Ch 4. Pathways out of Capitalism: The gift economy | The Gift Economy, Anarchism and Strategies for Change

4. Pathways out of Capitalism: The Gift Economy
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Terry Leahy 2023

The first of these chapters on pathways out of capitalism is on the gift economy. And in the last chapter, I talked about the problems with a monetary system and the problems with markets. And so, this chapter starts off from that to explain how we could have a society that doesn’t use money. There is more than one name for what I call the gift economy. Kropotkin’s ‘anarchist communism’ is a close fit. A term common in the European left is an ‘economy of the commons.’ Anitra Nelson is a participant in the global degrowth movement. She has written about a system like this as ‘non-market socialism’. More recently, she talks about it as the ‘community mode of production’, or as an economy based on ‘real values.’ Social ownership of the means of production, but with no money and no state. The term ‘gift economy,’ comes from the French ‘Situationists’ of the late sixties. It sounds less academic but can be a bit misleading. If you think gifts are always gratuitous, unpredictable, and totally voluntary! In the gift economy I am talking about, those assumptions do not apply.

Origin of the term ‘gift economy’

As you may know, the concept of the ‘gift economy’ comes from Marcel Mauss, an anthropologist who studied the pre-colonial societies of Melanesia and the Pacific. Things were exchanged but the aim was not to exchange equivalent value for equivalent value. According to Mauss, gifts in these societies were transmitted, rather than exchanged. You would give something to the recipient, and then the recipient had to give something to a third party. Not the original gift. Passing on the spirit of the gift. There was no expectation that the first donor would get something in return for their original gift. But they would eventually receive a gift as the outcome of a cycle of exchanges.

This anthropological use of the term, ‘the gift economy’ was taken up by the ‘Situationists’ in France in the 1960s. This was one of the political currents in France that contributed to the French uprising in 1968. They painted Paris with slogans like ‘Take Your Dreams for Reality’ and ‘Beneath the Pavement, the Beach’! Raoul VanEigem’s Revolution of Everyday Life explains their understanding of the ‘gift economy’.

My use of the term and other uses

To avoid confusion with a variety of uses of the term ‘gift economy’, I should probably call my version by another name. I am not going to take that route. I like the short version of the term. The great benefit of this term is to stress that in a gift economy, the ultimate prerogative of producers is to ‘give’ what they produce to others, to be responsible for the choice of recipient. There is no higher authority commanding the labour of people. If the reader would like another term to specify my use, let me call this the ‘grassroots gift economy’. Stressing again that decisions about production and distribution are made at the grassroots. Also, that these links of production and reception constitute a grassroots network of social links between producers and consumers.

So, in brief, how does my use differ from that of others who have used the term?

In Mauss’s examples of the gift economy, the gifts he is talking about are related to a system of patriarchal status competition. Men compete to give more than their rivals. I am hoping for an economic system that does not operate in that way.

In the Situationist writings that use the term ‘gift economy’, gifts are portrayed as gratuitous and random. What holds this system together, as the Situationists see it, is the abundance possible with modern technology. A society of ‘masters without slaves’, as Vaneigem puts it. I am assuming that environmental limits play a key role in defining what gifts we will be producing. We cannot afford to produce gifts that waste scarce resources. As well, I am arguing that the recipients of gifts need to play a part in working out what gifts are suitable. Gifts are not random and gratuitous. There are ‘compacts’ — promises to produce and receive gifts according to plans worked out between voluntary work groups and the communities they serve.

In Genevieve Vaughan’s use of the term ‘gift economy’, there is much that I share in my own discussion. The key difference is in the way she conceives gifts as purely altruistic. She relates this to her understanding of mothering.
The logic of mothering requires that the nurturer give attention to the needs of the other person. The reward for this behavior is the well-being of the other.
She opposes this to ‘exchange’, which is ‘giving order to receive’. The altruism she is talking about is certainly an aspect of the gift economy I am writing about. However, I will not deny the relevance of more self-interested motives. For a start, the reward of pleasure taken in an act of kindness. Beyond that, the rewards in appreciation, even status from being the donor. Finally, the economic rewards coming out of a realistic expectation of reciprocity, and the creative pleasure of being part of a joint project. The creative pleasure of producing something that changes the world through its use by other people. More on this later in the chapter.

