The Gift Paradigm & the Future of
Humanity:
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Jacob Wrestles with the Angel by Genevieve Vaughan (author of For-Giving:
A Feminist Critique of Exchange) |
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originally published in
Crone Chronicles, Summer Solstice, 1998
Personal Origins of the Theory
When I was young, the
circumstances of my life led me to ask the question, "Why does poverty
exist?" and motivated me to do something about it. I was born in Corpus
Christi, Texas, into a wealthy family and wondered why people on the other side
of town, or on the other side of the border some 300 miles south of us, were
poor.
In 1963 I married an Italian and moved to
After I got a divorce in 1978, I became a feminist and joined a
consciousness raising group of women who worked at the Food and Agriculture
Organization of the UN, which was located near my home. My feminism was
international from the outset.
From the beginning of my time in
Finally I was able to turn his theory upside down - which required me
to turn Marx’s analysis at least sideways. In fact, like other patriarchal
economists before and after him, Marx had a blind spot towards women’s free labor. Actually the blind spot is a defect of the
patriarchal eyeglasses.
Our Stable Psychotic Society:
Understanding and Transforming It from Within
The problems I thought were so urgent when I was young have not been
solved but have only grown more grievous. In spite of many important changes in the political world - the end
of the nuclear arms race, the fall of the
When I came back to the
My thesis in For-Giving is
that humans have created a stable psychotic society which we usually do not
recognize as insane because we are living inside it. I believe that if we can
understand how we have created this huge problem, we can find a way out. I ask
the readers to forgive me if the book is difficult. I can only say that the
problem is complex and tangled and that it has taken me almost thirty years to
figure it out to this extent.
There is much more there waiting to be explored.
The Two Paradigms
There are today two major paradigms or world views which are locked in
a struggle with each other. One involves giving directly to needs. The other is
based on exchange, or giving in order to receive (at
least) an equivalent of what was given. One is invisible, the other visible.
One promotes the satisfaction of needs, the other
promotes the competition to be “first”. One functions according to the values
of care, the other according to the values of domination. The very asymmetry of
the paradigms creates a “fit” which perpetuates the struggle. The exchange
paradigm is artificial but, because it is nurtured by the gift paradigm it
appears to define “reality” itself while the gift paradigm and its nurturing
values appear “unrealistic”.
In our society we look at everything through the values of exchange.
The equation x = y seems to be the basis of justice, of understanding, of human dignity.
Equal exchange seems to be the standard of right human relations, where we do
not want to give more than we can get. From love to law, from education to
entertainment we get what we gave, and we insist on
our money’s worth. Exchange is self-reflecting and spawns images of itself everywhere. while in giftgiving there is a transitive movement of the gift which
goes from self to other. Giftgiving seems to be an
inferior kind of behavior undertaken by those who
cannot succeed in exchange. Instead it is exchange that is an artificial and
aberrant kind of behavior which could not exist
without a flow of gifts from the other paradigm.
For-Giving is an attempt to
describe this state of affairs, to explain why it happens and how it works in
order to make it possible to change it consciously. The gift paradigm requires other- orientation
and gives value to the other by satisfying needs. The exchange paradigm
promotes ego orientation and gives value to the ego by the logic of the kick
back- by using the needs of the other as a means for the satisfaction of the
ego’s own needs. The gift paradigm creates bonding and co operation while the
exchange paradigm creates isolation and competition. In the competition between
the paradigms, the exchange paradigm is at an advantage because it promotes the
values of competition. The gift paradigm is at a disadvantage because it
promotes the values of cooperation. In fact those who practice it appear to
lose the competition while actually they are simply not competing.
Since the gift paradigm is based on
giving to the other it allows or encourages giftgivers
to give to those who are practicing the other paradigm - the exchangers. Since
the exchange paradigm encourages giving to the self, it fosters mirroring of
the self and re-cognition of the self. A kind of socio-economic narcissism is
created in which external images of exchange validate its point of view over
and over. This hall of mirrors effect makes it possible for the exchangers to
see and give value only to themselves and their own processes while receiving
from the giftgivers without recognizing them and
without giving back to them. The equation x =y appears to be fair and neutral
because we do not see how many gifts are being given to exchange.
