Figure 15. Exchange over-takes giftgiving and barter.

Chapter 11

Shifting into Exchange

When we use words instead of material gifts to communicate, we shift to another plane that we have created--language, which works according to similar co-municative principles. But when we shift from material giftgiving to economic exchange, we actually shift to the logic of substitution in place of the logic of the gift. The logic of substitution (which has a linguistic function) in a self-similar process, itself takes the place of the logic of giftgiving. Because of the double, two-level substitution of money for a product and of one logic for another, we cover more ground than we realize; there is a wider gap between giftgiving and exchange than there is even between things and words. (This gap is filled on the one hand with 'deserving' and on the other with correspondence between word and thing--perhaps what we sometimes call 'truth.')¹ There is a move from the micro to the macroscopic through the self-similar structures of substitution and exchange. (See figure 15.)

The alignment of self-similar structures creates a sort of mind warp, a hole in the roof, a breach with a strong updraft which draws us up into the 'new' mindset of exchange. Then this new mindset or paradigm attracts the attribution of value to itself. (It is only 'new' as opposed to giftgiving, which preceded it ontogenetically and phylogenetically.)

Because of the similarity and self-referentiality at the different levels, we give at least the amount of credence to the substitution of the whole logic of giftgiving by the logic of substitution that we do to the simple substitution of one thing for another. The new grosser-grained material level is familiar. We

¹Actually telling the truth should be seen as other-oriented communication, satisfying others' communicative needs to know about a situation in order to satisfy their other complex needs. Lying is ego-oriented. Like exchange, it uses the other for the satisfaction of the needs of the ego. False advertising is a lie which promotes an exchange. 'Objective' truth, the correspondence between words and things, might be seen as a reflection of equal exchange, outside the giving and receiving grain.

know unconsciously how the fine-grained micro level works, because we are using that substitution process all the time when we learn language and define things. We did shift to a new level when we gained language, and having language has mediated everything we are. The similarity to masculation of receiving a new 'name' in the price, of being given away by the 'producer' and out of giftgiving into the new logic of substitution, again sets up reciprocal confirmations. Exchange draws us in, and the exchange paradigm takes over, taking the place of other possible models for our concepts of human interactions.²

If superior value were not being continually attributed to exchange, it would not continue to exist as such. Nor would the masculated male continue to exist as such if superior value were not attributed to him. Giftgiving, and the extension and valuing of the gift paradigm, would make exchange unnecessary. So actually, at present, giftgiving is sustaining its 'competitor' (competition is of course an aspect of the exchange, not of the gift paradigm). The logic and the practice of exchange need this attribution of value, and everyone satisfies this need, even those practicing the gift paradigm. Having been given superior value, exchange becomes the only way to achieve survival--occupying the field, pervading our lives, and marginalizing or excluding its alternatives.

The social institution of exchange for money lets us shift paradigms every time we buy and sell. The shift itself becomes so common we do not notice it; it permeates our lives. Both the 'new' paradigm and the shift become natural and normal for us. The 'old' paradigm of free goods and services is dis-counted and valueless by contrast, though it continues to function.

Ego-oriented people attribute value to exchange, not only because they need it to survive, but also because by engaging in it they can individually deserve and receive extra value, appearing to be self-made (the source of their own superiority). Moreover,

²The new naming also happens in fundamentalist Christianity with baptism and with being re-born, which is similar to acquiring a new (exchange) value by relating oneself to the general equivalent. It is also similar to masculation and almost creates a third gender identity, with its own mandates for behavior.

the masculated pattern of exchange repeats their own over-coming. Other-oriented people also attribute value to exchange by logical consequence, because they attribute value not only to themselves but to others who need exchange to survive. Exchange occupies center stage, and it also attracts attention, because it promotes competition to which visibility is useful. The seller must elicit the choice of the buyer through the visibility and attractiveness of the product-in-exchange.

The substitution of giving--precluding it--makes the transaction of exchange adversarial. Since the other person is doing the same thing in a different phase of the process (giving money while we are giving a product, for example), she is our delayed or anticipated reflection and like ourselves, in scarcity is always ready to get our product for less or sell her product to us for more--even to cheat us. In exchange, when we 'put ourselves in the other's place,' we recognize our adversarial interests. A mechanism of our altruism thwarts itself by the realization that the other person needs to cheat us, as we need to cheat her. It would be in each of our mutually exclusive 'interests.'

The shift into exchange cross-validates with masculation, so it attracts some of the value which is given to masculation and vice versa. Like masculation, it cancels and invalidates the giftgiving source, making its practicer appear to stand alone. It sets the standard for the economic field and often even for 'reality' itself. What is similar to exchange appears to be not only more valuable but real and normal, while everything else is unconfirmed and uncertain (another way women and giftgiving are discounted). Exchange deals with evident value overtly, names it, accumulates and stores it as money, foresees its social fluctuations. It seems to be the crux of the matter. In other words, at this level the exchange process attracts the gift of value. We move back and forth from appreciating it to attributing value to it, contradictorily receiving from it--from the process--and giving to it. We breathe the living breath of value into the exchange process, like God breathing the breath of life into Adam. The value given to exchange by those who participate in

it, as well as those outside it, is influenced by market forces and finally accumulated in capital, which provides the rewards for having and the punishment for not having that motivate the whole process.

The importance of exchange is overdetermined, as might be expected, but giftgiving too would be receiving value and confirmation from many different areas, if its gifts and its value were not being drained into exchange. Many processes can be interpreted as giftgiving-and-receiving--from sexuality to birth, to breastfeeding, to breathing, to Mother Nature dropping her handkerchief for us to pick up (in windfalls and synchronicities), and to all the many ways of nurturing we have mentioned at all levels. These can be and are symbolized in many different ways, beginning with Mother Earth and Sister Water, the cornucopia and the grail. However, giftgiving is often concealed because exchange (like masculation) is in competition with giftgiving and parasitically depends upon it for the value that is attributed to it. Exchange needs to be in the forefront, to disguise giftgiving or blot it out, and to seem to receive value because it deserves it.

Exchange actually needs its value to appear to be revealed as its own rather than as attributed by others. That is, it needs to seem to have the source of its value in its own double logic, as if it were only getting back an equivalent of what it, exchange, 'gave.' It appears to re-institute giftgiving at its own (partial) meta level, and we may be led to believe that exchange is a very beneficial gift to the community. In fact, so-called 'developing' communities often have this idea when they begin to raise crops for sale instead of for their own consumption. The initial increase in prosperity and 'independence' appear to be almost magical, but they are soon off-set by the defects of dependence on a market economy. This dependence actually privileges only the very few, while making it appear to the others that their own defects--lack of intelligence, ineffective strategies, wrong choices, bad luck, etc.--are the reasons for their failure. Blaming individuals (instead of the system) for their failure allows excessive value to continue to be given to exchange and to the market.

Since exchange appears to be the only source of goods for survival in an economy based on scarcity, it does seem to deserve all our attention. However, the system has to create the scarcity as the prerequisite of exchange--because giftgiving in abundance subverts exchange by making it unnecessary. As the monetized economy expands, it occupies the space that previously was available for gift production and consumption, making it difficult for those not participating in exchange to survive. Natural resources are employed or destroyed (intentionally or unintentionally), so that they cannot be used as a source of livelihood for those who traditionally were nurtured by them. The economic marginalization of Native Americans and the destruction of the huge herds of buffalo on the North American plains, which were the free source of livelihood of many tribes, are one tragic example among many.

By showing how exchange is parasitic on the gifts of the paradigm which it hides and denies, we can finally see that it is not the primary source of economic well-being and that, even on its own criteria, it does not deserve the attention and the value we give to it. Giving value to a wider meta view for the good of all, we can shift the paradigm back from exchange to giftgiving.

Chapter 12

Giving Value to Exchange

Giving to the Market

Exchange does not itself give value, though it may appear to give through the process of monetary definition--by including something in the category of things which are exchangeable for money. Whatever is included in that category actually receives value that is given to it, and to the category as a whole from the outside. Not only is value attributed to things in that category because people want to buy them, who then give up their money in order to receive them, but value is given by everyone to the process as a whole (as they do to the process of masculation), to that part of it which is the category 'products on the market,' and to all the intricacies of capitalism that are built upon it.