Why the gift economy seems an unlikely improvement

The idea that there could be a society without money and without the state would strike most people as a joke. A typical reaction is to ask how we could maintain the technological complexity that we need. How could we maintain an advanced civilization in a voluntary localized economy? People envisage an economy without money as a neo-feudalism, like Hobbit villages. I want to say right at the beginning, that’s not what I intend. The gift economy is meant to be technologically complex. People will say, how could you organize that technological complexity without a market and money — and without a state to regulate that market?

People also worry about the way conduct could be organized without the incentives and sanctions that a monetary economy allows. Without monetary incentives, how would you get people to work? Without using money how could you guarantee fairness? How would you prevent inequality — some people living in comfort while others were languishing in poverty? What sanctions and incentives would prevent environmental vandalism? If everyone’s free to do whatever they like, then surely some people are going to cause vast amounts of environmental problems.

What about patriarchy and racism, how would a gift economy deal with those issues? What about crime and warlord usurpers? What if someone wants to take over in an armed coup? Does a gift economy mean there is no army and no police force? How do you manage that?

Finally, if this is meant to be a pathway out of capitalism it would have to be politically feasible. But the idea of having no money and no state produces vertigo. What do you really mean by that? That sounds ridiculous.

So, I will have to reassure you on all these points. I’m going to start off with a basic map of how the gift economy works.

The basic operation of the gift economy

Well, first, there’s no money. It’s not a society based on barter where people exchange equivalent non-monetary objects, one for another, trying to get the same value. Instead, it’s based on agreements to supply and receive. That’s why it’s called a gift economy. Agreement to supply means you guarantee to supply, for example, 20 carrots to this household, within the next six months. And agreements to receive. In the sense that the community that’s about to receive is aware that this is going to happen. And they’re part of the compact. They, say, ‘Yes, we want this’. And ‘Yeah, that’d be great, we expect it in November,’ or whatever. Anitra Nelson calls these agreements ‘compacts.’

Equivalence, as in fairness in distribution and reward for effort. You’re giving things to other people. How can you be sure that you’re going to get something equal back? Well, because we are not using money and this is not a system of barter, you can’t be totally sure. Instead, equivalence and fairness are the long-term effects of the gift economy. While you are distributing your produce to people through compacts to supply, other people are producing things for you and supplying you. This goes around in multiple networks and chains of distribution. The aim of all players is that everyone is getting a fair share and getting what they need.

The basic unit of the gift economy is a voluntary group, which produces goods or services. It can be anything from washing up to a bus service. So voluntary groups produce and supply stuff. On the one hand, they may supply stuff for their own community. Self-provision is a part of the gift economy. Like a community garden supplying vegetables to a local neighbourhood. Or there can be a compact to supply a group outside of the immediate community.

If you’re producing things, you are likely to need inputs from other collectives. For example, if you’re a part of a community garden group, growing cabbages, one of the things you will need is fencing mesh to keep the goats out. You’re depending upon another voluntary group to supply you with that. That ends up with a chain of production. From the very beginning, in mining raw materials, or sourcing them from recycling, through all the stages of production, up to the final product, and then to its distribution.

Each of these links works in the same way — production, supply, production, supply, production, supply, and so on in that chain. These chains of production form networks, like the network I was just talking about. There are the people producing mesh fencing, and then there are the people growing carrots. Then there’s a community eating the carrots. Other members of that community might be involved in making something, which the people making mesh fencing are using, like maybe chairs.

Most production in a gift economy is localized for environmental reasons. We have an impossible situation now. We’ve been relying upon fossil fuels to produce vast amounts of energy. Given the technologies we have available to us we can’t replace this amount of energy with renewables. Consequently, it makes sense to localize production — to reduce the energy used in transport. Localizing food growing and sewerage treatment. Producing a lot locally, with locally available resources. Energy supply, furniture, transport, housing. On the other hand, where local production is not feasible, we will transport goods with renewable energy — electric trains, sailing ships, airships. Production chains can move products from one link in the chain to another via transport powered with renewable energy.

How does work get distributed in the gift economy? Within each voluntary collective, there may be some tasks that are generally unpleasant. Nobody wants to do them all the time. To share this work around the collective will roster these tasks. You do it this week and somebody else does it next week. The basic assumption is that nobody is incapable of skilled work. And that everyone has a responsibility to do some mundane work. Our current class society has produced an education system that fails people at the bottom of the heap. We need to organize production so that most of the time people are doing creative and interesting work.