The world view of exchange receives a great deal of energy from those
practising the gift paradigm, but neither group re-cognizes the importance of
what the giftgivers are doing. The gift paradigm
encourages us to take the point of view of the other, while the exchange
paradigm promotes the ego’s self confirming point of view. Thus the exchangers
assert their superiority while considering the giftgivers
inferior and the gift givers internalize this attitude—because they take the
point of view of the exchangers (their “others”) about themselves.
Because of our growing participation in the labor
market, many women are now in the situation of maintaining both paradigms at
the same time internally. This creates an internal conflict. Although we women
may behave in giftgiving ways and feel the emotions
arising from others’ unsatisfied needs, we discount our own values and
motivations, giving credit to the point of view of the exchange paradigm-which
validates me-first behavior.
I believe that women are socialized to be mothers. Since babies cannot
“pay back” for what they receive, someone must satisfy their needs free,
without an exchange. This functional other-orientation is made necessary not by
the “nature” of women but by the nature of babies who cannot satisfy their own
needs. Society reads the biological differences to mean that women must mother.
The job is so difficult and time consuming, and its values so foreign to the
values of exchange, that we must be encouraged in that direction from
childhood, taking our own nurturing mothers as models.
The exchange paradigm has created a
large number of interlocking misperceptions which together make up a sort of
many faceted fly’s eye lens through which we collectively see reality,
misunderstand it and act upon it according to our misunderstandings. Then we
construct reality in the image of our image of it.
In our society the gift paradigm
seems to have many defects, even to be dysfunctional. I submit that its defects
are all due to its forced coexistence with the exchange paradigm. For example, giftgiving is difficult, even self-sacrificial in scarcity.
However, if we look at it in another way, we can see that scarcity serves the
exchange paradigm by keeping its patterns in place. If abundance existed there
would be no need to exchange because giving would become easy. It would be
enjoyable for people to satisfy each others’ needs directly. Therefore abundance threatens exchange, and it is not
allowed to accrue. For example abundant peaches are plowed
under when they would flood the market and lower the price. But on a larger
scale 18 billion dollars is spent every week on armaments world wide while that
amount of money would be enough to feed all the hungry people on earth for a
year. The military and the arms business do not produce any nurturing good.
Humanity’s effort to maintain itself has to come from other sources, doing
without the wealth that has been wasted. Over the years a huge drain on the
economy occurs through military and other make-waste spending. Because there is
also a short cycle of money through a few pockets, the arms business itself
(like the drug business) is lucrative for those who engage in it. However
because they do not produce any nurturing good, these businesses drain the
economy as a whole, causing scarcity and thus ensuring the ability of the
exchange economy to prevail.
Another consequence of the coexistence of giftgiving
and exchange is that the giftgivers do not see that
what they are doing is valuable. The exchange paradigm seems to be the “human”
way to behave. Getting to the top of the heap appears to be the way to survive
and thrive in “reality”. Actually we are
creating the heap ourselves. Our validation of patriarchal competitive values
only operates because we are inside the paradigm and therefore cannot see the
exchange economy for what it is - an artificial parasite which derives its
sustenance from the gift economy. If we can understand how the parasite is
created we can liberate ourselves and humanity from it. If we cannot we will
continue proposing the same wrong solutions to our socio-economic problems
until we finally destroy life on earth.
The gift paradigm is simpler than the exchange paradigm and not self
reflecting. There is a transfer of goods from one person to another, which can
be continued to another person and another, so that a flow is created. “If a
gives to b and b gives to c, then a gives to c” is the gift syllogism. We do not usually pay attention to the many
acts of giving that we actually do, perhaps because we feel that the
recognition of the processes of our good will might distort them by turning
them into exchanges. However, many aspects of life can be interpreted according
to the giving and receiving mode, if we look at them from the gift perspective.