In giftgiving, value passes transitively from giver to receiver, but in exchange the value of the gift does not pass to the other because the satisfaction of the need passes back to each exchanger. The implication of the exchange is not that the receiver of the product or her needs are important, but instead that the initiator of the exchange and her needs are important. The money which is given to the seller allows a product having that exchange value to return to the buyer--who was a seller previously and thus de-serves the return. If the buyer does not receive 'her money's worth,' more of the value passes to the seller--which may be another part of the motivation for cheating.

Buying in order to sell attempts to increase the amount of value which will be given to the product by others and, consequently, the amount of money which will be given up for it. For instance, by transporting a product to another location, we may expect more value will be attributed to it by others. Its rarity may even make it a prototype or sample product, and as such,

highly desirable. Commerce is made possible because products are placed in positions and given aspects of availability, durability, convenience, etc.--by which others will give more value to them from the outside. The threat of unsatisfied needs also causes people to give extra value to products. Scarcity serves this increase in the attribution of value and is often created for that purpose. The creation of scarcity is euphemistically called 'increasing the demand.'

The rarity of the product seems to enhance its owner's value--and the buyer pays for that, repeating the pattern. Many products also are given value as 'marks' of (masculated) status which increases the value the buyer gives to him or herself through the exchange. All these attributions of value influence the buyers' priorities and 'marginal' decisions. Her attributions of value seem to be expressed in her choices, which are all ultimately interpreted by economists in terms of her self-interest. They are, of course, choices taking place within the parameters of exchange, with the market as a 'given.'

Being in the category of exchangeable things makes products available to receive the attribution of value from the outside. Products on the market are given more value than abundant necessities, such as air and water, or things that cannot be sold, because they are broken or defective or overly abundant. Being on the market also reveals the value that products already have, which has been given to them by others in the past--a value which is usually calculated and expressed as costs of production. The market puts things--and people--in a decontextualized position where their value is 'revealed' by substitution, and where value is given to them by contrast with what has no exchange value. Bringing something to the market is thus similar to attending to something about which we will communicate--with regard to which we will alter our human relations--appreciating its value and attributing value to it. It is a slow motion replay of semiotization on a material plane.

In the market, we alter our mutually exclusive relations of property regarding that particular product, transferring the

product to a new owner while keeping its value in the form of money. In language, we alter our mutually inclusive relations regarding the things we are attending to, creating a shared experience and a common ground on the basis of shared substitute gifts. Altering our mutual human relations in a consistent and coordinated way with regard to something reveals and utilizes its general relation to the group. And vice versa, we use its general relation to the group to include ourselves, altering our relations to it in the moment, by making them specific.

In the market, we usually bring things physically to a place, for example, a store, where they will be categorized as valuable to the human relational process of (distorted) material communication, exchange, and given up. In speech, we usually alter our relations to things using the words to which they specifically give way and give value showing that those things are already appreciated as valuable to the human relational process of linguistic communication and, thus, to the communicators. In exchange, the product enters the category 'valuable' as it becomes related to money. In language, something first becomes a value in the culture, which leads to semiotization. It is socially related to other things of the same kind (and to a word as its name) and is capable of being explicitly related to the words of present communicators. Its categorization is part of its relation to the many, just as is the categorization of a product on the market as an exchange value. Value is appreciated and attributed by the exchanger or interlocutor, to products or to things related to their names. The first case provides the category of exchange value, the second provides the cultural or semantic value of each different category.

The attribution of value to a category or to the market is similar to the attribution of value to hierarchies with their different levels. Hierarchies transfer value and goods upwards. They are vertical strings of masculating definitions. The many give both to the privileged categories and to their privileged sample 'ones.' The structures of exchange and hierarchy often combine (for example, in the military or the church), where

those inside the valued category are supported by those outside (for example, through taxes or tithes). A hierarchical structure channels commands downwards and the obedience and services of the many upwards, towards ever higher levels of ones.

The value of particular products is revealed by their position within the totality of things on the market, and value is given to the totality from the outside by free labor and other gift practices.¹ Value is attributed freely to the market because the market seems to be the source of all goods; survival depends upon it. Other possibilities for survival are few. Scavenging from the garbage and begging are alternatives which are viewed as socially valueless ways of surviving, and so-called 'self-sustainable communities' are relatively new and isolated developments. Thus, value for the market becomes the sample of the concept of all value.

Value is given to the market from outside by everyone, but it is usually appreciated as coming from exchange, from the market itself, or from the products themselves. The fetishism of commodities comes from the denial and cancellation of gift value-attribution. Any value that is not 'deserved' through the market is considered a rip-off, because giftgiving is not recognized as contributing to the whole. If we get something free or pay less for something than its market price, it seems that there has been no original contribution to the market, through our production, corresponding to our consumption. It may seem unfair for us to receive 'something for nothing.' Yet this question is completely misplaced, because we have usually contributed to others and to the market itself through caregiving, and through the surplus labor which creates profit, as well as through giving credit to the market as a system, and to all the worthless and destructive products, politicians and ideas that validate it. In fact, enormous contributions are given free by everyone to the market, but are unrecognized.

¹ This situation is similar to that in which knowers freely give value to the concept, a value which instead is usually perceived as coming from the concept itself or from the things involved.

If I buy a useless toy or breakfast food or face cream that is available on the market and has been advertised, I am giving extra value, not only to the producers and sellers of the product, but also to the market process, without which I would not have bought it. Advertising elicits the free gift of our attention endlessly. Our minds, hearts, and houses are filled with products coming from or destined for the market, as is a large amount of our time. The central recipient of our attention for most of our lives is the market and all the varieties of our participation in it.

Giving Value

Value is also one side of a binary opposition with what is unvalued. It is the doorway for a relation to human beings, because we relate to each other more strongly regarding what is valued than regarding what is unvalued. It is likely that we would begin to create a concept about things that are valued. There is also negative value, to which we may give attention, and we may have to give many gifts to counter its effects. Satisfying another's need gives value transitively to that person.

Because the satisfaction of the other's need is used only to procure the satisfaction of one's own need, exchange cancels the gift and creates an equilibrium, so that neither the gift nor value pass transitively to the other person. The stimulation of more needs to increase production is even less compassionate than equilibrium, because it creates also more unsatisfiable needs.

Supply and demand in equilibrium are a lot like question and answer. Effective demand is the expression of the need (the explicit question or request) through money. Production is the 'right' answer. But their interaction is an imitation and transposition, even a travesty of the giving and receiving, which honors needs directly. A symmetrical closed circuit is created, in which each self-interested, self-valuing person who gives only in order to receive is equal to all the others doing the same thing, and finds the 'human' valuable common quality in that equality. Market equilibrium is a projection of the symmetrical circuit of

exchange. But giftgiving and the needs it satisfies, as well as needs which remain 'ineffective' and unsatisfied, lie outside this circuit though they feed into it.

Hierarchies and Makeshift Communities

The mutually independent and indifferent mode of exchange imposes a characteristic structure, through which we distortedly communicate materially to become a community. It is the hierarchical transposed concept structure of over-taking (power-over) and substitution, which is incarnated as the needs of the people in privileged one positions are satisfied by others--the many--who are kept in positions of giftgiving (so the attribution of value goes upwards). ( See Figure 16.) These many de-servers are those who are paid to create capital through surplus labor, or to service their privileged samples in various ways, providing them with the rewards which are the motivation for their capital accumulation.

In exchange, we do not give value to need or the person who has the need, but to the product that might satisfy the need, as a member and quota part of the category of things in exchange. The assessment of the product in terms of money, and the instrumental assessment of need for that product of those who have the money to pay for it, capture our attention and our production, leaving little energy for the needs of other de-servers much less those of the 'undeserving.' Communitary bonds wither and fall away. Compared to what they might have been, our communities as a whole are pitifully 'lacking.'