The gift economy on the ground

What might the sustainable gift economy look like on the ground? The following vision is based on my understanding of the current limits of technology. Showing what might be practicable. Much of this design for the gift economy follows the writings of Ted Trainer, an Australian advocate of ‘the simpler way’, as he calls it.

Villages and small rural towns would be connected by a network of railways or by canals, sailing ships and airships. Train services would run on solar power or wind power. They would not need to use batteries if we were only running the trains when the energy was available.

The use of rare earth metals has been seen as a problem for renewable technologies. With everyone on the planet using renewables, we will soon run out. It seems in fact that these rare minerals are only necessary to reduce the weight and bulk of our devices, from mobile phones to wind turbines. In a decentralized village economy with low consumption, the weight and bulk of devices is unlikely to cause major problems. We could do without rare earth minerals.

Local transport would use bicycles, oxcart, donkey carts. Emergency vehicles, power tools and earth moving equipment would run on biodiesel or batteries.

There would be small farmsteads, providing for themselves and then distributing a surplus into the community. Or community housing with a community farm — also supplying a surplus outside. There would be organic agriculture with an emphasis on tree crops. Localized irrigation networks using dams and contour bunds. In other words, permaculture agriculture or eco agriculture. Sewerage and water provision would also be organized very locally.

Local energy provision would use solar, wind power, local hydro, biofuels. Buildings would use electricity for lighting, digital entertainment, communication and computing. But space heating and cooling, cooking and hot water would not use electricity. Passive solar design of houses would be part of the solution. Likewise solar hot water panels and solar cooking. Wood burning stoves would be a final resort. Powered refrigeration would be rarely used. Instead, cool cupboards and cellars would serve for vegetable crops — with milk and meat supplied by local farms as and when needed.

These local villages and towns would also specialize in industrial production. For example, fencing mesh could be supplied by a particular town. In turn, that town would be supplied by wire from some other town. In turn that town would be supplied by steel, from another town. This chain of production would send products by train to the next site. These villages and towns might also specialize in high-tech services like a hospital in one town, a university in another.

There would be a lot of recycling. There would be no planned obsolescence. Most things would be made to be repaired and would last for a very long time.

All these villages and towns would be connected by digital communication as well as by renewable transport. Phones, the internet, TV, films, recorded music. These high technologies would be produced by chains of production linking villages and towns. With each link in the chain producing a part of the end product.

The debate about renewables

Faced by the vision described above, most middle-class leftists that I talk to say that it seems very austere. They compare it unfavourably to what is available to the affluent mainstream of the rich countries today. They treat this ‘simpler way’ vision as choosing a politically motivated austerity. For them, what seems more reasonable and politically practicable is current affluence with renewables. Space heating, air con and refrigeration — all running on wind, solar and batteries. Planes, cars and trucks — running with batteries, hydrogen, ammonia or biofuel. Urbanism — with international travel for holidays.

We need to untangle the political and the technological issues. These middle-class leftists may well be right about the political problems of a ‘simpler way’ vision. However, from a technological perspective, I believe what I have described above is the BEST we can possibly expect. There are two basic problems for the affluence with renewables scenario. One is that the minerals we would use for renewables are not inexhaustible. Even if only the affluent of the world (the top ten to twenty per cent globally) were to implement this solution we would quickly run out of essential mineral ingredients. Like lithium and nickel. Even copper. The second basic problem is that the intermittency of renewables means we need lots of energy storage. Doing without fossil fuels will make energy a lot more expensive than most people imagine. For example, say we had 20 panels to provide all the power we would need on a day when the sun is shining. But we could need 140 panels and 5 batteries to store energy from that sunny day for a following stretch of six cloudy days. It becomes less economically damaging to abandon some of our rich world lifestyles — urbanism, cheap cars, air con, flights to Hawaii. Compared to devoting a huge chunk of economic activity to propping these up with renewable alternatives.

How do questions of cost translate into a gift economy context where money is not being used? Prices are the way in which a market economy deals with the issues. In a gift economy, we must look at balancing different kinds of human needs and natural realities. How does the need for air con compare with the workload required to provide it? Could we source the minerals for that?