Unfortunately the power of definition (x is y) seems to be in the hands
of exchange. By defining and labelling, the exchange paradigm is able to
distort our view of giftgiving so that it looks
inferior. The equation of a product and money: a pound of coffee = four
dollars, and the exchange of one for the other, is a definition played out on
the material plane. We have been interpreting human thinking in terms of the
equations and self reflecting patterns of exchange. One example of the way this
works is that exchange defines receiving as passive (unless it is the part of
exchange which is “giving back”). However we can see from experience that receiving
has to be active. For example our children have to be able to use the goods we
give them physiologically and psychologically. Otherwise our caring intention
would not be realized; our gifts would not be gifts. Receiving is not passive
but creative.
Giving and Receiving between Sun and
Earth
Usually we think of the sun as the giver of light and life. However the
trips to the moon in this century have given us a new perspective by showing us the
earth from space. When we look at the moon or Mars we see no life, though the
sun shines there, just as it does on earth. It is only our marvellous green and
blue planet that uses the sunlight to create countless varieties of life.
Somehow the earth has devised creative ways of using the sunlight. Grass
captures the light through photosynthesis. Animals’ eyes use the light to allow
them informed locomotion. Herbivores eat the grass allowing them to incorporate
and use its energy creatively, etc. It is not the sun that is special, however
evident it is in the sky, but the earth, because of her creative receptivity.
The earth receives the light by creating new givers and receivers for its
energy. Each environmental niche can be seen as a gift that calls forth a
creative receiver. In our perception we receive the “givens” or “data” (latin for “givens”) of our
experience. Our minds and bodies are so perfectly attuned to receiving them
that they may indeed seem like gifts whether they are actually given to us by
someone or not.
The elements of nature function according to gift processes. Fire can
be given to others without being lost by the giver. Water with its capacity for
downhill fluid motion is used by life in many different ways as the basic
substance of bodies. Earth gives a location, the humus of the
past, and minerals to living creatures. And air moves from a high
pressure to a low pressure area, from where there is more to where there is
less (I wonder if this is the answer that is blowing in the wind.) In our human
bodies our hearts pump the blood full of nutrients and oxygen out to our cells
which receive them, and then the blood returns to the heart and lungs where it
is oxygenated. We breathe in the gift of air and breathe out carbon dioxide
which serves the trees. But we also breathe out sounds and words which are
heard and creatively received by the ears of other humans.
Co-muni-cation
is Based on Giftgiving
The word “muni” was latin for “gifts”. To co-muni-cate
is to give gifts together together thereby forming
the co-muni-ty. In fact we can say that we co-muni-cate materially by satisfying each other’s needs and
in so doing we actually create the bodies (and along with the bodies the minds)
of the people who make up our communities.
When we look at communication in
terms of the exchange paradigm, we see it as an abstract rule-driven system
where humans are different from the animals because our way is more abstract
and complex. I suggest that if we look at human language as based on giftgiving, that is, on satisfying each others’
communicative needs rather than as an abstract rule-driven system, we can see
our difference from the animals as deriving from our being more collectively
nurturing not only with material gifts but also at verbal and mental levels. We
can also see our human understanding as a process of receiving and embracing
experiential “givens” at various levels. In other words our “higher mental
processes” can be understood not as due to our capacity for abstraction but as
deriving from generalized mothering.
In spite of the fact that Language “sciences” such as linguistics,
semiotics, psycho-linguistics, and socio linguistics have developed and
proliferated in this century according to the model of abstract rule-governed behavior. It therefore appears that in language, our most
human behavior, we are following abstract rules.
Believing that this is what happens in our minds and brains makes us believe in
law and order as the mainstays of human society. We do not know how to live with
each other without harm otherwise, given that we find ourselves in a
competitive, even violent environment of every man for himself.
Instead if we can interpret our capacity to think as deriving from
language which itself is derived from giftgiving and
gift processes—from satisfying communicative needs, rather than from following
rules—we can justify a society based on satisfying needs instead of denying
needs in favor of law. Laws are necessary to keep the world safe for
commerce—for the exchange economy. They protect the market from those with
unsatisfied needs. If giftgiving were the norm, the
normal way of behaving, everyone’s needs would be filled. (New needs would
arise and develop in a natural way rather than being altered by advertising). A
kind of maternal anarchy would be possible.