This human void is filled in various ways: through more of the same hierarchical behavior in 'law and order,' but also through much unrecognized giftgiving. There are volunteer activities, done for the express purpose of bonding, by which many community bonds among those who would otherwise be indifferent or strangers are created or revived. A good deal of work has recently been done² by various authors on the giving of

²David Cheal, op.cit.

Figure 16. Gifts flow upwards.

Christmas and birthday gifts, an activity done mostly by women. Volunteer work, nonprofit organizations, charities, attempt to heal the wounds and bridge the gaps that are continually being created by closed circuit ego-oriented economics. Religious organizations encourage or require much free giving of money and of time and, therefore, give value to their own need for self-propagation. A sense of community among their members is created, because they are all giving instead of exchanging, and they are giving to the same overarching organizational need. Allegiance and obedience are also explicitly given to the priorities, interpretations and rules of these organizations. Each masculation and exchange-based ego thus finds itself having qualities and beliefs in common with others beyond its own egotism.

By stimulating pheromones and loosening inhibitions, alcohol and other social drugs make bonding more immediate. Drinking alcohol socially perhaps replaces giving each other milk, i.e. mothering each other! or at least being nurtured together--in

spite of alcohol's macho mystique. In fact, drinking excessively often stimulates masculated behaviors of overcoming, such as loudness, hyperactivity and physical violence. Alcoholics require special tending by others, which makes them seem to assume a superior hierarchical position with regard to their 'servers.' Such groups as Alcoholics Anonymous create community through serving one another's needs for support to solve a common problem. The community that is created replaces the bonds that were formed by drinking alcohol together which replaced the bonds made difficult by the exchange economy. The letting go attitude and trust in a higher power are healing alternatives to the power-over, masculated attitude.

Sports activities give us the shared (often vicarious) experience of attempting to achieve common goals through relatively short-term masculated competitions. Perhaps it is the sharing of the experience and its priorities as valuable that allows us to communicate about them successfully, forming bonds regarding their exclusion or entrance into the category of winners. These social institutions and habits and many others respond to a need for community that is created by the economic way based on exchange, and on the ego-oriented instrumentalization of the other's need, which creates the isolation of each individual ego. The responses of volunteer, self-help, community organizations are, in their way, gifts at a group level. They do succeed in creating community through giftgiving. Many women may become aligned with them, because they give a social location and a wider range of action to the other-tending they are already doing in the family. (For women who are still being socialized towards giftgiving, a contradiction and an internal tension are created between self and other-orientation, gift and exchange paradigms.)

The community organizations and institutions themselves remain hybrids between giving and exchange and often serve to maintain the status quo of the exchange paradigm by satisfying the needs for community created by it. They do have the positive effect of allowing space for the gift paradigm to be

practiced outside the family. However, the giftgiving that does take place is often at the service of patriarchal ideology, or it is re-assimilated into an exchange context. The recent criticism of other-orientation as co-dependent takes the isolated individual as the norm, and the other-tender as aberrant, discrediting the very giftgiving that is the cause of the healing. Of course, we also need to know how not to give care when we or other people need to be independent. That is, in itself, a needed gift. The exchange economy requires isolated individuals, privileged one behavior, and many de-servers serving them. It is this economic way that is the culprit, not other-orientation.

It seems to me that the movement for radical social change, now occurring in the US and worldwide, combines a number of the advantages of these efforts, while approaching the society itself from a wider view and trying to change the systemwhether this is understood as capitalist patriarchy, organized racism, or fascist tyranny. Much volunteering and many common activities are done by those in the feminist, ethnic, peace, and environmental movements. An on-going community is created. Although there seems to be a common consciousness among activists in the US that 'all the issues are connected,' exchange has not yet been considered as negative, and much masculated, 'privileged one' behavior still occurs.

The exchange principles of equality and equilibrium are still embraced by the social change movement, although some attempts are being made to celebrate diversity and to honor the Mother. Using exchange principles as the final court of appeal re-infects the movement with some of the values of the very system it is trying to change. This weakens and makes more superficial the alternatives that are proposed, such as using moneyless barter instead of the present system of exchange for money. Such attempts cannot solve the problems. They could perhaps provide moments of transition towards a gift economy, but only if they were clearly not themselves being taken as a final solution. On the other hand, these principles of equality and equilibrium may cause us to repeat the exchange paradigm by calling for reprisal,

payment, and punishment for the grievous wrongs that have been committed. These values re-confirm the principles of the system that caused the wrongs. Therefore, however well-intentioned they may be, they only reform the system locally and in the short term, but do not radically change it.

Giving the Givers

Value can also propagate self-similarities at the meta level as the gift of the giving of giving. We mentioned above that when French anthropologist Levi-Strauss argued that an 'exchange of women' between men of different kinship groups created bonds among them, and functioned like an exchange of commodities, what he did not realize was that the 'giving' of women is actually a meta gift--of givers. Needs for givers are present in every society, and the gift of the giver is the gift which, like the cornucopia, can potentially satisfy all needs. Women are the bearers of material co-munication and, as such, create the bonds of the community wherever they are--whether or not they are themselves subjected like commodities to 'exchange' or are given like gifts or decide upon their own destiny. Women often don't recognize their own contribution or attribute to themselves the meta gift of value any more than they or masculated men consciously recognize the mother as the source of giving or the gift paradigm as a viable Way.

From a feminist ('gynophilist') point of view, we can see value as the giving of giving, which in exchange value is made to double back and cancel itself out. Whereas originally there was a binary opposition between valuable and valueless based on other-oriented giving, exchange is a new kind of giving which is not for others, in its final destination. Exchange value creates a new opposite of giving (the giving of not-giving), an opposite of value different from valuelessness. Value-in-exchange constitutes a third opposition, and there is no longer a binary but a tri-polar, three-pronged opposition, consisting of value, valuelessness and exchange value.

Figure 17. Value is given to exchange; gift value becomes invisible.

This three-pronged picture is soon altered by a fourth, prong: use value. Then the gift of value is given to exchange, and to use value, canceling out gift giving. (See Figure 17.) We mistakenly attribute the gift of giving to exchange, to the market, and what is not exchange value or has not been through the exchange process seems to be valueless. Exchange value becomes the sample of the concept of value. Exchange over-takes giftgiving. We collectively and individually give it too much importance while denying any importance to giving. We are not conscious of the giving we are actually doing. We do not give it any value.

Giving value to exchange also gives value to the ideal 'sample' of the successful capitalistic masculated male as the opposite of the mother. The gift of value and of the giver (mother) are imprisoned in exchange value by giving value to their opposite and to not giving. (And many mothers and daughters are literally imprisoned by husbands, fathers, sons, brothers, etc.) The giving of giving is not usually visible as such, also because visibility is connected with language and with the characteristic of substitution, which is part of the process of exchange. If exchange subsides (or we start thinking outside the binary opposition), we can appreciate the value of the giving of giving, and the need for it, that depends on a widespread complex social situation and not just on the deserving which seems to come from self-similarity and participation in the exchange process.

For-Giving

Letting money (like a word) take the place of a product (or a thing) says about the product: 'Here is a gift, a satisfier of need.' Since the money-word is actually transferred as property from one person to the other, it enters into the anti-communicative logic of the not-gift: 'For me, therefore not for you--for you (or others), therefore not for me.' Our culture nevertheless identifies this anti-gift process as a gift, a socially useful process, and gives it the name 'exchange,' by which we can satisfy our linguistic

communicative need in its regard. In fact, we do engage in the process of exchange a lot; it is valuable. It satisfies our need for a source of goods in a situation where goods have been made artificially inaccessible through keeping property and abolishing giftgiving. By making access to goods conditional upon the production of other goods of equal value and their measurement and exchange, we interrupt the material giftgiving value-conferring process and cancel the bonds and community which it could have produced. We relate to exchange as the source, as if it were the mother--though it is an analog of masculation and thus concomitant to the process that alienated the boy (and the father in his time) from the mother. Perhaps this is why people feel so passionately attached to exchange, the market, capitalism and masculation itself. They bond with these processes, because the processes appear to nurture them.