To summarize, if you think this is an austere scenario, please come up with a better one. It needs to be a low energy budget. Something like 5 per cent of what we now get per capita (with fossil fuels) in the rich countries. On the current trajectory, the most likely scenario is that the renewables revolution will mean that less than one per cent of the global population are using electric cars, travelling overseas for holidays, and switching on the air con — while the rest of us are living a worse than feudal existence. I have tried to think up an alternative to that nightmare. It may be that after the gift economy has been implemented, we will come up with all sorts of new sustainable technologies to enable air conditioning and quick trips to international destinations. I am not holding my breath. Let us get off this side track.

Organizing production and distribution without central planning

So how would you organize production without ‘planning’. How would you know how much steel mesh to produce? If you were the town producing steel, how much steel would you need? And where would it go?

In many ways the gift economy is not that different to a market economy. A market economy doesn’t have central planning. Instead, people respond to market signals by producing for market demand. Clearly, the gift economy does not work through market demand. Demands in a gift economy are simply people’s wants and needs, expressed in a variety of ways – via media, as discovered from social research, through direct requests and so on. You get prestige and appreciation from producing to supply these wants and needs. In some ways it’s strange that people worry that such a system cannot be efficient — when the market economy also operates through decentralized production and supply chains.

In a gift economy, compacts to supply will be motivated by self-interest when people are producing for their own communities. Where other communities are concerned, one motive is the prestige that comes from supplying a real need in another community. Also, the excitement that comes from participation in a production chain providing for a collection of other communities. Directly, you’re not getting any benefit. What you’re producing is going to that next stage of the production chain. Nevertheless, you know that the whole production chain is making something useful for all these communities. Stepping back from immediate concerns, you are well aware that the benefits of the gift economy depend on voluntary local action and you are proud to be contributing.

We can think of various ways to coordinate a production chain. One would be that each of the towns and villages in a bioregion would decide how many metres of fencing mesh they required. Then those figures would be passed on to the town making the fencing mesh. We can imagine a team of scouts, going out from the town supplying the fencing mesh and checking these figures. And then the factory producing the fencing mesh would respond to each village and say, ‘Well, by next November, we can produce this amount of fencing mesh for your village. And that’s what we’ll be doing, is that okay?’ And they come to an agreement (a compact) and you go from there. The factory producing the fencing mesh would be making similar negotiations with the people producing the fencing wire. And so on, down through the whole chain of production.

Summarizing. These compacts to supply would be motivated by the following. Self-interest when you are producing for your own immediate community. Prestige and appreciation when you are supplying a real need in another community. Commitment to a production chain that provides for a whole set of communities.

The gift economy and the environment

So why is the gift economy uniquely suited to environmental care? In the first two chapters I have explained why a capitalist economy is a disaster as far as that goes. Here’s what the gift economy does. There’s no motive to produce for money and ignore the environmental consequences. Your own standard of living depends upon the gifts that come from other producers. You can produce as much as you like, but at the end of the day, that is not going to get you extra goods and services from anybody else. The wire that you’re making just passes onto the next community, which is making the mesh fencing. They’re not paying you back for that wire. There’s no motive to produce a vast amount of unnecessary stuff. The motive to produce things for other people is prestige, affection, long-term reciprocity. You will also be sure to make room for plenty of leisure time, for arts and slacking about. Enjoying what your work has made possible.

Prestige comes from a gift that looks after the environment. The local community where you have your production unit will not want you to damage their environment. You will not get any status producing wonderful things that other people enjoy — at the expense of your local community. This extends further afield. So, if you’re producing for another community — and they know that what you are doing is harming the global environment — they’re not going to like that. You are giving them a poisoned gift. A gift that harms the environment in which they also live.

The reason why these things are such a problem today is that capitalist economies give managers so many motives to act unsustainably. Those motives are completely absent in a gift economy. And the opposite motives become dominant. Everybody understands the prestige of getting it right. The pleasure of living in a good environment. That what we are doing is going to kick on to our grandchildren’s generation. These are all things that people think about. I remember one of my interviews with Newcastle steelworkers in the nineties. They told me about the terrible pollution of the Hunter River. The way the steel works drained toxic waste into the river. And they said, ‘Yeah, we know about this, but we don’t want to say anything because we’ll lose our jobs’. These steelworkers were concerned. They loved fishing and could see that the toxic waste was not good for the fish. They just needed to keep their jobs.

