessary.
Because the two paradigms are locked in conflict, exchange tries to discredit and conceal the gift whenever possible. It also infects gift giving and givers with its own values, so that gift giving can become manipulative and ego oriented. There is a spectrum of gifts at different levels , from unilateral gift giving, to substitute and symbolic gift giving to the gift constrained and doubled back upon itself in exchange. Even after exchange holds sway, gifts can arise again as in giving a job or a loan or supporting a family through waged labor. The exchange mode is parasitic upon the gift mode, and the market is parasitic upon the gifts of all for its motivation and its raison d'etre. Profit coming from surplus value is that part of the value of labor not covered by the salary and thus can be seen as a leveraged gift given by the worker to the capitalist. The scarcity in the context - the lack of means of giving available to the worker in non monetized resources, creates the leverage by which surplus value is extracted. Housework also passes through the gift of the male or female worker to the capitalist. The less the cost of labor and raw materials to the capitalist, the greater the portion of leveraged gifts they contain. Now with housewifization women have become the hosts of the patriarchal capitalistic parasite directly and on a broad scale the countries of the South have become the femized gift givers, whose gifts of cheap ( mostly gift) labor and raw materials flow to to the North. Gifts of nature,water, species, life forms, and genes are being commodified, that is, assimilated into the market category as objects of exchange. The market is taking over the resources that were available to be given as gifts to sustain life and which were used in the formation of the relations which are the basis of community.
Women are socialized towards gift giving while men are socialized towards a manhood agenda in opposition to their nurturing mothers. Naming boy children as male puts them in a category which is opposite to that of their mother who in their infancy is supplying their every need.The creation of a gender category in opposition to the mother results in a gender which has not-giving as its socially imposed agenda. Giving is replaced by domination, as the model of the male not-giver replaces the model of the mother as the exemplar for the category 'human'. Since there are few aspects of life that are not based on gift giving, being the exemplar becomes the content of the category 'male'.The boy takes on an artificial manhood agenda of competition and domination, stoicism and autonomy which he must enact in order to assert his gender identity. Private property and the market provide a space in which each owner can be a transposed exemplar, while money, the general equivalent is the incarnated exemplar of value. The market gives a non nurturing area in which the values of the manhood agenda can thrive and in fact the values of competition, domination and having more, move both patriarchy and capitalism. These social transpositions of gender allow women to participate as well as men in values and processes based on the male not-giving identity.
The early relegation of boy children into the not giving category causes the denial of gift giving and gift values throughout the society.Adopting a paradigm or world view which restores the gift as an interpretative key to disciplines from which it has been deleted allows us to re focus our attention. Language itself can be seen as verbal gift giving and receiving. Communication is co-muni-cation which forms co-muni-ty. From this point of view we can see the market as a kind of alienated psycho-semiotic sorting mechanism, in which money as the exemplar of value divides commodities having exchange value from 'valueless' free gifts (in the same way that similarity to the father divides the valued boy child from the unvalued category of nurturers). This division between commodities and gifts allows for greater value to be given to the market and male categories, and more gifts to be directed towards them. By understanding the market as something which is not primary or 'natural' but derived from a false social gender categorization we can deal with it more effectively and we can focus on gift giving, which already exists, as the alternative.
Essentialism can be circumvented by looking at giftgiving as an economic structure and superstructure which have been hidden and dominated by Patriarchy but which still exist. Gift giving is also a way of explaining the human in non patriarchal terms as homo donans rather than only as homo sapiens. This shift in perspective will allow us to validate gift giving as a practise and an interpretative key demoting Patriarchy, Capitalism, money and the market itself from their position of standards of value and reality. As we bring about this transformation we also need to survive so we must be clear that we can still intelligently use exchange for the purpose of gift giving. Martyrs to the cause of gift giving only make it look impractical and out of reach.Social experiments based on the gift need not to be based on charity but connected to a far reaching shift in perspective. By restoring the gift to our interpretation of nature and culture whenever the direct satisfaction of needs occurs, in ecological niches and language, in symbiosis and in cooperation, in perception and communication, we can provide a context for gift giving which is being negated at the practical level by the globalizing market. Thus we can find already existing in our daily lives, in culture and nature the possible world we must create for the survival of humans and the planet.
Genevieve Vaughan is the
author of a linguistic analysis of patriarchal economics,
For-Giving, A Feminist Criticism of Exchange, which
can be read at her website, www.for-giving.com/
or purchased from Plain
View Press at
<http://www.plainviewpress.com> You might also like to
visit her gift
economy website at
http://www.gift-economy.com/