The 'gift' of exchange contradicts giftgiving. The needs that surround it are the needs of a not-community, of people living within the 'adversarial' relations of buyer and seller. Though we continue to communicate by means of language and other signs, our material co-munication has become drastically altered and contradictory, and our attitudes towards one another have appropriately become fear and resentment.

For-giving becomes a moral issue, whereas it is actually only the psychological manifestation of the gift paradigm. When we forgive we refuse rancor, reprisal, 'measurement' of wrongdoing, and other psychological reflections of exchange. (We refuse to give up giving the gift for the not-gift. We do not change into exchange.) We try to understand others' motivations in terms of their unmet needs. And we try to understand the personal and social reasons for those needs, satisfying them and changing the contexts if possible, solving the problems. Shifting the paradigm back to giftgiving is a way to for-give everyone.

It is almost as if the word 'forgive' were pointing the way towards the paradigm shift. In fact, forgiving is not something we do to another person; it is a change in our values, in our own

attitude towards giving and away from guilt, blame, manipulation, and punishment, which are ways of remaining in and promoting the exchange paradigm at the psychological level. By modeling it, we also give the logic of giving a multiplier effect, since others can see it at last unconcealed--and follow our example. If we can shift paradigms and consciously change our behavioral logics collectively, demystifying and diminishing exchange and reprisal, we can have a permanent effect. We should look at the shift as a practical solution for all rather than just as a moral choice. The framework of morality limits the scope of for-giving to the individual, while the need of all the children of the earth is for a collective shift towards the Mother.

Supporting the Alien Noncommunity

We continue to have to give without exchange to very young children, and to form a community with them, socializing them as communitary beings. Yet, our most important and widespread material communication with others at large, as adults, is exchange. We have formed an alien noncommunity in which our children then have to try to adapt and survive.

The noncommunity of exchangers requires many free gifts. It needs gift (surplus) labor in order to supply the reward of profit, by which capitalists are motivated to create and maintain enterprises. It needs women's free labor, which cares for use values, gives to workers and reproduces the workforce, increasing the profit margin. It needs the gift of our credence, our belief that it is viable and even 'just.' But it also needs the giftgiving among humans that continues to take place beyond or in spite of exchange, not only as communication through language, but also through all the acts of kindness, love, generosity, hospitality and camaraderie that 'make life worth living.'

The aesthetic experience is, to a large extent, the creative reception of a gift, though owning the object of art is not free. The nonprofessional thought that goes into any kind of business

or work or activity is free. Sometimes bringing products to the market is done free, and the travel of buyers to the market is done at their own expense. The needs of consumers are greatly influenced by their care-giving of each other, especially through the choices of the women (and men) who have to buy the means of nurturing. The development of needs and desire itself is done free through caregiving--though it is now being profoundly altered by advertising.

The gift of value is also given, not only to exchange, but to a systemic adversarial (and instrumental, conditional) ego need to know or appraise how much a person has given, assessing his/her production quantitatively with regard to all the others. Ostensibly, this appraisal is made in order to give back to her/him the same amount, but it is actually made to give power to the one who judges who 'deserves' to be given access to the exchange itself, who 'deserves' to be given to, and eventually who 'deserves' to be the privileged one, the sample. (The privilege and generality of the sample, come from the polarization of the concept process in which it is immersed, and are not due to its having given more than others.) In our judgments about 'deserving,' excessive value is given to the equivalence or correspondence between thing and word, or product and money, or work and salary--and very little value is given to needs as such.

Even equations do not have value on their own; they are given 'values,' but they are also given their value from the outside. We have seen that equations take the place of the consideration of things in their relation to needs, and we over-value them in that role. Exchange could not exist if it were not embedded in giftgiving of many kinds and at many levels. The 'gift' of not-giving and the alien community of not-givers are possible because they are immersed in (and nurtured by) a community of givers.

Among the gifts we give to not-giving, which consumes those gifts in its processes, are our attention to exchange and our blindness towards gift processes. We do not form our community

regarding giftgiving, our linguistic communicative needs do not arise regarding it, because in fact we are forming our community mostly according to exchange. Thus, we do not communicate much about giftgiving. (This 'functional' reason supports the more misogynistic motivations for our denial of giftgiving and helps us for-give ourselves for it. Guilt, self-reprisal, 'paying ourselves back,' only confirm the logic of exchange more strongly.) Exchange has taken the place of material gift co-munication, as communication with language has taken the place of material co-munication, as men have taken the place of women. In fact, the exchangers are related to each other in a very individualistic way, which is a perfect fit with the ideal of masculation, the individualistic and adversarial lonely hunter.

Of the gifts that are given by the community, which is still acting according to giftgiving at an abstract level, the most important is the meta gift of value, by which other gifts and services are directed. We appreciate value and attribute it to art, music, literature--all of which themselves attribute value in complex, beautiful and surprising ways. We value the gifts of the painter or the story teller, as well as those of the political organizer, and even the salesperson's gift of gab. They direct our attention in new ways, altering our habitual attributions of value. We love the gifts of nature, of culture, of history, of science, which by satisfying our needs attribute value to us, as well. However, by giving value to exchange and to things in the exchange mode, we continue to maintain it, directing most of our goods and services towards it.

Another way in which value is attributed to exchange, to the self-similar shift into the logic of substitution and all the manifestations of masculation, is through confirmation by reflection, by their reciprocal similarity. Unless we consciously understand its causes and negative effects, the repetition of the pattern seems to give value to its different expressions. The pattern itself acquires a certain amount of independence, and we can imagine it floating through the universe validating other masculations whenever they form.

In fact, by acting it out, by giving the pattern of masculation repeated manifestations, humanity can make it into a 'kind of thing'--a thing which could be related to a word, to which we can begin to give value, and towards which we may direct our concept forming attention. We look for a sample and try to find the common qualities of the things related to it as similar. We both appreciate the importance of the pattern and attribute importance to it. We talk about it and give it a name.

For example, we call it 'patriarchy.' By naming it, we relate it to a word; we begin to transform it by making it 'give way' to the word which is our gift to each other. Women form ourselves as a co-munity by talking about patriarchy, as I am doing in this book, and as the progressive and the feminist movements are doing everywhere, pointing out the patterns of oppression and grasping the connections among them. We must also give to each othertime, attention, nurturing goods, forming material co-munities beyond exchange. We are working now to transform 'reality,' so that we can give the gift of a good earth to the future.

Figure 18. The relationship between products and money and things of a kind and a word are self-similar at widely different scales.

Chapter 13

Market and Gender

An Altered Reality

I am trying to trace the self-similar patterns of patriarchy in different areas of life, so that we can recognize them. Women and other have-nots may feel that if only we 'had,' we would realize our potential, becoming 'equal' to the haves--and finally, fully human. Thus, we aspire to the rewards of patriarchy and unwittingly help to motivate the system. If we can recognize the patterns, we can use the system for survival while we are changing it, without giving it value, without giving it our hearts. (See Figure 18.)

The market is like a language which is evolving from a past into a future state, according to quantitative (rather than qualitative) value and having only one word, money. The constraints upon this language derive from the kinds of human relations it is required to mediate, the mutually exclusive relations of private property. Money 'names' the products again and again as values, but because of the exchange mode, which preserves the ego-orientation of all, no further mutually inclusive material relations can develop.¹ The human exchangers cannot evolve fully as a co-munity.

The market seems normal, 'given' to us by the way things are. Instead, it is actually an altered reality. Why, indeed, should human beings allow the naming process to stand between those who have goods and those who have needs? The market involves naming or defining with the money word, over and over. 'This coat = $20.00. This other coat = $100.00. This bag of potatoes = $4.00.' The equation between products and money, which is a moment of the naming process, becomes an important moment

¹We have been talking about exchange as definition. Because there is only one material word, money, I am now talking about naming. Several of the functions of the definition are collapsed into each other in monetized exchange.

for the society as a whole. It seems to be the gateway to all value. In fact, it is used to bring some products into the category of 'valuable,' while others appear to be valueless because they are not saleable, or because they are free (gifts of nature: air, water, sunlight, etc.).

