----- Original Message -----
From: Bob Wallace <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Tuesday, August 08, 2000 3:55 PM
Subject: Giving vs Economics
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 trans formed 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.
