Summary of Chapter 8: Exchange and Gift
V’s summary:
Both the nobility and the proletariat conceive human relationships on the model of giving, but the proletarian way of giving transcends the feudal gift. The bourgeoisie, the class of exchange, is the lever which enables the feudal project to be overthrown and transcended in the long revolution (1). History is the continuous transformation of natural alienation into social alienation, and also, paradoxically, the continuous strengthening of a movement of opposition which will overcome all alienation. The historical struggle against natural alienation transforms natural alienation into social alienation, but the movement of historical disalienation eventually attacks social alienation itself and reveals that it is based on magic. This magic has to do with privative appropriation. It is expressed through sacrifice. Sacrifice is the archaic form of exchange. The extreme quantification of exchange reduces man to an object. From this rock bottom a new type of human relationship, involving neither exchange nor sacrifice, can be born (2). (75)
Vaneigem begins with the recurrent theme, of the present social order as an interregnum between two revolutions, a “no-man’s land” in history waiting for its culmination and transcendence:
The bourgeoisie administers a precarious and none-too-glorious interregnum between the sacred hierarchy of feudalism and the anarchic order of future classless societies. The bourgeois no-man’s-land of exchange is the uninhabitable region separating the old, unhealthy pleasure of giving oneself, in which the aristocrats indulged, from the pleasure of giving through self-love, which the new generations of proletarians are little by little beginning to discover.
This is also true where (at V’s time of writing) the “shadow of the bourgeoisie continues to rule under the red flag” (76). The bourgeoisie does of course play an important, though temporary, role in this history:
to give the devil his due, it is through the historical presence and mediation of the bourgeoisie that such a future becomes accessible to the proletariat. Is it not thanks to the technical progress and the productive forces developed by capitalism that the proletariat is in a position to realise, through the scientifically worked-out project of a new society, its egalitarian visions, its dreams of omnipotence and its desire to live without dead time?
Social organisation – hierarchical since it is based on privative appropriation – gradually destroys the magical bond between man and nature, but it preserves the magic for its own use; it creates between itself and mankind a mythical unity modelled on the original participation in the mystery of nature. (77)
From this point of view history is just the transformation of natural alienation into social alienation: a process of disalienation transformed into a process of social alienation, a movement of liberation producing new chains. Eventually, though, the will for human liberation will launch a direct attack on the whole collection of paralysing mechanisms, that is, on the social organisation based on privative appropriation. This is the movement of disalienation which will at once undo history and realise it in new modes of life.
The bourgeoisie’s accession to power signals man’s victory over natural forces. But as soon as this happens, hierarchical social organisation, born out of the struggle against hunger, sickness and material distress, loses its justification, and is obliged to take full responsibility for the malaise of industrial civilisations.
The hierarchical principle is the magic spell that has blocked the path of man in his historical struggles for freedom. From now on, no revolution will be worthy of the name if it does not involve, at the very least, the radical elimination of all hierarchy. (78)
The old feudal elites justified their rule in terms of myth and sacrifice, though this in reality meant “mythical power for those who sacrifice themselves in reality, real power for those who sacrifice themselves in myth.” (79)
The sacrifice-gift, the potlatch – the game of exchange or loser-take-all, in which the size of the sacrifice determined the prestige of the giver – obviously had no place in a rationalised trading economy. Forced out of the sectors dominated by economic imperatives, it re-emerged in values such as hospitality, friendship and love: refuges doomed to disappear as the dictatorship of quantified exchange (market value) colonised everyday life and turned this too into a market.
Strictly quantified, first by money and then by what might be called ‘sociometric units of power’, exchange pollutes all our relationships, feelings and thoughts. Where exchange dominates, only things are left, a world plugged into the organisation charts of cybernetic power: the world of reification. Yet this world is also, paradoxically, the jumping-off point for a total reconstruction of life and thought. A rock bottom on which we can really start to build. (80)
V posits also a final stage, or possibly an alternate non-revolutionary future, of “cybernetic democracy:”
The sacrifice of the masters is followed by the last stage in the history of sacrifice: the sacrifice of specialists. In order to consume, the specialist makes others consume according to a cybernetic programme whose hyper-rationality of exchange is destined to abolish sacrifice – and man along with it. The day pure exchange comes to regulate the modes of existence of the robot citizens of the cybernetic democracy, sacrifice will cease to exist. Objects need no justification to make them obedient. Sacrifice is no more part of the programme of machines than it is of a quite opposite project, the project of the whole human being. (81)
The order of exchange will fall apart, and be replaced by that of the pure gift:
We must rediscover the pleasure of giving: giving because you have so much. What beautiful potlatches the affluent society will see – whether it likes it or no – when the exuberance of the younger generation discovers the pure gift. The growing passion for stealing books, clothes, food, weapons or jewellery simply for the pleasure of giving them away, offers a glimpse of what the will to live has in store for consumer society.
We will have to renew our acquaintance with feudal imperfection, not in order to perfect it, but in order to transcend it. We will have to rediscover the harmony of unitary society while freeing it from the phantom of divinity and from hierarchy sanctified. The new innocence is not so far removed from the ordeals and judgements of God: the inequality of blood is closer to the equality of free individuals, irreducible to one another, than bourgeois equality. The cramped style of the nobility was only a crude sketch of the grand style which will be invented by masters without slaves. Yet it was a style of life nonetheless – a world away from the wretched forms of mere survival which ravage the individual’s existence in our time. (81-2)