Masculation has made everyone expect to be 'elevated' or fear being demoted by being put in one category instead of another. The moment of naming with the gender term: 'John is a boy,' or with money: 'one pound of coffee = $2.00,' puts the person or the product in the category of those having value in relation to that word or that amount of money. Girls and products which are unsaleable or free (giftgivers and nature's gifts) do not belong to the superior category. Thus, the gender term for females already attributes to the person the contradictory value of not being in the superior, valued, category. Being put in a superior category by '... is a boy' seems to deprive the members of the category of their ability to give in the present, while giving them another mode with something else--words, positions, money to strive for (a distraction and a kind of addiction). The naming of gender and the exchange of products for money focus us in the present, but only through the mis-recognition of gifts and overemphasis on the equation and substitution.

We give value to definitions rather than to people or to the nurturing way, which remains concealed, in the shadow. Gifts give value to the receiver, exchange does not--except through the process of 'deserving,' where the exchanger appears to cause the payment herself through her own value, her previous production, etc. As in masculation (where boys learn to 'deserve' the name 'male'), the definition takes over, and the gift model gives-way. The social gift, the name, takes over from individual gifts and, because it is general, appears to be something else, to have an arcane power. The one-many position, when used as a privileged, phallically invested sample with power in the real world, backs up this fetishized power of the name. When we 'earn' a profess-ional qualification, we can call ourselves a 'journalist' or a 'doctor.' We enter a privileged category. By behaving in

appropriate ways, and learning to put into practice the knowledge we have mastered, we are able to fit the definition. Like the boy, we 'earn' the right to bear the name. And we earn a 'living' in the exchange economy.

A Self-Replicating Parasite on the Tree of Life

At a true meta level, we would recognize exchange as partial, just as we would recognize the male gender (and its definition) as partial. But giftgiving does not see itself, nor giftgivers, as its creatively receptive others. The meta level is confused by the different kinds of self-similar reflections. Anything attributing importance mainly to itself is necessarily partial, because it diminishes its other and decontextualizes itself--pulls itself out of its context (while the reflections of the concept structure make it appear to be all there is). Gifts require others who will receive them. But people in the closed system of extreme hierarchical patriarchy attribute importance to themselves through the instrumentalization of those who are 'different' or 'inferior.' They use others for the purpose of enhancing themselves while denying others' importance as the source of their good. This process gives these artificial egos completion, while making it seem as if they are self-made, either through being nurtured because they 'deserve' it, or through manipulation or force, or because the other is 'inferior,' or it is her/his 'nature' or 'instinct' or duty to give to one in that position. 'Of course she takes care of him; he's her husband.'

The male occupies the 'sample' or one position, requiring others to relate to him as many, reinstating the moment of comparison and equivalence between relative items and the sample in the concept formation process. The many also give way and give to the one who takes over, repeating the 'many-to-one' relation between things and their names. These patterns become self-confirming, also because of their similarity with a more abstract meta level. The human 'one' ignores the many and stands alone, out of context, self-reflecting as one instance of one.

In thinking about his 'one position,' a person then applies the concept process again to it. Seeing himself as one alone, he is equal to himself and to other ones alone.

The process repeats and reflects itself at different levels. Since re-cognition is based upon comparison and equivalence, comparison and equivalence appear to be the all-important relations even at the meta level.² Thus, even using a meta level in thinking about the situation validates the de-contextualized concept formation process in its various incarnations. However, the equation and the concept form only seem to constitute the whole meta level. Instead, they are one branch of the (fractal) tree, the trunk of which is giftgiving. Perhaps, we should say that their self-similar structures are a vine, a parasite upon the tree.

Reworking the metaphor: it is not just the trunk of the tree that has the structure of giftgiving. In fact, the possibility of giving and receiving elicit a living tree: the leaf receives sunlight, uses it in photosynthesis, sends its products throughout the tree to satisfy its needs for energy, the roots receive and transmit moisture from the rain and minerals from the earth and the humus of previous leaves and trees. The availability of the gifts of earth, water, air and sunlight allow the development of living things which can receive the gifts. The decontextualized equation and the concept, classes, exchange, hierarchies and the self-reflecting meta level also derive the possibility for their existence from the gifts that are given to them, through the roots they have planted in the gift way. They serve living beings who have warped and distorted themselves, so that they can receive these abstract gifts. The whole society creatively receives the altered nourishment.

²The class of all de-contextualized classes (classes taken out of context) is a de-contextualized class. However, a true meta viewpoint would be logically broader and would include giftgiving, thus including the different (the other), bringing about contextualization and destroying the de-contextualized class. The patriarchal view of thinking over-emphasizes classes and under-emphasizes the giftgiving context, just as patriarchal society over-emphasizes classes, and under-emphasizes the gift paradigm. A critic might say that comparing exchange and giftgiving is like comparing apples and oranges. My point is that these apples only exist within a context of oranges, which also give to them.

Patriarchal structures develop in a 'culture' of giftgiving, because they, too, are able to receive in special ways and give again to beings who are adapted to receiving them. De-contextualization is only a moment of abstraction used for concept formation. It has been made into a permanent condition of ego isolation, which serves the economy, the psychology and all the institutions built upon masculation. Patriarchy maintains control through the supporting interplay of various decontextualized self-similar structures. The vine, the parasite, is the over-development of the equation, the concept structure, classes. It is made up of human definitional strings organized in hierarchies, which suck up gifts to nurture the ones at the top. Patriarchy cannot exist on its own but twines around the tree of human giftgiving and feeds on it, draining the goods away from needs, creating the scarcity which serves as its necessary environment.

The artificial parasite becomes believable and self-validates by reiterating its own form. Exchange, as it replaces one product with another, also continually replaces the need-oriented qualitatively varied gift with the qualitatively simple, quantitatively varied equation. It asserts part of the concept process, the equation, as 'reality' while replacing the giftgiving female with the sample male. Qualitatively-oriented giftgiving is replaced by a quantitative naming process, which has had its gift aspects canceled. This take-over is the acting-out of masculation. The equation itself appears to be a gift which also appears 'inalienable' or perhaps inescapable. Actually, it creates a focus upon itself and receives importance from others through its reflections.

Being and Having

What we are seeing here is the psycho-socio-economic meeting between being and having, in the relation between the word and the sample, the sample and its items, the father and his sons, and the owner and his properties--even the owner of the

male body and his body parts.³ The masculated boy identifies what he 'is' by what he 'has,' and by the similarity of what he 'has' with what others 'have,' rather than creating his identity in an ongoing way by what he gives and receives. Then he lets that relation be played out symbolically, as he constructs his identity around other possessions, many of which are phallic symbols. Because the erect phallus is the possession of the adult male, who is his model, the symbolic phallus--in toy cars and little guns--lets the boy privilege that having in the immature present.

Exchange is made necessary by the mutually exclusive relation of private property. Property is a relation in which the many things give and give-way to the one owner. This makes it similar to the relation between men as body-part holders, with the phallus in the forefront, and women who are 'lacking,' but who give and give-way to the one who 'has.'

Women internalize the desire for property and the mistrust of giving that come with the exchange paradigm, and this is also perhaps part of the reason we do not propose the giving model for our sons. We push our sons away from giving and into the (ex)change of categories and likeness to their fathers, so that we can be sure the boys will have the right kind of identity to get what they need and keep it. If they were to follow our model, they could presumably be considered 'sissies' and excluded from heterosexual patriarchy, exiled in a no-man's land, where they would be neither male nor female. This strange mothering behavior occurs because gender is actually an economic identity. What we consider 'male' characteristics of competitiveness, aggression, sublimation of emotion, focus on goals rather than process, etc. are qualities rewarded by capitalism. The reason for this is that capitalism is the economic way that is based on male gender characteristics. Capitalism is the replay at many levels of

³Jacques Lacan described what he called the 'mirror stage,' a level of integration of the child's body parts image greater than that appropriate for his age. I would speculate it is the relation of ownership that integrates them as 'his' and that their fracturing the relation to the male sample as reflected in exchange. See Ellie Ragland-Sullivan, Jacques Lacan and the Philosophy of Psychoanalysis, University of Illinois Press, Chicago, 1986. Kenneth Wright, Vision and Separation Between Mother and Baby, Jason Aronson Inc., Northvale, New Jersey, 1991.

