The Gift, Anarchism and Solidarity

Anthropological Reflections on Anarchism’s Political Economy

In Diverse Economies: Performative Practice for ‘Other Worlds,’ Gibson-Graham (2008) advocate a project of ontological performativity—the development and use of a discourse of economic diversity as a practical intervention in social reality. Key to this project is a rejection of “capitalocentrism,” seeing capitalism as an economic totality, as the economy. This move posits non-capitalism, diverse economies in the here and now, rather than a more familiar focus on anti-capitalism, resistance now for a post-capitalist future. Through this ontological move, theory becomes a tool of political-ethical intervention.

While anarchist political economy certainly fits within Gibson-Graham’s focus on diverse already-existing alternatives, anarchists see no necessary contradiction between anti- and non-capitalist positions. To appropriate an insight from Massimo De Angelis’ (2007) The Beginning of History, anarchists recognize the totalizing drive of capitalism without conceding to a capitalist totality. They believe that the drive of capital is to replicate its social relations throughout the social field and that this totalizing drive demands anti-capitalist struggle. When the free bonds of solidarity are threatened by the imposition of alienating capitalist relations, many anarchists will tell you that “solidarity means attack!”At the same time, however, solidarity means construction. Anarchists attempt to organize and build upon the non-capitalism that already exists within the social field.

Anarchism is a form of political economy organized around both non-hierarchical and anti-capitalist principles. Although anarchists are best known for dramatic protest actions, they spend most of their energy on mutual projects aimed at constructing radically alternative frameworks for daily life. At the center of these are mutual aid and solidarity. Mutual aid is an unambiguous expression of the ethic of reciprocity. Solidarity, the counterpoint of alienation, is an experience and a collective process constructed through a complex dynamic of collectivity and autonomy. Both mutual aid and solidarity are rooted in the practice of the gift. As such, I argue that anarchism can be understood as a contemporary political expression of the logic of the gift. Almost anything can be a gift: objects, words or services. Quite simply, the gift is concerned with certain practical dispositions toward interaction based on the value people place on building and sustaining relationships.

Instituting the Gift: Networks, Infoshops and Really Really Free Markets

The practice of the gift constitutes decentralized networks, which are also the best way to demonstrate the complex and overlapping relations of alliance and rivalry existing within the milieu of anarchist communities of struggle. In practice the relationships within such networks often coalesce, dissolve, and reconfigure around concrete projects of radical giving. A great deal of anarchist activism is concerned with innovating ways to give that foster anti-authoritarian social relationships and challenge the political and economic power of capital and the state. Such projects are about the mutual construction of alternative frameworks for daily life. Examples of such projects include Really Really Free Markets and Infoshops.

As the members of Crimthinc: the Ex-workers Collective explain in the journal Rolling Thunder (2007), “a ‘Really Really Free Market’ is a market that operates according to gift economics, in which nothing is for sale and the only rule is share and share alike” (34). The idea is to create decentralized institutions within communities where people can not only share resources but can, more importantly, build lasting solidary relationships that overcome the alienation on which the regular market is based.

Infoshops are collectively managed spaces committed to the distribution of alternative and politically radical knowledge and information. Infoshops come in all shapes and sizes. The physical structure of the space is less important than the collective process that organizes it. Anarchist Infoshops generally operate based on direct democracy and worker control. Often decisions are made through a process of consensus, which can range from highly formal forms to highly informal ones. Interestingly, the dynamics of consensus decision-making follow the classic cyclic pattern of the gift identified by Marcel Mauss (1990 [1925]) in The Gift: give, receive and return. In the process everyone must give, and give up, something of their position to everyone else and all must be prepared to receive what others are giving. The process iterates and finally consensus is a return to everyone by everyone.

Anarchism: Order, Not Chaos

It is likely that some readers find it ironic that “anarchists” would cooperate in any kind of endeavor. Anarchism is a broad term and generalizations must always be cautious but there are some basics principles on which most anarchists agree. Anarchists are widely misrepresented as violent anti-social hooligans bent on an extreme individualist ethos, a caricature of the historical and contemporary reality of anarchist practice. Anarchism is not about chaos; it is about order, a social order with as little hierarchy as possible. Anarchists reject the organizational principles of the state and capitalism. They reject utopianism in favor of directly modeling the core relations of the society they desire. “Building the new society in the shell of the old,” as the classic slogan has it. Today this form of practice is called “prefigurative politics,” and its basis is consensus process. Anarchism’s historical commitment to direct democracy has spread far beyond groups that might call themselves anarchist. The General Assemblies of Occupy Wall Street and the Democracy of the Squares that swept through North America, Europe, and the Middle East during the global uprising of 2011 are salient examples of anarchist practice. Here the term horizontalism might be a more inclusive term to distinguish between groups that use anarchist organizational methods but may not call themselves by the name.

The Gift: A Choice between Solidarity and Alienation

To fully understand the importance of the gift, we have to understand how anarchists conceptualize the contrast between solidarity and alienation. Alienation is the experience of a social process: a form of social production that denies its own sociality. In Change the World without Taking Power, John Holloway (2010) explains that alienation “is labour for others which exists in the form of labour for one’s self. The sociality of doing is ruptured and with it the process of mutual recognition and social validation” (46). The experience and process of alienation is simultaneously subjective and objective—intersubjective.

In contrast, the experience and process of solidarity is constituted through the practice of the gift. Here it should be kept in mind that the gift is mercurial and capable of producing hierarchy as well as egalitarian community. Though in this essay I focus primarily on its egalitarian possibility, I do not deny its hierarchical potential. The value of the gift is the social bonds it helps create; the gift creates alliances. In their excellent book, The World of the Gift, Godbout and Caillé (2000) write, “[w]hereas the gift puts in place and supports a free social bond, the market frees us by pulling us out of the social bond; in other words, its freedom consists in freeing us from the social bond itself” (191). Collective solidarity is based on the free social bond, the choice to join with others in common projects. Within the anarchist movement these common projects might be most visible as protest actions. Black Bloc tactics (militant direct actions) grab headlines but much of the action of anarchism can be found in the thousand small solidary gestures of daily life, the weaving of community based on the free social bond of the gift.

Patrick Huff is a doctoral candidate in the department of anthropology at the University of Georgia, Athens. His interests include political economy, practice theory, radical social movements, value theory, autonomous politics, and radical feminism.

via Anthropology-News http://www.anthropology-news.org/index.php/2013/01/10/the-gift-anarchism-and-solidarity/