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 often 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 ubiquitous 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 potentials 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 positive 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.
If you ask the ‘average’ factory worker if everything he/she is involved in accomplishing can be done by gift, the reply might be: “Ay Mate, gifts can’t get all this done.” That factory worker would, I think, be correct. Reciprocity works well in small-scale permanent associations, where there is a long future time horizon – i.e., people will be around to reciprocate the gift – and where production systems are simple and involve few people. Modern production is precisely the opposite – everyone’s production depends on everyone else’s, and labour-mobility constantly moves people from one place to another.
A thought experiment regarding even a relatively ‘simple’ article – such as a radio – quickly reveals that the radio makers, radio painters, radio machine makers, radio transistor makers, radio wire makers, radio plastic case makers, truck drivers, warehouse workers, and all the other direct and indirect labour involved in radio production adds up into the tens of thousands if not millions of people.
So, if gift-giving can’t do it, how is all this labour and output to be coordinated? There are two methods currently used – planning and market. Planning operates *inside* organizations, such as business corporations or government departments, and serves to organize and coordinate the various skills and forms of knowledge used within them. Market operates *between* these production units, and serves to coordinate the outputs of one with the inputs of another.
Now don’t get me wrong. I’m *not* advocating the present order of things. Anyone who has read our worldstewards materials knows that we are remorseless *critics* of the present system of fragmentation and exploitation of human beings and the Earth. What I am suggesting is that if we want to really change the present order of things, and if we want to overcome the market and the fragmentation of humanity it engenders, we need to look deeper than the market; we need to look at production, at how we work together to produce the ‘goods’ of life.
Part of a possible future solution to the ‘division of labour problem’ lies in what might be called ‘code’, of which computer software and nc tools programs (software for numerically controlled machines) are the current best exemplars. Eventually, much tedious and specialized work and knowledge may be performed by *multi-purpose* machines and robots operated by ‘code’ and perhaps with the help of nanotechnology(manipulation of atoms) or other ‘futuristic’ technologies, thereby lifting a huge burden of bee-hive behavior from the backs of humanity..
As code partakes of the well-known ability of information to be duplicated for virtually zero cost, the advent of a code-based or code-assisted production system, which is already under way in certain quarters, could constitute a post-scarcity technology of abundance (though finite natural resources would still be a concern, and maybe a greater one than ever.).
Precisely to avoid obscuring its future potential, it is important not to exaggerate the present power of ‘code’, and information-technology to eliminate labour. It is true that in certain key industrial areas – autos, steel, wood processing, and so forth – automated processes have eliminated massive amounts of labour in the past few decades. At the same time, our Stewards branch here in Seoul Korea works with third-world ‘guest workers’ from countries such as the Philippines, Sri Lanka, and Pakistan. Their exploitation as cheap labour – 12 hour, six-day work weeks, very low pay, very poor housing – are a continual reminder to us of the hard labour realities for billions of people around the world. Moreover, I personally am also engaged in design and development of new software, and can attest from personal experience that hard labour – in fact, very hard mental labour – is alive and well in the programming world.
Despite the preceding caveats, the future potentialities of ‘code’ – and *full* use of current informational and network technologies, is part of the program we advocate for organizing poor and working people to ‘”work together to care for one another and the Earth”. Our particular interest is in building a Worldstewards corporation (non-business), which is highly networked, strongly democratic, interconnects poor and working people as globally as possible, enables us to participate in all struggles for social and ecological justice, and simultaneously enables us to build new social forms to work together for both global justice and for the cooperative production of the means of meeting our basic, social, and higher level creative and spiritual needs.
The discussion of Worldstewards here is not intended simply as a cheap ad (though a bit of advertising is included). My primary purpose is to exemplify the direction in which I think a solution needs to besought – not just in trying to replace market or exchange relations with gift-relations, but in the development of new methods of working cooperatively together in the production and reproduction of ourselves and our lives as people in the modern world.
* For our particular approaches to the problem, see ‘The Three Modes of Social Cooperation’; ‘The Stewards Corporation: A New Way For Poor People to Work Together’; ‘The Stewards House Template Contract’; ‘The Mind of the Steward: Inquiry-based Philosophy for the 21st Century’, and other works at our website.