Figure 19. The owner of the money is a human 'one' to whom property is related as 'many.' Money, the value sample, can itself be an item of property.

the (ex)change of categories caused by the definition of gender, and the denial of nurturing.

Owning the Value 'Sample'

Patriarchy denies and discredits giftgiving in order to preserve itself. The two paradigms remain consistent with themselves: mothering appears as giving away the penis-property, and the boy (and being deprived of both) but continuing to give. Giftgiving therefore seems self-sacrificing, even self-mutilating. Practitioners of the exchange paradigm appear to be giving up the mother, but receiving the penis, the superior male identity, and the exchange model itself in exchange. The logic of exchange confirms itself, and the logic of giftgiving confirms the 'other.'⁴

Money takes the place of the owner as the privileged sample for value, to which the property is related. Then the same thing happens again when another former seller buys.

⁴In addition to all this, mothers who are afraid of the father's competition with a nurturing son for their affection, may also be motivated to make him similar to the father, so that the father will not destroy him. Like Moses' real mother, they deny that he is theirs, give him to someone more powerful, and stay nearby to take care of and serve him.

The one-many pattern is embodied first in ownership, then in the one-many money relation repeatedly. (See Figure 19.)

Though exchange for money is a commonplace process, it is much stranger than we realize. We need to look at it carefully, in slow motion, to see its similarities to language, the concept process and masculation. In fact, an amount of money is the value of that product on the inter-individual plane--'for others and therefore for me'--socially. Money does the same thing economically that the word does on the plane of language. Products cannot get to the needs, except through exchange. Because products cannot be given in co-munication, they are 'spoken about' with money. Like the word, money mediates among people with regard to something, and that mediation changes their relation from a general 'everything is possible' sort of attitude, to one in which something is relevant in the present, and with regard to other people, addressing some need. The exchanger's relation to something becomes a present relation, selected from everything else it could have been.

Money takes the place of each person in turn, as the 'value-sample' to which the product is related, when the person gives up property. The owner of the money is a human 'one-many sample' to whom the value concept sample itself--money--is related as property. As a seller each person lets the other's money take the place of an item of her property and, by doing so, becomes the owner of the money. We might say she is 'meta' to the money, while the money is 'meta' to the products. As a buyer, she lets her money take the place of another's product, transferring the relation of ownership of the money to the seller, and of the product to herself. (See Figure 20.)

The (mutually exclusive) relation of ownership itself thus remains the same, while the kind of property that is owned is abstract as money, and concrete as the product. The relation of ownership changes levels from concrete to abstract and back, according to whether what is owned is a product or money. This permits the actual piece of property which was sold to be replaced by another (or others) constituting the same value and remaining

Figure 20. Money is the value concept sample, owners are samples for the complex of property. Money as sample is in the same (or a similar) relation to products as owners are to property.

in a sense the 'same' thing. At the same time, the seller's relation becomes one of ownership of the abstract sample itselfmoney. The one-many ownership relation can actually apply to money, the one-many concept sample itself, as an item of property.

There is a single kind of substitution performed over and over, as money continues to be given to others as the substitute concept sample for their products (another similarity money has with the word).⁵ Money is always in the concept role of value sample for the product, while the owner is always in the transposed one-many concept role of ownership.⁶ The owner can be in many different overlapping one-many roles. S/he can be, for instance, a father, a king, a pope, a city counselor, or a CEO and

⁵ Money is only substituted itself when, having been 'invested,' it returns increasedanother transposed masculationperhaps a boy being born from the head of Zeus. The capi-talist is the one who makes this happen.

⁶Ownership is perhaps more like Vigotsky's 'family name' complex than like the concept; since the properties owned are diverse, they have no common quality, except that of being properties of that 'one.'

Figure 21. Money-laborer-owner allows her son-product to be 'named' by phallic money and gives 'him' away. Buyer gives up phallic money value-sample and remains 'lacking' but unharmed, with a use-value.

still own money. However s/he can have no access to the 'one' position in human hierarchies and still be a 'one' with regard to her/his properties, satisfying in that way the need to become a 'sample.'

The Social Nexus:

Male Sexuality Overtakes Mothering

The male gender is incarnated in the father in a way which is different from the incarnation of value in money, but there are many similarities due to the 'one' position. Money takes the place of the owner as the 'one' to which the commodity is related as a value according to the concept process pattern, and the same thing can be said when the gender term and the father take the

place of the mother as sample for the boy. Moreover, the owner is superceded as 'one' by the money, which functions as incarnated word-concept sample for the value of the commodity, and the mother is superceded by the father as concept sample for the child. The similarity of the pattern permits a replay of the alienation of the boy into the category 'male,' through the alienation of the product into the category of economic value and the replacement of the product by money.

The 'castration' of the mother is replayed when the buyer gives up the money-phallus-word and receives the reward of the nurturing goods s/he needs. Those who hoard and accumulate money do not undergo this symbolic castration and, in capitalism, find a way to increase the money-phallus-word almost infinitely. The market serves as a 'safe space' in which to act out the childhood trauma of the boy's change of categories due to the naming of his gender. It has the healing effect of showing that giving up the product for sale, transferring it into the value category and the category of ownership by another, is not a harmful process in and of itself. (See Figure 21.)

Moreover, the symbolic castration involved in giving up the money is shown to be benign, not harmful to the buyer. Unfortunately, the whole process of exchange for money takes the place of giftgiving as the form of life of the co-munity. Then giftgivers give to the exchange process itself, valuing it above the very process they are practicing, giving gifts to it and to those who practice it in the same way that they give validation to masculation, to their sons and to other males. Exchange is a process that, to some extent, alleviates the psychological burdens having to do with masculation and castration, but it causes an aggravation of the problem at other levels.

In the economic realm the dependence of the child upon the mother is also played out in the dependence of the wife upon the husband. The wife and children all appear to be in a 'many-to-one' concept relation to the father, similar to the relation of property to owner or things to a word. He gives them his name. In the traditional family, the father appears to give the money-word-

phallus to the mother, who in turn gives it to others, buying the means of giving, in order to give gifts to him and the children. His gifts are visible and counted, while hers are invisible and uncounted.

However, the wife is actually receiving the support (means of giving) of the husband in return for having given the boy into his category and having given up her place as concept sample (almost) becoming the husband's property. By shifting her validation onto her husband and exchange and masculation, she abdicates from the position of gift paradigm sample and puts the exchange paradigm in its place. For this, she receives the 'gift' of the husband's salary. The daughter is also given to the father, because the model the daughter follows is the mother who gives-way and gives to patriarchy and to the father.⁷ In a context of scarcity, 'pockets' of gift economy are dependent on gifts from some part of the exchange system. Women have traditionally given up everything in order to put themselves in a position to be able to receive these gifts. Now they have joined the exchange paradigm as its actors, using the money they earn to support and nurture their children.

Even when the giftgivers are working in the exchange economy themselves, they often have to give their children up to the definitions and models provided by schools, television, and the streets, while they sell their labor in order to support them. The mothering economic model is diminished again at the same time that women are re-presenting it at another level, giving up their labor time in exchange for money with which to provide for their children, and giving up their children to be educated by others in the exchange economy.

The large scale economic changes that happen during wars (as in World War II) bring women into the capitalist workforce, weakening the link between economic activity and the masculine gender, which continues to be promoted by masculation. Changes

⁷The daughter might be considered as the 'good' or 'use value,' which is once more part of the nurturing way after the buyer has given up the phallic equivalent. She could also be considered the good which is not exchangedat least until she marries.

in the big picture have an effect on the smaller picture, which changes more slowly. Even though many mothers now engage in monetized labor, there is an expectation that gender roles will continue to be distinct. One-many social structures take the place of the phallic father.

