On the Gift Economy, A Response to Kermit

Kermit extols the virtues of gift-giving as an alternative to market exchange, with allusions to Marx and Bataille, but specific reference to Lewis Hyde (“Breaking Down the Market in our Heads: Abandoning the Logic of Capital” Slingshot #101).

Kermit identifies capitalism with market exchange. Marx uses market exchange to oppose capitalism in the first pages of Capital. I.e. capitalism is faulty because it breaks the basic law of the market, that exchange should be fair, equal value for equal value. Capitalism is to be criticized specifically because it seeks to “cheat”, to extract value by exchanging that of lesser value for that of greater. Furthermore, it is capitalism, and not market exchange, that subjugates value in use to value in exchange. In a natural, i.e. pre-capitalist society, markets serve the valid function of exchanging the products of one’s labor for the products of another’s labor. If I don’t have to train myself to be my own cobbler, architect, builder, garbage-man, farmer, and tailor, I can be more effective and efficient in my labor. However, in order to do so, I have to have access to a market in which I can exchange the products of my labor, whatever they are, for the products of the labor of the tailor, cobbler, builder, etc., that I need for my own very human (i.e. not artificially-created and not exchange-based) needs. Markets are far older than capitalism, and so is cheating, but it is capitalism that raises cheating to the status of a systemic necessity, in order to extract profit.

Students of anthropology will note that even very primitive, pre-capitalist societies, indigenous peoples who live as nearly as possible outside of industrialization, have very rigorous notions of exchange. These concepts of exchange extend even to human beings, and the loss of one person from the tribe is often seen as compensatable by an equivalent exchange in livestock and other goods, which is seen to compensate for the lost labor that the lost person would have produced in the remainder of their life in the tribe. Students of anthropology will also make reference to The Gift as the locus classicus for gift economy, not the one by Lewis Hyde but the one by Marcel Mauss. Mauss achieved noteriety by pointing out that gifts necessarily put their recipient in debt. The only difference, in fact, between gift exchange and market exchange is that the compensation for gifts is normally paid at a different time and in a different form than the original item or a currency. People who fail to make this exchange will be seen as tight and will not be the recipients of further gifts, as the givers will feel cheated.

And who has not been the recipient of an unwanted gift? A gift can be highly obnoxious in its coercive effect to initiate an exchange of gifts where one is not wanted, a relationship that is not desirable, nor desired. This gives rise to the phenomenon of guilt, an already huge cultural edifice and the subject of extended meditations by Nietzsche. This leads to the subject of gifts that not only seek to establish an unwanted relationship but are in fact unwanted themselves. They may be given to someone who is thought to need them, through they profess not to want them. Much psychiatric treatment falls into this category, and these gifts seldom serve the interests of anyone but their givers.

The appeal to nature is poorly made. Yes, fruit rots on trees. Yes, such waste is riotous with life. Yes, it is hardly calculated. However, although it is not the result of calculation, its results are the same. For the fruit to rot, the spores of mold or microorganisms must reach it. For spores to reach it, they must spread everywhere. For them to reach everywhere, they must be produced very economically, in enormous number and microscopic size. The organism must organize its reproductive cycle and allocate its biomass within very tight limits if it is to meet these demands. The process of variation and selection in evolution disciplines organisms to be very strategic or else go extinct. In fact, many concepts in classical economics had their origins in ecology. The effect is identical to systemic calculation, even if it was reached by other means. Calculation itself is little more than the attempt to speed up evolution by anticipating evolutionary dead-ends in advance, rather than actually suffering through them, a process that can take time on a geologic scale. Who can really say what “waste” is, in this context? The fruit is rotting, so it is waste to us humans, but it’s serious business for the rot, and may be key to the tree’s reproductive cycle as well. I’m averse to visions of nature as a big factory, a market, etc., but what’s interesting is that it isn’t decidable. Whether to see it one way or the other is up to you. Sure, not every spore matures into a full-fledged organism (far from it!). But are the rest still waste if they are necessary for the statistical likelihood of one spore to survive? Profligate waste everywhere evident in nature can thus be evidence of life’s mere impotence. Whether the evolutionary variations are truly random “mistakes” in genetic transcription, etc. (i.e., “waste”, the conventional view) is debatable and an unfortunate opportunity for religious lunacy. For an early survey of the arguments in this area (bereft of religious overtones), consult Bergson’s Creative Evolution.

