International Conference on the Gift Economy
Nov 12-14, 2004: Las Vegas, Nevada

A Radically Different World View is Possible

The gift economy inside and outside of Patriarchal Capitalism

Conference Concept Statement

The stage seems to have been set for the millennium by Patriarchy and Capitalism with wars and counter wars at the personal and at the political levels. Attack and reprisal seem to be the pattern of interaction of all. Even suspicion of intent to attack is thought to justify counterattack. The cycle of violence is based upon exchange, tit for tat, which is a development of the logic of the market, giving in order to receive a quantitative equivalent.

There is another logic, the logic of unilateral gift giving, that has not been considered, yet it is practiced in society at many levels all the time. First, the gift logic is necessary for mothering: satisfying the needs of children who cannot give an equal payment in return. Housework is itself an immense free gift that women give to the market economy. In fact it has been estimated that housework would add 40% to the GNP in the US if it were calculated in monetary terms. Directly satisfying needs of all kinds, whether material, psychological or spiritual, creates community, while exchange, which is adversarial, with each trying to get more and give less, creates competition and hierarchy. Exchange is "ego" oriented because one satisfies the need of the other only to satisfy h/er own need, while giving directly to the other is "other" oriented. Capitalism is built upon exchange and incorporates the Patriarchal values of competition and hierarchy. In fact Capitalism needs Patriarchal individuals to carry out its self aggrandizing agendas.

Gift based societies existed prior to Capitalism and some still exist today. Indigenous peoples practice gift giving both in interpersonal interactions and in regard to the Spiritual and natural worlds. Matriarchal societies (which are not the mirror image of patriarchies) on all the continents continue to practice gift giving. There are many gift based areas within Capitalism as well. The home, where children are parented free, is one example of this. In fact mothering may be considered as a vestigial gift giving practice and homes as pockets of a gift economy. An example at a different level of a gift within Capitalism is the huge quantity of remittances that immigrants to Northern countries send home to their families and friends in the South, equaling or sometimes surpassing sources of income in their countries of origin. In fact the free distribution of goods to needs can be considered as a working gift economy with its own priorities and values. Any time a need is satisfied free, a gift is given.

Gift giving happens not only with material goods but also with communication, and a case can be made that language itself is based on gift giving at many levels. Music, dance, arts of all kinds which are not bought or sold, or when they are priceless, ie beyond commerce, have an important gift aspect. Nature gives many free gifts as well: air, water, sky, space, and all the varieties of perception. Culture also provides gifts of tradition, the common know-how, lore and information that have been handed down for centuries, given as gifts from one generation to another. With globalization these gifts are being commodified and transformed into goods to be bought and sold to the advantage of corporations.

The gift has been ignored by those who study the economy but actually from our perspective, surplus labor, the labor above the value of the workers' salary, in other words profit, is a gift to the capitalist from the worker. The motivator of the market, profit, is itself a gift though it is not called that. In fact all the gifts of humanity and nature are being siphoned off at an alarming rate and passed into the hands of the few who miss-spend them on armaments or otherwise waste profit gifts instead of using them to satisfy human and environmental needs. Patriarchal Capitalism has to create the scarcity that makes gift giving difficult in order to maintain its control. In a situation of abundance the system of domination would not be necessary. Capitalist patriarchy accords privilege to the few and wastes 'excess' wealth to maintain scarcity.

Within Capitalism there are many areas of gift giving, beginning with those in which people are trying to satisfy the big picture needs of society for systemic change. For example there is the anti globalization movement, which is trying to save the collective gifts of the common people from the corporations. There is the peace movement, there is the movement against domestic violence; there is even a movement of the capitalists themselves to satisfy the need to change the system: the funding movement for social change.

There are also cross-overs in these movements, for example anti global Native American funders for social change, matriarchal goddess spirituality artists, people working on domestic violence, who see how it is connected to war and international violence. All of these attempts to satisfy needs, and to give gifts, are discredited by the ideology of exchange and self interest. That ideology ignores the importance of needs and of giving to satisfy them. Instead it privileges 'effective demand', a market category which privileges the needs that people must pay to satisfy and for which they possess the necessary money. Even education and the media which should satisfy the needs of the people for knowledge are becoming commercialized to the extent that they only satisfy the needs of Capital and the governments' needs for propaganda. At most Patriarchal Capitalism permits band aid charitable giving which allows the system to continue unchanged by addressing some of its most cruel inequities. On the other hand it also advertises its own manipulative 'gifts' - thus foreign 'aid'- or uses the satisfaction of needs as a pretext for its aggressions- thus the invasion of Iraq to 'help' the Iraqi people.

The system of exchange arrogates to itself the right to model gift giving (in return for a price). It discredits real gift giving and validates itself. Many of us internalize those negative judgments and values. People who give their time and indeed their lives to improve conditions for others do so under the burden of believing that the system is right or that they are crazy, too soft hearted or even co dependent, but they do it anyway. The answers will not be found in the old paradigm. We need to recognize what Patriarchal Capitalism is doing and provide an alternative. Denouncing the terrible evils of the system is important but until we recognize that another world view is possible, a world view that validates our humanity, we will not be able to create the possible world we long for. Moreover, the market and patriarchy lead us to believe in solutions that re-propose aspects of the system as answers to the problems the system creates. We need to recognize the thread that unites us, that unites the women's movement with the movement of indigenous peoples, the movement against globalization, the movement for the elimination of hunger and disease, the movement against domestic violence and trafficking of women and children, the peace and ecology movements, the movements for alternative spiritualities and art.

We are proposing that what unites all these movements is gift giving, which is firmly rooted in mothering, a detailed pan human gift giving practice that is necessary for children to survive. Women are usually socialized to be mothers but men can perform mothering care as well. All of us, when we were young, lived to some extent in a gift economy as mothered children or we would not have survived. Both mothers and non mothers are now absorbed into the system as market agents and can embrace the ideology of exchange or they can embrace both gift giving and exchange at once. By recognizing gift based societies outside capitalism and gift based practices inside it, we can acquire a point of view whereby we see the market as a short term and circumscribed aberration of what is basically a gift giving species. It is by creating alliances according to the world view of gift giving that we can free ourselves internally and externally from the patriarchal market and its mentality. This will allow us to choose gift giving and its values both personally and politically as a way to peace and abundance for all. It is time for women to rise to non patriarchal leadership in all these movements, according to the values of gift giving.

Genevieve Vaughan, 3/04

Articles about
the Gift Economy

Radio Interviews

Il Dono/ The Gift: A Feminist Analysis

Gift Economy Website

Conference Endorsers