Mothering Economics, Mothering Language

May  2009

Some years ago a young woman parliamentarian  from New Zealand, Marilyn Waring, (Waring 1989) wrote a book on the fact that women's free labor in the home was not being counted in the Gross domestic products of the world. In the USA she said 40% would have to be added to the GDP if women's work were counted, even more in some other countries. I was working on the idea of the gift economy at the time and I realized that this free labor of  housework is a huge unseen gift that is being given by women to the economy as a whole.

In fact there are really two economies, a free economy and an economy based on exchange. In one we give directly to satify needs, and in the other we give in order to receive an equivalent. Actually exchange has a lot of defects we don't recognize because we have been  brainwashed by it into thinking it is the natural way to distribute goods and the answer to everything. There have been and still are whole cultures where market exchange is not the mode of distribution and instead goods are given directly to needs.  In our society, which is based on the market, mothers still have to give directly to young children because, as everywhere, they are born completely dependent . in fact children do not learn how to exchange until they are 4 or 5 years old. This means that everyone is born into a gift economy but in our society has to change and adapt to an adult exchange economy later on, a fact that perhaps  makes the gift economy appear childish and primitive. Actually though, the exchange economy is bad for us psychologically and materially while the gift economy brings about community and makes us truly human.

Giving directly to satisfy needs as happens between mothers and little children produces positive human relations of mutuality and trust. The mother has to give attention to the child, see what she really needs and make or get or somehow provide something that will satisfy it. The child receives this gift creatively and uses it, she digests the food, and it nourishes her, she grows, develops new needs  and becomes able to do some things on her own. The mother understands the child's different needs which change as she grows and can also recognize when it is a gift not to give to her, not to help her for example when she needs to do something by herself. The giving and receiving between mothers and children has a relation-creating logic of its own and can be taken as the basis of an economy without exchange, of giving directly to satisfy needs. This economy is already universal because it is necessary for the survival of young children. All of us have it as our heritage, not a genetic but a social heritage because  the very dependence of infants forces some adult to relate to them in a very other oriented way. This is not heredity, it is just the social consequence on adults of infant biology.

Giving and receiving, the unilateral satisfaction of needs, already creates positive human relations, which are beyond or before reciprocity, debt and obligation. I believe the relational themes, which develop into what anthropologists call  gift exchange and market exchangeactually begin in unilateral gift giving and receiving, which is more basic and more widespread than gift exchange or market exchange. Lets look at the distinction between unilateral gift giving and market exchange.
Unilateral gift giving takes place according to a transitive logic, a movement of goods, which also implies the value of the receiver. In fact if the receiver were not important for the giver, s/he would not have given the gift to h/er. There is also a syllogism of gift giving "If A gives to B and B gives to C then A gives to C." This syllogism underlies the circulation of gifts, which are passed unilaterally from one person to another. The value of the receiver is implied here also, and a giver, who was previously a receiver, does not have to lose the value s/he has been given, even when she gives the gift to someone else.

On the other hand, market exchange takes place according to an intransitive identity logic. By making the transaction contingent on an equivalent return the unilateral gift is cancelled and the action becomes ego oriented rather than other oriented. Unilateral giving and receiving create bonds while market exchange cancels and breaks them, and indifference is created between the participants. Indeed exchange is adversarial in that each person is trying to get more than the other out of the supposedly equal exchange (Hyde 1979). Exchange is self-reflecting and self-asserting while unilateral gift giving concentrates on the other and therefore the giver often remains unnoticed. Attention and value are transferred to the other along with the gift or service.

In the early processes of unilateral giving and receiving the bodies of the members of the community are made, and their minds as well, in that their experiences are formed by these interactions. I think this transitive gift giving transfer of need-satisfying goods and services can be seen as communication, a material communication, which creates bodies as well as relations and minds and gives material goods as well as value. This comunication forms the co 'muni' ty - from the latin meaning 'gifts' - giving gifts together.