Television and film personages locate the father in the imagination; the 'word' becomes abstract once again. The motivation towards the general equivalent, money, produces many things in its image: the programs which show us one-many dominant men from police chiefs to fathers, supermen to singers. Women stars also perform one-many roles as sex objects, businesswomen, superspies. Even newscasters, as the one visible speaker to whom the many invisible listeners are related, fit this pattern. The dominance-submission model combined with hierarchy and competition are everywhere visible in our entertainment industry, business, politics, and academia, continuing to offer the poisoned gift-apple to little Prince Charming, providing the pernicious patriarchal models which are no longer directly available in mother-centered families.⁸

Gang relations also sometimes personally supply the one-many (violent) paternal models which are missing from the families of single mothers. Male sexuality, formed according to naming and the shift of categories, over-takes mothering as what Alfred Sohn-Rethel calls the 'social nexus'⁹--the deep pattern upon which society constructs itself. I think that, in spite of the difficulties, mother-centered families are beginning to change this situation. All too often, however, the discrediting of the single

⁸The norm-ality of exchange is reinforced by the ascendancy of the verbal over the nonverbal in the society, and in childhood, since the child is learning language precisely during the Oedipal period during which masculation is occurring. The possibility of the precocious genitalization of boys is stimulated by the importance given to language and naming and the transfer of the boy from the mother's category to the father's (or at any rate the sample male's). Economic exchange for money then actually retraces and reinforces the Oedipal situation, as well as this moment of genitalization. Ex-change is really a sex-change.
⁹Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Intellectual and Manual Labor: A Critique of Epistemology, MacMillan, London, 1978. Sohn-Rethel thinks that the 'exchange abstraction' deriving from the exchange of commodities is the social nexus. I believe that commodity exchange derives from masculation, which is therefore the basis of the exchange abstraction.

mother, together with the lack of the father, leaves the boy vulnerable to other, more negative masculated samples, as he follows the maze of one-many patterns that make up patriarchy.

Acting Out Masculation in the Market

The world of commodities imitates the world of patriarchy. The commodity-son is presented to the money-father, and found similar to it, relative to it as its equivalent, allowed into the concept of the 'other,' the privileged concept of things having monetary value, and given away to the 'other' by the mother-owner-producer (labor-er). The mother-owner-producer's place is taken first, by the money-father, as the concept model for the son-commodity, and then by the buyer as the one to whom that property is related as its owner. The mother-owner-producer gives the son-commodity away to become related to someone else as his/its owner. Then s/he changes roles and the phallic-father-money serves him/her as that to which the product of another is related. Another mother-owner-producer is giving up the product-child.

When the product is found equal to 'him,' that phallic-father-money can be made to satisfy the communicative need for a means for (altering) a relation and changing from the mother to the father sample as the product moves from seller to buyer. The present (mother role) seller relates her son-commodity to (father role) money, comparing them, finding them equal, belonging to the privileged concept of things having value. The process of naming the product as a value-in-exchange, like the process which names the boy as 'male,' takes over from the process of giving-and-receiving a useful good. It is not the need of the other which determines the exchange, but effective demand. The money which the other possesses becomes relevant to one's own need for the money as a means of altering the property relation of someone else again to their useful good, in order to satisfy one's own need. The definitional meta need is superimposed upon the material need.

The use of the term 'labor' in English is interesting, as if the mother gave up her son as soon as she finishes her 'labor' and he is 'delivered' to become gendered, related to the term 'male' as soon as the midwife or doctor says, "It's a boy." She gives him up so quickly, and gives up her own sample capacity--in favor of what? a word! "In the beginning"--as soon as he was born--"was the word." He never had a chance.

In buying to sell, the phallic-father-money goes forth in society again and again, allowing son-commodities to become related to him, thereby confirming 'himself' as general equivalent. His/its human owner or collaborator then takes the son-commodity to others whose needs he/it will satisfy, and for whom his/its value is greater, so that the quantity of phallic-father-money in the hand of his human collaborator is increased. The economic operator engages in a kind of sexual activity, buying not to use the good to satisfy his needs, but to give it up again so as to increase the amount of his phallic money-holding.

From the linguistic point of view, the interaction of the economic communicators brings the 'money-name' into play so that the thing can be related to a human being by means of its socially validated general word equivalent. What is visible of all this in stores is the hierarchy of products with their prices from least to most, the 'sons' with their 'marks,' their price tags, dangling down with numbers on them to show 'how much' they deserve the money-name.

A Collective Psychosis

We are creating our reality collectively in a way which is harmful and unnecessary. By this, I do not mean that trees and cows, mountains and automobiles, children and grandmothers are not 'there.' I mean that we have been living out a distorted process, masculation, taking the images it spawns of itself as the principles by which to organize our lives. The misinterpretation of who we are and what we ought to be doing results in the rewarding of 'having' and the punishment

of 'not having.'¹⁰ Masculation creates a collective psychosis by which individual men vie with each other to be the sample man, and whole armies vie with each other to make their Fatherland the sample nation.

The 'over-taking' (substitution) aspect of words is inflated to become domination, while the giving-way (being substituted) of things becomes submission. These complementary activities can be found at many different levels. Overtaking is sometimes implemented violently in the family as the masculated gender role, or through the dominance of the adult over the child. Giving-way seems to be the role of the woman (or the child) who is obedient to the adult's words or commands. In the market, money takes over and the product gives-way, at the same time that the exchange process takes over and giftgiving gives-way. ¹¹

Patriarchy is a collection of vertical definitional strings, aspects of which are self-similar with relations in the market where the verticality of the strings is displaced onto the numerical progression of price. The market's definitions are many and short-lived, high-speed compared with the long-term definitional positions of over-taking and giving-way that are typical of the roles of command and obedience, for instance in hierarchies of the government, the army or the church.

Though many short-term acts of over-taking and giving-way and command and obedience may occur in these hierarchies, they flow together to make stable long-term roles. In the market, the position of the head 'honcho' is only one: money, the general equivalent, while in human hierarchies there is a chain in which the ones above take over from those below, and those below give and give-way to those above--to the ever more privileged ones.

¹⁰Even the Bible says, "To him that has much shall be given."

¹¹At another stage of the same process, exchange for money takes over and barter gives way. There are at least these three layers of overtaking and giving way involved in exchange for money. We can tell they are still there because, at any time, we can revert to the 'previous' stage according to the will of the exchangers. We can barter instead of exchanging for money, or we can decide not to require an exchange and simply give the product to the person with the need.

The intermediate moment between product and need, which is based on exchange and the equation, becomes the focus of the whole society, requiring equality¹² with money for access to goods. The masculating definition over-takes nurturing and imposes itself as a model everywhere.

Rather than resolving our problems through acting out the incarnation of the word, we have distorted reality, distributing goods psychotically to the benefit of the few to the point almost of omnipotence, according to a child's dream. We are using our linguistic ability to name or define, to transfer privilege onto some people instead of others, making them 'haves' instead of 'have-nots.' The priorities of masculation have altered reality collectively in a pernicious way, but if we understand, as Eastern religions have always said, that this reality is an illusion, a nightmare, we can return to a gift economy the ever-present possibility of which is the true dream into which we can finally awake, re-creating a reality which is a gift for all.

The Long Arm of the Definition of Gender

In spite of the odd and devalued positions giftgiving is forced to assume, it continues to be creative and life-sustaining. It is necessary for the enhancement of activities based on the definition--activities which, by themselves, would be abstract and barren. Thus, the denial of giftgiving sometimes includes incorporating some gift elements into the masculated model post hoc. Patriarchal religions do this, satisfying spiritual needs (while diminishing the importance of the mothering model) and legislating altruism. Sometimes masculated males create needs which they then satisfy. For example, a group isolates and disempowers its giftgivers by feminizing or enslaving them; then it gives them 'protection' by asserting its phallic hegemony over them and over other similar male groups which might try to overtake them. Such is military might.

