Politics of the Gift: Towards a Convivial Society

194 Pages·2022·6.658 MB·English

by  Frank Adloff

POLITICS
OF THE GIFT

TOWARDS A
CONVIVIAL SOCIETY
FRANK ADLOFF
ALTERNATIVES TO CAPITALISM
IN THE 21ST CENTURY
Alternatives to Capitalism
in the 21st Century
Series Editors: Lara Monticelli, Copenhagen
Business School, and Tor sten Geelan, University of
Copenhagen

Debates about the future of capitalism demonstrate the urgent need to
envision and enact alternatives that can help tackle the multiple intertwined
crises that societies are currently facing. This ground-breaking new series
advances the international, comparative and interdisciplinary study of
capitalism and its alternatives in the 21st Century.
Forthcoming in the series:
Capital to Commons
Hannes Gerhardt
Money Commons:
Remaking Money for an Inclusive and Sustainable Future
Ester Barinaga
Out now in the series:
The Future is Now:
An Introduction to Prefigurative Politics
Edited by Lara Monticelli
Find out more at
bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/
alternatives-to-capitalism-in-the-21st-century
Alternatives to Capitalism
in the 21st Century
Series Editors: Lara Monticelli, Copenhagen
Business School, and Torsten Geelan, University of
Copenhagen
Advisory board:
Wendy Harcourt, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Netherlands
Vasna Ramasar, Lund University, Sweden
Tom Malleson, King’s University College, Canada
Silvia Federici, Hofstra University, US
, The New School for Social Research, US
Nancy Fraser, The New School for Social Research, US
Luke Martell, University of Sussex, UK
Laura Basu, openDemocracy and University of Utrecht, Netherlands
Juliet Schor, Boston College, US
Isabelle Ferreras, Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium
Göran Therborn, University of Cambridge, UK
Gar Alperovitz, The Democracy Collective and
the Next System Project, US
Francesca Forno, University of Trento, Italy
Flor Avelino, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Dutch Research Institute
for Transitions, Netherlands
Emanuele Leonardi, University of Parma, Italy
David Bailey, University of Birmingham, UK
Ashish Kothari, Global Tapestry of Alternatives, India
Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, University College London, UK
Arturo Escobar, University of North Carolina, US
Albena Azmanova, Brussels School of International Studies, Belgium
Find out more at
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alternatives-to-capitalism-in-the-21st-century
POLITICS OF THE GIFT

Towards a Convivial Society
Frank Adloff
Translated by Björn Bosserhoff
Originally published in German by Edition Nautilus in 2018 as
Politik der Gabe: Für ein anderes Zusammenleben
Originally published in German by Edition Nautilus, Hamburg as
Politik der Gabe: Für ein anderes Zusammenleben (2018)
English language edition published in Great Britain in 2022 by
Bristol University Press
University of Bristol
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ISBN 978-1-5292-2624-9 ePub
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Front cover image: “Exit through the gift” by Zualidro
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Contents

Introduction: From Capitalism’s Crises to a Convivial Society 1
PART I An Anthropology of Giving
1 Self- interest, Altruism, and the Gift 13
2 Mauss’ Gift 25
3 Homo Donator: A Different Anthropology 38
PART II Society’s Gifts
4 Locating the Gift in Society 55
5 The Gift between Socialism and Capitalism 70
6 Commodities, Values, Money, Gifts 81
PART III Crossing the Borders
7 Science and Technology, Nature and Conviviality 99
8 Gifts of Nature 108
9 Civil Society, Conviviality, Utopia 119
PART IV Worlds of Conviviality
10 Aesthetic Freedom, or The Gift of Art 131
11 Pluriversalism: Towards a European and Global Politics 141
of Conviviality
Conclusion 154
Notes 159
References 161
Index 182
v