In a gift economy, producers who were in any doubt might seek the advice of a science collective — to find out how to produce things without an environmental disaster. Like, the helmeted honey eater of Victoria, which is now on the extinct and endangered list. If you had a patch of bushland that could host the helmeted honey eater, a great thing to do would be to introduce helmeted honeyeaters and to look after their habitat. Not knock it down for a new block of apartments. You would find out how to look after the helmeted honeyeater by asking bird watchers or biological scientists.

There would be no need for state enforced regulation because there would be no motive to get it wrong.

What people often say about gift economy is this. How could we possibly coordinate a global response to climate change? Well, one answer is you’d coordinate it through meetings of representatives who would take back ideas and information to their own towns and villages. That would be part of it. But the bottom line is that you would not have any motive for causing such an awful ungodly disaster.

At the same time. If there was a situation where you felt that there was a need for coercive enforcement, you’d just do that. Let us look at a local village. You might appoint a group to go round making sure that people in your village were handling a particular environmental issue. And obviously these people would be unlikely to turn up fully armed and in uniform. They’d be more likely to appear in civvies as a sort of advice team. ‘Oh, well this is a composting toilet. The problem here is you’re not putting enough straw in your compost, and when you lift the lid, you can see how much it smells. Okay. That’s because you’re getting anaerobic composting. Let me explain that’. But at the same time, there’s five local people who are not happy with what you’re doing, and you get to know that. And if necessary, they take over and say, ‘Well, you’re obviously not handling this. Right. And this is really a danger to the whole community. So, we’ll roster someone on to come and help. You are clearly having trouble in your life and can’t manage this now’. This logic could apply on any scale, from the village to regional or even global. More on these issues later in this chapter and in other chapters.

Social justice and the gift economy

How could we ensure just distribution in a gift economy? How are we going to make sure that people don’t just get rich and look after their own interests? Without anything going to the people who really need it. Most people assume that the only way to get just distribution is to coercively enforce redistribution of wealth and income — through a state apparatus. Let us look at a few issues related to this.

The gift economy is predicated on an ethic of fairness. We’re looking for a cultural change, which leads to that. I don’t think that’s impossible. A lot of people would like to see that sort of cultural change, but capitalism makes it difficult to implement these generous sentiments.

The voluntary collectives of a gift economy and the community forums that run local affairs are run democratically. The assumption is that these collectives look after all their members, while considering differences in people’s needs. It is inevitable that these production units would consider the interests of their own members, and their own communities first. Theoretically that could lead to inequality. But people would produce more than enough for their own use. With a surplus they would face the question. Well, what do we want to do with this? Most likely, they would want to look after people with the most need. A community that already has plenty of fencing wire is not going to want more. Why would they want that? The community that needs fencing wire. If you provide it to them, they’re very appreciative. In a gift economy, fairness and just distribution comes out of the desire to be appreciated for what you do. You want to produce gifts that will really make a difference.

Distribution to equalize world living standards makes sense. People in the impoverished backwaters of the world economy would be a lot happier, more productive and contribute more, if they could sort out the life and death problems preoccupying them now. In any case, global warming is a global problem. We need changes in systems of production and environmental restoration in every part of the world. In a gift economy a combination of useful assistance and an end to exploitation enables this. In a gift economy, the rich countries would stop exploiting the Global South through trade and the market. If rich countries produced things for the South, they would be gifts. All that they might expect would be some reciprocity in the long term. There would be no expectation of equivalence, and no way of measuring it. Trading relationships that end up with debt and impoverishment would completely go.

In the rich countries we would be looking after our own needs to a much greater extent. Let’s look at Australia as an example. In Australia the supermarket shelves are stocked with foods produced in the global south. Coffee, tea, chocolate. I could go on. The only reason these foods are not grown in Australia is that labour here is expensive. There is nothing about our climate or soils that prevents us growing all these foods here. The same reasoning applies to the industrial goods we now receive from China — toasters, laptops, and washing machines. The clothing from India. All produced by people working twelve-hour days. In factories where they lock the doors and workers are unable to escape a fire. In a gift economy we would be producing these goods in our own communities. With voluntary collectives making sure that work was an enjoyable experience, rather than a boring torment.

