Replying to LO29821 --
Andrew, Richard,
Here is something else. I understand it but a lot of people don't really
"get this" as Graeber says, since it is so far away from the neo-classic
economic model the economy is built on.
Ray Evans Harrell
from: In These Times, August 21, 2000
Give It Away
By David Graeber
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.
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-2Oth 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, Emile 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 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 Kwakiutt 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 certainty
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
Gyorgy 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 naďve m 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 modem 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, GeraId 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 modem 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- 9Os, 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.
David Graeber is a professor of anthropology at Yale University.
> An Economy for Giving Everything Away.
>
> Does anyone recognise the title of this essay? Would anyone like to read
> it...
--"Ray Evans Harrell" <mcore@nyc.rr.com>
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