Introduction: From Capitalism’s

Crises to a Convivial Society
Humans are living longer, healthier, wealthier, safer, and more peaceful
lives than ever—n ot just in the Global North but in many regions around
the world. And yet many feel that we are living in an era of crisis. The war
in Syria and the millions of refugees it produced brought home to us that
armed conflicts and material human suffering are not a thing of the past
but affect even “us” in the North quite directly. In Germany and elsewhere,
right- wingers intent on protecting their people from Überfremdung and
“replacement” tried to use this situation to their advantage. Meanwhile,
international cooperation, crucial for effectively fighting global warming,
has been stagnating for years, and the effects of climate change are becoming
more and more apparent as natural disasters proliferate. Large parts of Africa
have been shattered by wars, corruption, hunger, and forced displacement.
Social inequality is rising dramatically in many countries, and the economic,
financial, and debt crisis is far from over. According to Oxfam, in 2018,
the wealth of the 42 richest individuals on earth equaled that of the poorest
3.7 billion. And the gap continues to grow: the top 1 percent now rank
in more than 80 percent of the global economic growth, and the number
of billionaires is higher than ever before. Perhaps worst of all, democracy
is under attack in many places, with authoritarian leaders trampling on
liberal values and human rights, and corporations shamelessly exploiting
the fragility of once strong democratic institutions and processes. On top
of all that, in 2020 the globe was hit by one of the deadliest pandemics in
modern history, which has further aggravated the social inequalities both
within our societies and globally.
This is the dire state we are in 30 years after the Cold War ended. The
end of history? Think again. Little wonder, then, that calls for a radical
transformation are becoming louder, voices that demand that we finally
move beyond neoliberal financial capitalism, confront inequality, overcome
stereotyping and isolationism, and develop new, sustainable forms of living
on earth. Which is exactly what I, too, call for in this book. In what
follows, I try to lay the foundations for an understanding of new forms of
human cooperation and institutional orders. In doing so, I will make ample
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POLITICS OF THE GIFT
use of the concept of convivialism (from Latin con- vivere: living together),
which is based on another sociological concept that is the focal point of
my argument: the gift. Starting out with everyday varieties of gift giving,
I will work my way towards the global scale and examine different shapes
that a “politics of the gift” could take, a politics that aspires to change the
ways we treat each other and the world in which we live.
In this endeavor, I was inspired by a small volume published in 2013 by a
group of 64 mostly French academics, the Convivialist Manifesto. Intended
to make plain that “[a] different kind of world is not just possible” but “a
crucial and urgent necessity” (Les Convivialistes, 2014: 38), the manifesto
was signed by intellectuals of various political convictions who nonetheless
agreed on the two main causes for today’s societal crises: the primacy of
utilitarian, self-i nterested behavior, and a persistent belief in the blissful
effects of economic growth. The convivialists’ response to this diagnosis is a
fundamentally different vision of the good life. What matters most, they insist,
is that we become more mindful of the quality of social relationships and of
humanity’s relationship with nature: for our “living together” to succeed,
we must first realize that our lives are based on a cycle of giving, receiving,
and reciprocating (see also Adloff, 2014; Adloff and Heins, 2014a, 2014b).
A second Convivialist Manifesto was published in 2020 and has already been
translated into various languages. Reacting to current political developments,
such as the worldwide renaissance of illiberal regimes, it makes more concrete
policy suggestions than its predecessor; and since it grew out of a broader
collective discussion, the second manifesto is also more international in
character: almost 300 academics and intellectuals from 33 countries ended
up signing it (see Convivialist International, 2020).
The idea for the first manifesto was born at a colloquium in Japan in
2010. This was followed by a proceedings volume and by Alain Caillé’s Pour
un manifeste du convivialisme (Caillé, 2011a; Caillé et al, 2011). The debate
on conviviality and convivialism was initially focused on the work of Ivan
Illich (1926– 2002), an Austrian American theologian and philosopher
who was a radical critic of modern technology and an early proponent
of degrowth. His book Tools for Conviviality was popularized in France by
André Gorz and received much critical attention around the world. Like his
friend Erich Fromm (1976), Illich believed that it was time to once again
prioritize “being” over “having”: a truly convivial society would limit its
use of technology, which otherwise may take on a life of its own and cause
more problems than it solves (Illich, 1973).
A second, much older, and perhaps surprising source of the conviviality
concept is the book The Physiology of Taste (1825), in which the French
gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat- Savarin described the “spirit of
conviviality” as that which “brings together from day to day differing
kinds of people, melts them into a whole, animates their conversation, and
2
INTRODUCTION
softens the sharp corners of the conventional inequalities of position and
breeding” (Brillat- Savarin, [1825] 2009: 160–1 ). In both the French and
English languages, “conviviality” is still commonly used to denote friendly
social intercourse— and this could be expanded to include people’s relations
with “things” (such as artifacts, infrastructures, technologies, or institutions).
There are two more strands of thought that have influenced the convivialist
vision: the anti-u tilitarianism of Caillé and critiques of growthism as voiced
by Patrick Viveret and Serge Latouche. The philosopher Viveret (2011)
identifies the structural exorbitance of modern productivism, in both its
capitalist and socialist versions, as the root of our current crisis. The fixation
on economic growth, he holds, ought to be replaced by other criteria of
wealth and the good life— and the measure of the gross domestic project in
particular be reconsidered. Latouche, an economist, is the most prominent
proponent of degrowth theory or décroissance. He champions a society of
“frugal abundance” (2014) and, like Viveret, calls for a new conception of
wealth that goes beyond its monetary aspects. In Latouche’s view, a convivial
society must radically question the idea of growth; it must limit itself. New
forms of economic activity are needed which put an end to the permanent
creation of ever more (potentially unlimited) pseudo-n eeds. Latouche sees
growth for growth’s sake as the maxim of a religion of the economy that,
along with the ideal of the homo oeconomicus, we should finally get rid of.
Currently, ideas of growth and material wealth serve as a screen onto which
people project all sorts of hopes and fears. To be sure, hopes for individual
future prosperity hold societies together, even though they usually remain
unrealized. But what happens when the time of high growth comes to an
end (as already appears to be the case, at least in Western societies), when
unemployment can no longer be minimized by growth, when incomes
are not enough to get by on any more, when social inequality keeps
rising? For the convivialists, the answer is clear: our ideals of a good life
must be decoupled from material wealth, and democracy and conviviality
acknowledged as ends in themselves. Such an adoption of completely new
ideals to guide the lives of individuals and whole societies would amount
to nothing less than a political and ethical revolution.
Degrowth theory has its origins in earlier debates on the ecological crisis
and “post-d evelopment.” Adherents of the latter concept, also drawing on
Illich, are highly critical of a modernization of the Global South along the
lines of Western/N orthern notions of economic growth (see Chapter 11).
For Latouche and others, in light of the current social and ecological
double crisis caused by capitalist hegemony, future human self- limitation is
imperative. In capitalism, the economy must keep growing, so as to keep
competition between companies and the eternal struggle for profits running.
Many now come to realize, however, that this mode of economic activity
is just not sustainable, since it relies on energy prerequisites that soon will
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