Racism, patriarchy, and the gift economy

Would a gift economy solve the problems of racism and patriarchy? As a purely economic format, the gift economy does not imply an end to racism or patriarchy. If we look at pre-colonial stateless societies, a lot of them were ‘ethnocentric’ and ‘patriarchal.’ For example, men would gain prestige by going on midnight raids to other villages and coming back after taking heads. They’d refer to their own tribe as ‘the people’ — others were less than human. These societies were gift economies. There was no money, there was no state. People came to agreements and decided what to produce. Gifts were ubiquitous. All the economic characteristics of a gift economy.

So, the short message is that we need to work on racism and patriarchy independently. As well as working towards a gift economy. An end to racism does not automatically come out of a gift economy. We require a cultural shift to end racism. Along with anti-racist structures built into the new gift economy. The same thing with patriarchy. We need a cultural change and new gender arrangements for childcare, housework, and domestic authority. An independent women’s movement. So that’s the short message. A more nuanced message would talk about why the gift economy makes it easier to solve problems of racism and patriarchy.

Racism

Let us imagine a scenario. There is a global revolution to implement a gift economy. In Alabama, the white majority want a white ethno-state. They want freedom and an end to elites. They end up convinced that a gift economy is the way to go. They implement their ethno-state and their non-monetary economy with that. Thankfully, people who are not happy with these developments leave peacefully and go where they are more welcome. In the rest of the United States, anti-racist gift economies dominate. How do they respond to these developments in Alabama? They close off their economic links. The production chains that make the former United States viable as a technologically complex society. No one wants to work and make deals with these racist idiots. They get no gifts from regions where the refugees from Alabama have any say. Their racism seems more and more quixotic. Their children desert them.

In other words, racism is an impediment to a flourishing global gift economy, and this becomes apparent to all concerned. What we would also want from an anti-racist global economy is an end to the post-colonial structures considered in the first two chapters. A generous gift exchange between the global north and the south. The end of white racism in the global north.

Patriarchy

Where patriarchy is concerned, the economic format of the gift economy makes it a lot easier to solve some of the tricky problems of patriarchy. The gender order in capitalism is backed up by the division between unpaid domestic work and paid work in the public sphere. Domestic work is by and large the responsibility of women. Paid work is where men gain economic advantage. In a gift economy, there’s no paid work! This dichotomy vanishes. The unpaid side of the economy expands to fill the whole economic space. That makes it easy to roster housework. The understanding is that in any household, there’s a certain amount of domestic work to be done. That will be shared equally by the members of the household, whether we are talking about a couple or a commune. Just like the boring jobs are rotated in any voluntary producer collective. We would expect that each of these various work tasks takes time, requires skills, and will be rewarded with status and acknowledgement.

Patriarchy and class society

The gift economy is a pathway out of class society. Patriarchy has always provided the seeds for class society. If our gift economy does not get rid of patriarchy, the most likely outcome is that class society will eventually renew its evil reign. The psychology of class society is based on the patriarchal power structures of the family.

Patriarchal families instil the deep belief that somebody must always be the boss. All class societies model themselves on the patriarchal family. The ruling class, king or state represent the father. The duty of the subordinate classes is to obey and love these figures. The chains of command that make up a class society depend on people taking up these two roles. Father and child. A point made by the leftist psychoanalytic literature from Reich to Firestone.

Further than this, patriarchal families create the competitive masculinity that is essential to the functioning of any class society. Men anxious to prove they are really men. What has aptly been named ‘toxic masculinity’. How patriarchy recruits biological men to hegemonic masculinity. This emotional pattern is not innate to men as biological creatures. In a brilliant survey of the anthropological literature, Chodorow explains this process — as a cross cultural constant of patriarchal societies. Toxic masculinity comes out of a family structure in which women are the main nurturing figures. Men are somewhat remote, avoid much of the work associated with childcare, and operate in the public sphere to gain power. Young boys have little intimate engagement with men. Becoming ‘a man’ is a puzzling challenge. One way to prove your manhood is to reject femininity. The women looking after you as a young child nurtured you. To be a man is to do the opposite. Cutting the apron strings. Cruelty as the proof of manhood. Another strategy is to challenge other men — to prove yourself a man. Sorting the men from the boys. This detachment, this denial of empathy is an essential foundation for class societies. Where the suffering of the subordinate classes is concerned, the ruling class feel no qualms. The armies prove their manly prowess defending the state. Expanding the empire through conquest.