Let’s not forget how deep the logic of exchange really goes, as Nietzsche and others remind us. Exchange is deeply rooted in notions of fairness and justice. Negative exchanges are completed through retribution and old, old laws going back to Homer, the Torah, etc. The syntagmatic compulsion to complete the cycle can be irrisistable, and goes beyond the distinction between gifts and exchange. Is long-sought revenge a gift or the end of an exchange? What about the return of the repressed in Freud? The master/slave dialectic in Hegel?

In short, gift economies are impractical to meet all human needs, are already ubiquitous to a negative degree in human society, and not simply opposed to capitalism (in many ways, consonant with it). This is not to vitiate the point of Kermit’s article, but to burn away the detritus that clouds and obscures it, that the notion of exchange corrupts human relationships and makes them overly worldly, cheap, and ultimately insufferable. The problem is more pervasive than can be dispelled by a simple giving of gifts. Yes, keeping a mental accounting of one’s position vis-à-vis everyone else is wearying, penurious, and withering of the spirit, but what is to be done?

To escape these traps (of the pervasiveness of the logic of exchange, whether through gifts, capitalism, or otherwise), one needs to reach for Bataille. Bataille, careful student of Hegel and Nietzsche, was wary of these traps. He realized that there is no freedom from exchange except in the conscious practice of intentional waste, which he elevated to fundamental status. All forms of exchange, the results of careful calculation, etc., Bataille relegates to the status of restricted economy. The bigger processes, the general economy, is exemplified by things like potlach – the intentional, useless and profligate destruction of wealth that can never be compensated – among the first nation peoples of the pacific northwest (The Accursed Share). Yes, the effect of evolution is as if strategic and carefully calculated, in the small, but to what end? The ultimate end of all life is only death (and then more life). In order to break out of the small-minded, alienating cycle of exchange, we must will specifically unnecessary sacrifice and waste, per Bataille. We must practice what has been condemned in society as evil. It is in fact the anguish of loss that forms emotional bonds between people. It is in fact the bereaved company of the funeral that is the basis for all community, and thus all political society, a theme explored by Jean-Luc Nancy in his masterful The Inoperative Community. It is perhaps this that Kermit is trying to get at with his rotting fruit example.

These ideas are not only heterodox but blasphemous to our culture’s most treasured ideals of humanity and society, a small list of which I have just given. Derrida sounds these themes in his early essay on Bataille, “From Restricted to General Economy A Hegelianism without Reserve”, pp. 251-77 in Writing and Difference, and returns to their specific consequences for the ideal of exchange much later in his Given Time I: Counterfeit Money. On a psychoanalytic level, the classical ideas of good and evil (so well summarized by Schelling) have led, through a sort of excess of the good, to the phenomenon of abjection, of vomiting up the mother’s milk (Kristeva, Powers of Horror). Since Aristotle at least, political society is supposed to be based on the sharing of collective ideals and goals, i.e. “the Good”. However, not only do the relationships that spring from working towards common goals (such as the maximization of societal wealth, i.e. capitalism) superficial and unsatisfying in many ways, the apotheosis of this ideal is fascism. This is not just the hyperbolic assertion of irresponsible French scholarship, it has a very sound echo on this side of the Atlantic in Social Choice Theory (SCT). SCT was founded by Kenneth Arrow’s mathematical study of voting algorithms, leading to the astonishing result that there can be no such thing as a social welfare function (a common goal) that is in any way an aggregate of the goals of the individuals in society (Social Choice and Individual Values). In fact, it can only be imposed by a dictator if it is to meet minimal standards of rationality. The very distressing results of this thesis for political economy are summarized by Riker, Liberalism Against Populism. Insofar as we wish to be democratic, we are condemned to irrationality in our societal policies. “The Good” is a fascist chimera.

“It was easier, when I was younger, to hold onto a sense of righteousness when I looked out at the world…” begins Kermit. Certainly. One of the dangers of tarrying with such postmodern ideas is that one can become very skeptical of righteous zeal. Taking them seriously, one may find oneself the receipt of the unwanted gift of police surveillance and psychiatric treatment, the last defense against dangerous ideas and the people who espouse them by a defensive and insecure society, badly on the ropes of the contradictions in its logic and ideals.