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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.
Pioneering French anthropologist Marcel Mauss studied "gift economies" like
those of the Kwakiutl of British Columbia. His conclusions were startling.
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-20th 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 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 naďve 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.
David Graeber is a professor of anthropology at Yale University.
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The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking
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~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The libertarian therefore considers one of his prime educational
tasks is to spread the demystification and desanctification of the
State among its hapless subjects. His task is to demonstrate
repeatedly and in depth that not only the emperor but even the
"democratic" State has no clothes; that all governments subsist
by exploitive rule over the public; and that such rule is the reverse
of objective necessity. He strives to show that the existence of
taxation and the State necessarily sets up a class division between
the exploiting rulers and the exploited ruled. He seeks to show that
the task of the court intellectuals who have always supported the State
has ever been to weave mystification in order to induce the public to
accept State rule and that these intellectuals obtain, in return, a
share in the power and pelf extracted by the rulers from their deluded
subjects.
[[For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto, Murray N. Rothbard,
Fox & Wilkes, 1973, 1978, p. 25]]
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