These two mechanisms are key aspects of the way class societies work. So, getting rid of patriarchy is a very good idea, if you want to maintain a gift economy. Putting this bluntly, if men do not want to be oppressed by ruling classes, they need to help women destroy patriarchy.

Crime, violence and the police

What about criminal gangs and warlord usurpers? People who steal things and try to take over, using violence. For a lot of people today, the Mad Max scenario of post-capitalism is very plausible. After the collapse of capitalism warlords take control. A global extension of what’s happening now in Mexico and Brazil, with drug gangs. Most people assume you need a benevolent state authorized by the people, and a police force, to prevent this outcome. For reasons that I will explain and consider in later chapters, a gift economy could not have a state. Not having a state, it could not have a police force — a body authorized by the state to implement the popular will, with violence if necessary. On the other hand, there is no doubt that violence could undo the benefits of a gift economy — stepping in to override compacts and divert goods and services to an elite of thugs. To take one example. So how would a gift economy deal with these issues?

First, the gift economy would end many of the motives people have for crime. Poverty is a huge motive for crime. There would be no poverty in a gift economy.

The pursuit of prestige, crime as a ‘deviant career’ as sociologists call it. In capitalism, the sense of being a failure is ubiquitous. No achievement can reassure you that you have done enough. There is always someone who has achieved more. The veneer of meritocracy convinces you that the problems of the capitalist system are your personal fault. This emotional structure is reinforced by competitive masculinity — coming out of the patriarchal family. In this context crime can be an arena of control and achievement. In a gift economy, control and achievement come from participation in production and distribution. The economy runs on the production and receipt of gifts — implying, on a daily basis, that other people appreciate you.

In the world today, many criminal gangs depend on selling drugs for their business model. This model works because people medicate themselves with drugs to damp down the traumas of capitalism and patriarchy. The state backs the sensible hard-working mainstream, the ideology of duty and the fiction of the meritocracy. It tries to alleviate the worst effects of dysfunction through tough policing. The high cost of drugs forces addicts to crime. In a gift economy we would expect these issues to be handled quite differently. Less trauma all round. Drug use treated as either recreational or as at most a health issue.

We can also look at crime today as ‘lateral violence’. Capitalism is a violent society even when the police and army are not directly involved. The subordinate classes are exploited and dominated. They cannot even be sure that their basic needs will be met. Ultimately, the violence of the state backs up these humiliations. It’s a very frustrating situation. People become angry and turn on the people who are easy to violate. People who are in their immediate vicinity and part of their same class group. Through domestic violence or street fights. The capitalist class and the economic structure itself are difficult to target in ‘vertical’ violence. There does not seem to be much point if you believe things cannot be any better. These motives for lateral violence would be absent in a gift economy. An egalitarian society with the means of production controlled by voluntary collectives.

Competitive masculinity is one of the drivers of assault and other crime. As noted earlier in this chapter, men try to prove their masculinity by defeating other men. If a war is not on the cards, crime is a good second option. Especially for those who feel they are not achieving masculinity through work, wages, and domestic power. In a gift economy where feminism had become successful, we would expect men to be doing an equal share of housework — including childcare. And we would expect women to be full participants in the public sphere. These changes would undo the psychological roots of toxic masculinity. Given time, much of the criminal violence that currently plagues us would just evaporate.

In a gift economy, incidents of assault or property damage would mostly be handled through mediation, compensation, and treatment — rather than enforcement and policing. Or direct intervention on the spot if that was safe and a practical response. If we look at stateless societies of the past, that’s exactly how they worked. For example, compensation. If you do something awful to another family, then you must compensate them in some way. Mediation is also common. Conflict is mediated by an outside party. They listen to both sides of the story and facilitate something that works for both sides.

So, we can summarize this by saying first, that there are less motives for engaging in violent attacks on other people in the gift economy. And secondly, mediations and compromises might solve some of these problems without a police force.

