Eric Sommer
I was glad to see the interest in alternative, and hopefully more cooperative,
forms of economy in a recent issues of `Future Positive'. However, the slogan
at the website - `tell only the truth, and all the truth, and do so promptly
– right now." - emboldens me to advance certain concerns regarding the emphasis
on gift-giving, or reciprocity, in the advocated solutions.
To begin with, I believe that the notion of replacing present economic relations
with `gifting' is oten based on mistaking the market - buying and selling
- for the whole of the present economic order. In fact, the market may, with
a certain degree of simplification, be said to be only the `appearance'; while
the system of *production' * constitutes the essence.
Market relations are not ubiquotous merely because people have `poor values',
or are `selfish', nor because of the right-wing propaganda in magazines such
as Forbes or the Economist or neo-liberal economics journals.
Rather, the pervasiveness of the market is anchored directly in the underlying
reality of a very complex division of labour, coupled with privately owned
means of production, through which the world's people currently collaborate
in eliciting the various potentialies of the world - good, bad, and indifferent;
from cheap clothing to computers to nuclear bombs to anti-biotics - which
we now enjoy.
I believe that the U.S. labour department authorities currently record something
like 30 or 40,000 categories of specialized work, and even this figure is
too low if we factor in the additional specialized knowledge related to the
particular situations in which people produce (dairy farmer in Penn. operates
differently than a Southern U.S. dairy farmer; manager in one kind of store
must have different knowledge than manager in another, etc.).
Emphasis on gift-giving as a kind of `global' solution is, I suspect, based
on mental, and perhaps actual, isolation from these spheres of complex production.
Lest I sound hostile to gift-giving, I am both an old hippie (*the* original
20th cent. gifting culture) and my principal mentor is Dr. Stuart Piddocke,
who wrote one of the seminal anthropological studies on the Potlatch ceremony
cited as a model for gift-giving in one of the future postive gifting articles.
Nevertheless, and despite its importance in *all* areas of social life, I
would want to stress that gift-giving is no solution to connecting and coordinating
the labour and production outputs of billions of specialized workers throughout
the world. Nor can we do without that connection - unless we want to also
do without the production which delivers cheap food, cheap clothing, anti-biotics,
longer life, universal schooling for our children, computers, space exploration,
and other extensions of human capability.
Read
the full article