Market exchange instead is a kind of aberrant material communication, a non- communication, which is intransitive and stops the gift. The value of the other, which would have been implied by the gift transaction is cancelled. By using the other as means for the satisfaction of h/er own need, the exchanger implies h/er own value, not the value of the other. Attention and (exchange) value are also attributed to the product, the commodity, not to the human beings involved. So called 'symbolic gift exchange' is intermediate between these two extremes of unilateral giving and market exchange, and all three can coexist simultaneously.

The identity logic of the market economy influences us very strongly to validate only the kind of relations that occur in giving to receive an equivalent or to make a profit. Moreover market exchange emphasizes the ego orientation of homo economicus and considers other orientation as an unrealistic moral penchant. Instead I believe that the ongoing maternal gift economy is transitive, satisfies needs and creates relations. It is not primarily moral but functional. The term 'economics' has been identified with market exchange. I believe we should call maternal gift giving, mothering, a mode of distribution, a way of distributing goods directly to needs, a mode, which is economic on a par with exchange. That is, we should broaden the term 'economic' to include this unilateral maternal relation-creating gift economy. The economy based on exchange could therefore be seen as derived from the unilateral gift economy by a doubling back of the gift, making the counter transaction obligatory and requiring an equation of value-in-exchange. The market would no longer hegemonically occupy the whole concept of 'economic'.

The division between the domestic and the economic and political spheres can thus be cancelled or bridged  by recognizing the maternal gift economy as an alternative economy which already exists and actually subsidizes the economy based on exchange. The answer to the terrible problems that have been brought upon us by Patriarchal Capitalism is the liberation of the maternal economy from the economy based on exchange, and the gradual elimination and discrediting of the market rather than the assimilation of the gift economy into the market.  That is why I do not believe in wages for housework. We need to eliminate the market altogether and put in its place a generalized maternal gift economy. Even thinking about this possibility and working towards it begins to make cracks in the monolith and validates the vales of gift giving over the values of exchange.

I believe that one important step towards doing this is to distinguish between gift giving and exchange, and to see the reciprocity which was and is practiced in indigenous societies as a variation on the gift rather than a primitive form of moneyless exchange. In fact in our present day context, gift economy is often taken to mean the exchange of gifts for reputation, as happens in internet software gift economy. I am talking about unilateral gift giving which has a transitive logic of its own, and which is not the self reflecting identity logic of exchange.

Giving directly to satisfy needs is a mode of distribution but unfortunately  the maternal gift economy has been robbed of its mode of production because the economy based on exchange coexists with it and  has taken over. Gift giving requires abundance in order to function without sacrifice.  In fact in abundance it is easy and delightful. Exchange requires scarcity, because the market economy cannot exist in abundance -  if everyone had enough no one would work for a boss or a corporation but would gladly enjoy life, consuming the fruits of the earth and giving to others and receiving from them. Therefore the economy based on exchange creates the scarcity necessary to maintain control. It channels the flow of gifts from the many to the few, takes the collective gifts of housework and other free labor, and uses them to cut the costs of production,  it takes the gifts of nature destroying age old forests and jungles and cuts costs again by polluting, it commodifies free seeds and even whole species through life form patenting. It takes indigenous knowledges and copyrights them. The exchange economy is actually a hungry mechanism comsuming the gifts of all. Production in this society is focussed on the market and is directed not towards the satisfaction of human needs but towards the needs for profit, which means that what is produced is what will sell. Instead of production for needs there is the category of effective demand which is also deeply infuenced by advertising,  This effectively limits the gift basis, and does not allow the gift economy to flourish, while at the same time  indebtedness for consumer goods (which are advertised almost as gifts) maintains scarcity for the many and channels profits to the few.

Indigenous and Goddess worshiping people pray to the spirits of the  four elements, Earth, Air, Fire and Water. Two of these Elements have now been privatized, Earth and Water, and Air is becoming a commodity as well in debt-for -nature swaps. Nature in the countryside used to provide many gifts but people have run away from Her, migrating to cities like moths drawn to an electric light bulb, thinking it is the sun. In the Global South many people who would have been sustained by the gift economy of Nature now live in the cities on the only free places left, the garbage dumps. When the market economy does not succeed in creating enough scarcity it makes wars to waste the wealth or creates financial bubbles as has happened recently. I do not know if this is done on purpose or if it is automatic and unconscious. However it is clear that this is a worldwide economic system that is not working. It is dysfunctional and harmful to everyone.