Ultimately, however, the gift economy is like any other social formation. It implies and assumes a certain willingness to use coercive violence to maintain that social order. The revolution itself is a key instance. It is an exercise of force by the great majority against the capitalist class. If we’re looking at daily life situations in the gift economy, people would expect civilian intervention to defend community norms. For example, if you were witnessing domestic violence, you might intervene, with force if necessary. If it was safe to do so. For more extreme situations, we could have local enforcer clubs vetted and approved by their communities, with a rotation of these roles. For instance, if a little gang started forming up and going around intimidating people, then you’d form an enforcer club to control them. If a whole town in your bioregion decided to become an empire and take over the whole bioregion, you’d have to get together, setting up your militia groups, arming yourselves to control that. I’m not anticipating a warlord insurgency would be a daily occurrence. Something of that kind may never happen. Nevertheless, if it did happen, there would be a way to deal with that. I will return to these issues in other chapters. If a ‘state’ in the usual sense is impossible in the gift economy, what kind of political organisation of territorial communities could work?

How likely is this alternative?

So, I come to my last point in this chapter. Is a gift economy politically unlikely? Well, not necessarily. I could certainly agree that it seems unlikely at the moment. Most people are voting for one of the mainstream parties. In Australia, the combination of preferential voting and compulsory voting means that minority voices are represented in voting preferences. There is only a small minority voting for a left alternative to capitalism. Between ten and fifteen per cent. Mostly for the Greens, with a miniscule handful of Socialist voters. You could argue from these voting figures that most people are happy with capitalism as it is now. People don’t see any better options around the corner. Nevertheless, we are facing an impending collapse. The most recent report of the IPCC makes it quite clear that climate change is going to destroy our current civilisation if nothing drastic is done. The ruling class fails to deal with it. It is difficult for them to make the drastic u-turn that the situation requires. It seems unlikely that people will maintain their faith in the system as these disasters start to really bite.

Let’s look at the argument that most members of the community don’t want to move to anything drastically different from capitalism. With several colleagues from the University of Newcastle, I have done a random sample survey of people in the Hunter region of Australia, along with a set of face-to-face interviews. Our findings are backed up by ethnographic studies in a range of countries. The term we came up with to summarize our findings was ‘two track thinking.’ In one track people believe we are headed for collapse. Environmental crisis or some other catastrophe is going to end current civilisation. We really need to be doing something radically different. Government is working hand in glove with big business and failing to deal with the real problems. Up to twenty per cent believe we need system change to socialism or the gift economy. About fifty per cent think that we need drastic government intervention. So, this is one of the two tracks. The other track forgets all this doom and gloom. It assumes that business as usual will continue. In this track people worry about the kind of jobs that their children might get. They hope they will be able to afford to buy a house. They expect their children will fly off for a holiday after completing high school. They will marry and have kids. They will own a car and a small outboard for fishing. So that’s the second track. Normal life and business as usual.

When people go out to vote, they vote in the context of normal life. They worry about how their vote may affect the market and their chances within that economy. The other track, the dark thoughts in the middle of the night, they forget about that. What that means is that something as wacky and radical as a gift economy could happen at any time given the right circumstances. The point where people realize that the business-as-usual track is no longer relevant. That’s not out of the question and it could happen quite soon. Most commentators on politics overestimate the stability of the market, the economy, and the parliamentary system. They don’t take two track thinking into account. They just look at the one track reflected in voting behaviour.

So as a global collapse becomes more and more real, and the ruling class fails to deal with it, people are going to start looking for alternatives. Even if the gift economy alternative is massively unlikely, I personally find it the best thing to be advocating. As I will explain in later chapters, I think it is the only thing that would really give us a better life on this planet. To escape one of those other sticky ends that may be more likely. Like ninety per cent of the world’s population die. We end up with feudal lords who screw the peasants into the ground — accompanied by plagues and stupid wars.

Other options

In the next two chapters I will consider the two main alternatives for system change that are coming out of the environment movement and the left more generally. One is the democratic socialist option. I will explain why an attempt to establish democratic socialism is unlikely to work as intended. The other is what I will call ‘radical reformism’. The founder of radical reformism is Herman Daly with his ‘steady state economy’ concept. A stronger government regulation of the market economy, ultimately achieving a steady state. I will explain why I think this proposal is also problematic.