Is sharing for the sake of sharing ever really sharing for the sake of sharing?
Before There Was Money (Part 4)
Hey folks,
Welcome back to episode 4 of Before There Was Money, in which I walk you through how various traditional societies conducted trade prior to the invention of money.
If you’d like, you can check out Parts 1-3 here:
This is part of my effort to run a system upgrade on my political analysis, which rejects both capitalist and Marxist economics.
As regular readers are aware, my roots are deep in the radical left, specifically in the anti-globalization movement, the 90’s punk scene, and a broader countercultural tradition that goes back much much further.
I don’t think any of you will have any difficulty placing where I stand if you consult this handy-dandy cheat sheet to the political spectrum.
IS A DIALECTICAL SYNTHESIS OF ANARCHO-CAPITALISM AND ANARCHO-COMMUNISM COMING SOON?
In recent years, however, I have been inspired by voluntarist/anarchist authors such as Etienne de la Boetie 2, Derrick Broze, Iain Davis, James Corbett, and others who could be characterized as anarcho-capitalists, whether or not they choose to use that label.
This has caused me to revisit some of my assumptions about economics out of a desire to create some sort of synthesis between anarcho-communism and anarcho-capitalism. If that seems impossible, that’s probably because communism and capitalism and framed as opposite modes of governance by rival gangs of statists. But when one extracts the state from the question of how human economic activity should be organized, the debate becomes one of balancing individualism and collectivism.
Clearly, all people have some degree of responsibility towards their fellow human beings; anarcho-capitalists don’t deny that. They simply insist that sharing should be voluntary.
As for anarcho-communists, their main objective to “private property” boils down to an objection to rich people monopolizing the resources which others need to survive.
Clearly, these are not mutually exclusive positions. There is a balance to be struck between the desires of individuals to pursue their own desires and their responsibilities to their fellow humans. I don’t think the gulf between the two camps is as large as I originally thought.
As Emma Goldman once said:
There is no conflict between the individual and the social instincts, any more than there is between the heart and the lungs: the one the receptacle of a precious life essence, the other the repository of the element that keeps the essence pure and strong. The individual is the heart of society, conserving the essence of social life; society is the lungs which are distributing the element to keep the life essence--that is, the individual--pure and strong.
For my latest exploration, I will be turning to an example of an indigenous society of the South Pacific, the Baining.
The Case of the Baining
In The False Coin of Our Own Dreams, David Graeber begins his exploration of gift economies with the story of an indigenous group called the Baining.
A good place to start with might be Jane Fajans’ work on the Baining of Papua New Guinea. The Baining, a population of taro farmers who live in scattered hamlets in the mountainous interior of East New Britain, are somewhat notorious in the anthropological literature for their almost complete lack of any elaborate social structure. Fajans describes their society as a kind of “egalitarian anarchism” because of their lack of political structures; in fact, they lack enduring social structures of almost any kind whatever. Not only are there no chiefs or “big men,” but no clans, lineages, age grades, no initiation societies, ritual or exchange associations, or anything, really, that can be called a “ritual system.”
There was a time when anthropologists used the term “simple society” as a euphemism for “primitive”; normally, the term was an obvious misnomer, but the Baining appear as close as one is likely to find to a genuinely simple society. There are domestic groups and individual kindreds, and that’s about it. Perhaps as a result, Baining society also appears to be singularly lacking in mystification.
According to Fajans, Baining society is based on something very much like a labor theory of value. What distinguishes humans from animals is the fact that humans work; work, or “sweat,” is considered the quintessential human activity. It is conceived largely in terms of the generation of heat: fire or “sweat” in gardening, which is in turn seen as the quintessential form of work. Hence the basic schema of action, or what Munn would call value template, is one of the application of human labor to transform nature into culture, “socialization” in the broadest sense. It’s a template of value because the ability to do so is the main thing that brings one prestige in Baining life. While gardening work is the paradigm, raising children (literally, “feeding” them) is seen in the same terms. It is a matter of transforming infants, who are seen as relatively wild creatures when they are born, into fully formed social beings, humans whose humanity, in turn, is defined largely as a capacity for productive action. So even here, there is a sort of minimal hierarchy of spheres. Producing food is not simply a value in itself. The most prestigious act in Baining society is giving food, or other consumables. To be a parent, for example, is not considered so much a matter of procreation but of providing children with food an attitude reinforced by the very widespread habit of fostering, which ensures that almost every household where food is cooked has at least one child to feed in it.
Food-giving takes a more communal form as well. While the Baining lack elaborate, ceremonial forms of exchange like moka, people are in the constant habit of exchanging food, betel nut, and the like on a less formal basis. If two men meet each other on the road, for example, they will almost invariably both offer each other betel nut to chew, each then taking some of the others’.
Families often exchange food, here too almost always in egalitarian same-for-same transactions; for example, two neighbors will exchange equal amounts of taro with which to prepare their dinner.
Hence, while giving food to children is seen as ‘reproductive,’ in the sense of producing production, the apparently pointless habit of continually exchanging food is a matter of the continual production of society. In the absence of enduring institutional structures which can be seen as existing apart from individual human action, “society” itself has be re-created by individuals on a day to day basis. Yet that society has to be re-created, as it is the basis for the existence of any sorts of values at all.
Even in this remarkably minimal, stripped-down version, then, one finds one key distinction that always seems to recur; what in dialectical terms is usually referred to as the distinction between “production” and “realization.” Productive labor creates value mainly in potentia. This is because value is inherently contrastive; thus it can only be made into a reality (“realized”) in a relatively public context, as part of some larger social whole. Among the Baining, producing food through the labor of gardening is seen as the origin of value, but that value is only “realized” when one gives some of that food to someone else. Hence the most truly prestigious act is being a good provider to children, thereby turning them into social beings; but this in turn requires the existence of society. After all, without society, the socialization of children would not be prestigious; just as without the continual socialization of children as new producers, society itself would not continue to exist.
This example is given because it is a particularly clear example of a case where the act of giving is done as part of a social affirmation of a certain type of relationship. Far from being pointless, the exchange of equal amounts of food produces a sense of neighbourliness and goodwill. This is in effect a way of ritually affirming that one is in reciprocal relation with one’s trading partner. In other words, they are friends, not foes. In other contexts, this function of trade is often obscured.
As I will show as I continue my explorations, however, one important purpose of trade is the production of goodwill between people. When we are imagining our future anarchist society, we would do well to keep this in mind.
If we are looking to increase the sense of solidarity felt between different members of society, we would do well to consider the role of ritualized sharing in affirming social bonds. Such rituals need not be religious in nature, but should serve to strengthen feelings of neighbourliness between people who live in the same area.
I would suggest that customs involving the sharing of food would probably be particularly helpful in this regard. If evolutionary psychology has any merit, our sharing instincts towards sharing come from ancient practices of communal food-sharing. By sharing food, we align ourselves with the more cooperative part of our human nature.
If we want to foster a sense of community, we would do well to consider that human beings typically share food with friends, not enemies. If we want to foster a spirit of social solidarity and mutual aid, we should come together regularly in order to share food.
Which brings me back to the Feast System.