In fact giftgiving contains some internal
processes and provisos which can look like rules if we are viewing them from
the exchange paradigm. For example there is a basic movement “A gives
(something) to B”. B has to be able to receive from A,
and what is given has to be something B can use. That means A cannot be a fish blowing bubbles
in the bottom of the sea while B is a mountain goat on its mountain. A cannot
be my great great grandmother while B is last night’s
full moon. These impossibilities do not depend on rules but on the lack of relation between the interactors.
A certain amount of real world relevance has to go into gift processes. You
can’t get blood from a turnip but you also can’t give blood to a turnip. This
fact does not depend on law but on the ability of the giver to give, the
receiver to use what is given and the two to interact. I believe that these
reality based processes or shall we say limitations are transposed into
language as syntax. Adverbs modify verbs and not nouns because they are the
kinds of gifts that verbs can use. We say “a dog” not “a dogs” because the
singular not the plural uses the kind of gift that is “a”. It has that kind of
“need”.
Our system based on exchange does
not look at needs but at profit, at the abstract needs of “having more”. Our
business, university, government, military stick together and uphold each other
and rely on the law to protect their control. Their needs and the needs of the
market are abstract needs to control, to define, to enforce definition. Their
hierarchies function according to rules, command and obedience.
If we can go back to the gift based
processes we can find a way of regulating our interactions according to needs
having to do with gift processes rather than with needs of the system, both of
which have been interpreted as abstract laws or rules we have to follow.
Refocusing our view of language would allow us to reclaim the mother tongue for
the mother, taking it away from command and obedience, the law of the
patriarchal father. As we begin to get an idea of language as based on giftgiving, which I try to sketch out in my book, we can
see the far reaching effects of this fundamental shift in perspective. If indeed language is what “separates us from
the animals” and language is based on giftgiving,
perhaps the way humanity can move out of heart-stopping patriarchal exchange
and begin to evolve again is through reinstating widespread giftgiving.
Giving value to people’s actual needs would shift distribution away from
profit-producing “effective demand” (the needs of those who have the money to
buy the products to satisfy them) and towards eliminating the widespread
suffering that now exists in the world.
Repeating Patterns in the Exchange Paradigm
The exchange paradigm brings with it many offshoots and look-alikes
which we validate because we already unconsciously or consciously accept and
give value to the patterns of exchange. Systems of rewards and punishments such
as the justice system or the attacks and reprisals of war, are exchange
patterns transposed into areas of life beyond the market. The justice system is
an exchange based process through which those who have been injured can make
the perpetrators “pay back” for the harm they have done. It is of course very
difficult to measure harm and in fact those whose loved ones have been murdered
or whose countries have been destroyed by war probably find that no amount of
revenge or payment could ever restore to them what they have lost.
I believe that we have to address the root of the entire problem from
the cradle to the grave. We do not need justice, we need kindness. The root of
the problem is the exchange paradigm itself. Its exacerbation creates both the
crimes and the justice system we use to correct them. It expands to arms races,
escalations and military exchanges. It validates those who “have” more and
bigger missiles and penalizes those who “have not”. Having missiles does for a
country what having a big car or a lot of money can do for an individual. It
makes the country or the individual first, the one at the top.
Origin of the Patterns of Exchange
I believe that the patriarchal patterns of exchange, competition and
hierarchy come from a misuse of a process we use to form concepts. In this
process we compare many items to one prototype or model in order to find the
concept of something. In patriarchy, the father is seen as the prototype for
the concept of “human being” while the mother is discounted. The baby boy is
told he is “male” because he has a penis like his father and that he is not
like his mother with whom he has been participating in material co-muni-cation. By being named “boy” in opposition to “girl”
the child is pushed out of the mother’s category into that of her “other”, her
“superior” opposite. I believe this movement out of the giftgiving
category is due to the naming of gender and is the origin of our problems. This
simple and innocent linguistic mistake causes the alienation of the boy from
his giftgiving human processes.