I believe that one of the reasons for the cruelty and dysfunctionality and failure of this system is its inability to recognize mothering and its exploitation of the gift giving maternal principle. That is why I think that the movement for a new economy needs to be led by  mothers and women who have mothering values  with the support of  men who have salvaged the legacy of their maternal upbringing from the macho ego  ideal of capitalist patriarchy. They need to ally themselves with indigenous and colonized  people who have not been altogether assimilated, with environmentalists who are trying to save the gifts of Mother Earh and with everyone in the peace and justice movements who are trying to give the gift of a better world.

The analysis of what is wrong with the economy  has to take into account the exploitation of the vulnerable who are gift givers, the creative source of life and care. The success of this exploitation often means that we don't even see the people who are practicing gift giving, not only the ones at home but the ones abroad who give the gift of their cheap labor in sweatshops so that the corporations can profit from selling us what they make.

Gift giving and mothering have not been used as an explanatory key in academia or politics or often even in feminism, because we have all been caught in the spell of exchange. We believe it brings justice and mutual respect, right rewards for work, that some deserve to make much more than others. We believe in rules and measure, on marks in school and on  rating ourselves against a  standard of value, and our products and our work against money.All this is part of the market mindset, and we use the market as the metphor for everything from human capital to the marriage market. Now as the market is failing we can see that the whole fabric of society is riddled with lies, of advertising and propaganda, of and the lies of our US president, first stealing the election and then lying us into war, even the twin towers disaster was probably the product of lies. Now we have the business lies, lies of accountants, lies of tax havens, lies of pyramid schemes, lies of millions and billions of dollars given to the very people who created the disaster, but especially the lies of the people selling mortgages and credit cards to poor people, then re selling the loans and then blaming the poor people because they can't pay.

Why is it ok to lie this way? I think it is because we do not recognize the great positive maternal principle in language. We believe that language is hard wired into our brains with Chomsky, or that it is an exercise in following grammar rules, or that it is a tool. Umberto Eco even suggested that it is an instrument for lying and that is our species specific trait. Lying fits with the ego orientation of exchange, of satisfying the need of the other only to satisfy our own need. Surely this is not the species specific trait of the gift giving mothering human, homo donans, but it is the trait of homo economicus. We are dividing into two species and one is trying to domesticate the other by feeding it lies.

If we can show that mothering is not just instinct, or slavery or mindless drudgery, but the practice of a human principle, a logic, that permeates the rest of society, we can liberate it as a great social force, as well as an interpretative key for understanding many aspects of life in a different way. I believe one way of doing this is finding that it is a basic principle for language. In fact in my view language is a virtual verbal gift economy, which we use to satisfy the communicative needs of others. These are needs for human relations with us regarding things beyond us. The verbal gifts we give each other correspond to the gifts of the world that we could be giving to each other to form relations but are not giving at the moment.  Even when those things are too big or small or too many to give or in the past or the future, we can still give each other verbal gifts in their stead and create human relations with others. The maternal gift economy of language is always abundant, we do not lose words by giving them, and others have the same facility. We ellaborate our gift giving agency and receptive creativity by giving  and receiving words,  sentences and discourses. The linguistic  creativity that Chomsky talks about is not just unlimited creativity in making sentences but in satisfying others' communicative needs with them.

If we believe that language is a neuter and neutral inherited brain module perhaps it does not make much difference if we lie or believe lies. However if we believe it is a gift and a construction of gifts,of  the orientation towards the other that makes us human, allows us to inherit and pass on to the future the words of the people of the past, creating the community of generations together with the populations of the globe, we can honor language and the mother, Mother Earth and Mother society. We are not a spcies that should die. We are a species that should honor our mothers.

References

Hyde, Lewis, 1983 [1979]. The Gift, Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property, New York, Vintage Books.
Waring, Marilyn (1988).If Women Counted, A New Feminist Economics, San Francisco, Harper and Row.