The boy is told that he has to grow up to be a man like his father and
he is forced by society to attempt to construct a gender identity for himself
which is outside of the giving and receiving way. In fact his male agenda becomes
that of becoming the prototype himself—but of course, this sets him up for
frustration and failure because logically only one can be the “one” at the top.
A society is created in which, in order to carry out the mandate of their
gender, all the males are competing to be the prototype, or “one” to whom the
others are related as “many”.
Different hierarchies are created in
different areas of life so that there can be several “one” positions. These
hierarchies support each other and usually together support the dominance of a
single one who rules over all.. In fact, the role of the “one” appears to be
domination. A flow of commands goes from the top down, while a flow of
obedience and the giving of gifts and services goes
from the bottom up, from the many to the one. Domination is also often
maintained by physical violence.
There is a phallic-symbolic character of being the “one” at the top
because the penis distinguishes boys from girls, locating the boys in a
category the members of which will vie to be the prototype. The girls are in
the category who will remain like their mothers and
(usually) will not vie to be the prototype. We have so over-emphasized the
importance of the phallus—the mark of the category “male”—that having it
appears to make a human being superior to others who do not have it. The
“superiority” is necessary to be able to vie for the “one” position. Thus the
category of “having” also becomes over-sensitized, and it appears that having
much money or many things gives a person a high status, bringing him or her
closer to the “one” position. Scarcity also serves the top-down system by
making those in the lower positions of the hierarchies
need the monetary payments of those in higher positions. “Having” seems to give
those who “have” a right to control those who “have not”, in deep analogy with
having and not having the penis, (the “mark” of the “superior” category) giving
men a “right” to control women.
Scarcity also serves to keep exchange in place. If abundance existed
there would be no need to exchange because it would become easy and even
enjoyable to satisfy each others’ needs directly. Therefore abundance threatens
exchange, and it is not allowed to accrue. For example abundant peaches are plowed under when they would flood the market and lower the
price. But on a larger scale 18 billion dollars is spent every week on
armaments world wide while that amount of money would be enough to feed all the
hungry people on earth for a year. The military and the arms business do not
produce any nurturing good. Humanity’s effort to maintain itself has to come
from other sources, doing without the wealth that has been wasted. Over the
years a huge drain on the economy occurs through military and other make-waste
spending. Because there is also a short cycle of money through a few pockets,
the arms business itself (like the drug business) is lucrative for those who
engage in it. However because they do not produce any nurturing good, these
businesses drain the economy as a whole, thus ensuring the ability of the
exchange economy to prevail and making giftgiving
difficult.
Exchange Floats Upon
a
If we adjust our perspective to validate giftgiving
and invalidate exchange some things which have been both ubiquitous and
invisible are illuminated. For example women’s free labor
in the home can be validated as gift labor. It is now widely known that if women’s free labor were counted monetarily more than forty percent would
have to be added to the GNP in the
If we look at profit as coming from surplus value—Marx’s term for the
extra amount of work that the worker puts into the product over and above the
amount of his or her salary (the going price for that labor
on the market)—we can see that “extra” as a gift from the worker to the
capitalist. In fact once we have stopped
validating exchange we can begin to see
gifts everywhere. Profit is a gift, an extra portion of nurturing given from
each of those below to those above. The gift of profit motivates the whole
system of capitalism. In fact exchange itself floats upon a sea of gifts.
And so does human life itself. I started by talking about the various
levels of gift giving and creative receiving, from the beating of our hearts to
language, from the uses of light to the movement of the wind, from
physiological processes to the embracing of the “givens” of our
experience. Co-muni-cation
at the material and the linguistic levels depends not only on our ability to
give to needs but on the capacity to receive that comes from having had a
mother or caregiver. Because they must be nurtured at length as children humans
develop a receptivity towards all of the things that
satisfy their needs as if they came from the mother. Thus when we say “Mother
Earth” we recognize the great giver as the source because we have been
children. If we have needs that the
varieties of our experience can satisfy, it is because we have evolved to
creatively receive what is available as given.
The Exchange Paradigm Separates Us
In exchange, our gifts return to ourselves—by giving X we get Y in
return. The way of exchange separates us
by not allowing the flow of gifts and value from one person to the next. It
turns the attention of some away from needs and towards profit while the many
are kept in a survival mode through scarcity. Exchange
creates adversaries, every man for himself, as each person tries to corner the
gifts and to “have more”. The hierarchies spawned by the imposition of
the artificially constructed male gender upon the nurturing generic human make
a sick and distorted social structure appear to be normal.
Nations held in place internally by such
hierarchies make war with one another as each tries to become the “one” or
prototype nation, its leader the necessarily male top “human”. The
Achieving a Woman-based Socio-economic
Order
We must heal this situation by finding and validating a female way of
being human, a way which celebrates life and gives to needs instead of acting
out or projecting into society the alienation of the boy from the mother. The
false and artificial goal of being the “one” having the most and the biggest,
competing and fighting with other “ones” promotes the psychotic behaviour which
is bringing the earth to the edge of disaster. We who love life
have to stop the behavior, disinvest from its
values in order to heal the psychosis now. We can do that by readjusting the
focus, by giving attention to giftgiving.
Patriarchy has under valued the mother (or falsely sentimentalized her)
because it is threatened by the direct satisfaction of needs. Yet all of us
long to return to the giftgiving way. Our hearts cry
out with the need to be compassionate. We idolize female “one” models of
charitable action like Mother Teresa and Princess Diana, yet we do not realize
that radical social change is the only truly charitable approach. Only by
eliminating the patriarchal parasite from our hearts, our families, our
economics and our international relations can we stop creating the problems
that charity tries unsuccessfully to address. Unfortunately charity itself is
not the solution as long as we are living under the reign of the exchange
paradigm, though it does point the way. We have to give money, energy, attention, action to cause
systemic change. Giftgiving and receiving must be
revealed as the norm. The ability to recognize needs and satisfy them must
emerge as the basic female and male, institutional and individual human behavior. Shifting
the paradigm requires a shift in values. (Let me remind you that value is
something we give). Otherwise the problems are continually re created.
Achieving this mothering society will be easier if we realize that we
have simply been misinterpreting the many areas of our lives according to the
models of exchange. The liberation of women into the labor
market has allowed us to demonstrate that it was not our—not men’s—biology that
determined our economic gender roles, but our socialization. We can and must change the socialization of
our children, but as we are beginning to undertake that enormous task there is
something else we can do. We can re
interpret and reclaim the patriarchal disciplines for the gift economy by
recognizing that the matter or matrix of all their forms is giftgiving—and
that even their forms are complex gift patterns as well. Exchange itself is only a gift which has been
doubled, with a proviso of reciprocity so that it cancels the transmission of
the gift’s value to the receiver. In this reinterpretation we can recognize the
negativity of patterns of exchange and the dominance of the “one”. In fact the imposition by slaughter of “one”
religion upon the witches during the Inquisition and the imposition by genocide
of the exchange economy on indigenous peoples (many of whom were practicing
gift giving) might be interpreted as an expression of the struggle of the
exchange economy against the gift economy, that is, of the imposition of the
European male gender identity agenda upon the rest of the world. Unfortunately
but not surprisingly, the armaments, the phallic guns which the Europeans
brought with them to the
Having restored mothering to
disciplines from which it has been eliminated by patriarchal thinkers
throughout history, we can understand many of the empowering aspects of
participation in business and the market not as “gifts” of the exchange paradigm
but as due to changes in our access to complex gift constructs that patriarchy
has spawned. The ability to use these constructs then provides limited access
to the abundance that allows us to freely give (reclaiming the means of
nurturing). The paradoxical promise of the market system is that we will be
rewarded by abundance, and the ability to live in individualized, “pocket” gift
economies in our own families.
However, the logic of other-orientation
does not stop at the borders of any in-group. Instead everyone’s needs are
important. The possibility of giftgiving-in-abundance
must spread to all mothers and their children, to the people of all nations,
classes, cultures and religions. Giving and receiving in abundance is the
mother-given birthright of every human. The ego oriented exchange paradigm
separates us from one another and destroys our material co-muni-cation.
It exacerbates our individualism and makes us think that our problems are due
to bad individuals. It hides the forest behind the trees. By making it appear
that there is no system, it protects itself from our collective understanding
and from the capacity of individuals to join together to change it.
Those of us who have kept our sanity despite the psychotic society are
taught that the only thing we can to is to be “good” people (As in Kipling’s
poem “If you can keep your head when all around you are losing theirs, you’ll
be a man my son”). Instead the only way to be good is to give up the goal of
being good and grapple with the system itself like the angel wrestling Jacob. I
say it this way since Jacob was a Patriarch, and we have to engage our highest
and best angelic selves in this struggle. Unfortunately, as angels would, we
usually hold back our strength because we don’t want to hurt our patriarchs or
damage their self esteem. These acts of kindness keep us from solving the
problem.
As we begin to understand how the exchange paradigm works, its
continuous, pernicious and insidious draining of energy from the many to the
one, we can and must begin to work together to change it in the big picture as
well as the small. As we begin to recognize the exchange paradigm as parasitic
upon the more fundamental giftgiving way of the
mother which we are all meant to enjoy—and after all each and every patriarchal
male was born of a mother—we know that this transformation is not only
necessary, it is possible, for it requires only a return to what we have always
known.
Fortunately the world wide women’s movement holds few illusions about
the beneficence of Patriarchal Capitalism. The international women’s meetings
at Beijing and especially the nongovernmental organizations’ meetings at Huairou, Nairobi, Copenhagen, Mexico City, have
demonstrated a commonality of approach to problems and solutions that proves
the validity of the assertion of the caring values of women everywhere across
all the patriarchal boundaries.
Women in the United States have the political and economic power to
change the system from within not only to solve our own problems but so that
our sisters can be freed to solve their problems in their own areas. We can
learn a lot from our sisters about our system and we can learn from each
others’ struggles with every aspect of patriarchy. We can propose mutually
informed and co-ordinated alternatives. Women are the vanguard of the movement
for social change everywhere although we usually are unrecognized and often do
not even recognize ourselves. We in the first world need to stop investing our
energy in patriarchy and join with our sisters everywhere to create the change
in consciousness which will validate the gift paradigm not only in practice but
in theory.
I feel heartened by the fact that when women become conscious of the
struggle between the paradigms , they are undaunted
and often ask me “How do we begin to change this?” I think the first thing to do is to recognize
how much giftgiving women are already doing so that
we validate the gift paradigm in ourselves. Giftgiving
can be seen at all levels. It can be discovered in the small kindnesses of
everyday life: even the phrase “how are you?” is really asking “what are your
needs?”. It is visible in our own and others’ unpaid
need satisfying work and so called “volunteer” activities. It is present
(notice the gift-word “present”) in perception and knowing: our creative
reception of the givens of experience is not just a mechanical process but a
response to the nurturing of our senses by our social and physical
environments. It can be seen in nature, in our spirituality and in all our non
manipulative love relationships. It can be practised at many levels, from
listening to someone to satisfy her psychological needs to solving a complex
problem of social analysis. Even when the exchange economy is the context,
gifts can be given. Giving someone a loan or a job can be a need-satisfying
gift at one level even though loans and jobs require exchange as their content.
After we re-view the various aspects of life in the light of giftgiving, I recommend that we see whatever giftgiving we are doing in terms of a paradigm-shifting
practise rather than as isolated individual choices or quirks. It is only by
generalizing the paradigm and recognizing it as an already existing pattern
that we can validate it as the way to peace. We must also give our energies to
activism for social change while validating giftgiving
values. Solutions to social problems are themselves gifts—to humanity, to the
future generations, to the planet. If we do not validate our own giftgiving motivation for social change as paradigmatic,
our activism seems to have nothing positive to turn towards and stops at
denouncing wrongdoing—a dead end if we cannot also offer a positive
alternative. I do not pretend to know all of the ways people can assert the
gift paradigm—the possibilities are infinite. I do know that if humanity is to
survive all of us must assert the gift paradigm soon,
following the leadership of women.
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