¹²I believe that social change movements make too much of equality as a criterion, because they do not realize that its use in the market broadcasts its validation everywhere. Instead, I think we should celebrate qualitative diversity.

The good will of masculated men, of which there is still much, comes into play long after their personalities have been formed by giving up the gift paradigm and taking on their gender identity. Men's good will sets the standard for 'moral action,' while leaving aside the paradigm which would normalize the satisfaction of needs--not only in the lives of individuals, but also in the economic and political institutions of the group. If the society as a whole were already giving and giving value to needs according to the gift paradigm, morality would be quite a different thing. Much less individual heroism and 'willpower' would be necessary, because the good of others would already be a life premise of everyone and of the group.

The definition from which giftgiving has been deleted is broader than the gender definition and does not altogether coincide with it. Because it is at the basis of masculation, however, it resonates strongly with the male gender identity. The definiendum, and the equivalent position in concept formation are apparently over-valued on their own, though they are actually re-infected by the gender definition (which they helped to create). Thus, money the value sample and ways of dominating by naming and definition like academic discourse or the law are over-valued, but it is not immediately evident what part gender has in this emphasis, or what part giftgiving has.

Other seeingly gender-neutral categories, such as that of race, follow the pattern of gender, instituting a competition to be a concept sample for the human, over-taking other races, considering those who are different from the chosen sample as inferior. Like gender, these differences are culturally seen as physiological, while it is actually the form of the definition 'loaded' by masculation that implies that some group is 'superior' to others, who must then give-way and give to the 'superior' group. Similar situations can occur with political or ideological systems and nationalisms. Those born within the national boundaries of a country may consider themselves superior to those born outside those boundaries, even when there are no other differences affecting the actual bodies or minds of the

nationalists. The whole nation then assumes the general equivalent (sample) position, potentially reinforcing the egos of the entire population with regard to other nations. Political systems, religions, interest groups follow these same patterns towards hegemony.

Profit

The definition can be manipulated for the superiority of those who use it in other areas of life, just as it is used to confirm and perpetuate the superiority of males. It seems that by being related to more of what is in the position of the economic definiendum (the money-word), we are better than others. It is as if this repeats the birth situation, again and again putting a person in the superior category by a relation to the general equivalent and taking him/her away from giving. Moreover, by providing the general equivalent, some of us can buy and control the time of others to our own ends. Requiring those for whose time we provide the general equivalent also to give unpaid gift (surplus) labor, the products of which we sell, allows us to make profit and accumulate capital. If we consider the general equivalent also as phallic, and so much the more so capital, we can understand the sexual appearance of investment, putting money 'in' something, taking it out increased, and re-investing it until we finally reap the profit.

We should realize that every time we 'make' a profit, some or perhaps many other people are giving a gift. Instead, we think our profit is a reward or that we earned it. But this again repeats the 'deserving' of the male, because he acts in a masculated way and thereby enters the privileged category again, 'deserving' the name 'man.' In fact, the male is rewarded by the gifts which he gave up giving when he entered that category in the beginning. If some primary or essential male gender characteristics were being put to work in our economic lives, they would be easier to trace and identify. But both the gender characteristics of men and the functional characteristics of our exchange economy derive from a

'common ancestor,' which is the definition by means of which males are privileged while being alienated from their nurturing mothers.

It is as if the collective boy child mind said, "But why am I a boy, and not like my wonderful Mommy?" The reply, "It is that way just because it is" becomes what he cannot beat but must join--what he, like his father before him, models himself on and then 'discovers' as his 'male' or 'human' characteristics. It is as if being itself, being equal, being equal to a sample, being the sample and being the word all collapsed into each other as the characteristics of male over-taking by categorizing and naming. This distressing situation is then projected out upon the society at large and finally becomes the lebens-form of the economic way of exchange. The 'father-sample' has the same characteristics of being, as did his father before him. There is, therefore, an infinite regress back through the generations of 'father-samples.' It is no wonder that male identity, which, denying giftgiving, has been read until recently as human identity, has had such a prominent place in philosophical discussion. It was and continues to be the source--not of some 'higher destiny'--but of our many problems.

Having More

The motivation towards increase can perhaps be found in the fact that the little boy's member is really very different and much smaller than his father's. If the phallus is the 'mark' of the male category, perhaps the boy cannot really consider himself 'equal' and part of that category, until he has a bigger member. The need to become the concept model, to occupy the general equivalent or word position, would imply also the need for a large member. The child is, of course, powerless to make this happen, while he, his brothers, his mother and sisters may be dominated (and sometimes abused) by the large phallic father, who is himself finally living out the mandate of the masculating definition on which he modeled himself in his own childhood.

The child, already in a position of competition with his father for the equivalent position, may also feel the need for a large phallus and its economic and symbolic equivalents, so that he can defend himself and the women with whom he is still participating (to some extent) in a giftgiving situation from the father and from still other men who may try to take over. The boy learns to dominate in his turn, playing the role of the definiendum. While the mother's nurturing bridges the differences of size by engaging the child as a human receiver (and giver and receiver of signs) at a very early age, the gender definition places the child at a decided disadvantage. For the moment he cannot achieve his gender mandate. He must be relative and part of the many, seemingly because he is too small. The real reason, after all, is due to the logic of the situation: there can only be one 'one.'

Perhaps the basis of the motivation for violence, power, and greed is this desire to be bigger (have more of the phallic equivalent), so as to occupy the position required by the gender definition. Girls can buy into the competition for superiority, though we do not have the physiological phallus and often do retain at least some of the giftgiving, mothering values to which we have been socialized.¹³

Because the father is often absent, the boy child, who has been taken away from the mothering model, can be left without a model for his identity (other than the definition itself) or a content for his category. Add to this the violence that many large men perpetrate on those who are smaller than they are, and it is clear that size (or quantity) can become the obsession not only of individuals but of whole cultures. A visitor from another planet who came here would surely look aghast at the ever-taller skyscrapers with which businesses demonstrate their corporate pride. Those who have offices in the towers of steel are of course superior to those who have offices in smaller, less erect buildings. They have more money and more power, which makes them closer to the concept model of the father, the adult male to which

¹³See Making Connections, Carol Gilligan, Nona P. Lyons, and Trudy J. Hanmer, editors, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1990.

the little boy can only aspire. Then again, apart from any erotic sense, it is the erection which is different and so much larger than the boy's member, and it is that which the skyscrapers (guns, rockets, missiles, etc.) imitate.

All of these edifices are constructed upon the abandonment of the mothering model. Abandonment itself becomes directednot towards the boy, but towards those who are lacking the phallus-word-money. Those with needs are left to die by those with goods. Those without the phallus have to pay for having put the boy in a different category. In fact, they have to invisibly continue to transfer the money-phallus to him as surplus value. Paradoxically, other-oriented giftgiving seems to be hypocritical and certainly no match for exchange as a method for providing distribution.

What is also concealed in plain sight is the draining of wealth into phallic symbols and infinitely expanding capital, away from the needs of the many. Wealth and energy flow from the many into the 'ones.' They also flow from giftgiving into the market and into capital, and from the 'Third World' to the 'First World.' The illusion is that it is the other way around.¹⁴ As in the formation of the concept, the sample receives its value from the existence of other items of the same kind, but now there is an actual transfer of wealth from them to it.

Punishment by Scarcity

This whole situation could also be read as society's reprisal against the mother and her giftgiving way, for having given up the child to the father. Reprisal, of course, is part of and consistent with exchange. The displacement of the goods away from the needs, into the hands of those who have more and more of the

¹⁴The 'gifts' from the 'First World' to the 'Third World' contain hidden exchanges and actually return to the 'First World' many times over. See, for example, the work of the DAWNE collective and Gita Sen and Karen Grown, Developmental Crisis and Alternative Visions, Monthly Review Press, New York, 1987; Susan George, How the Other Half Dies, Allanheld, Osmun & Co., Montclair, 1977; and Vandana Shiva, Staying Alive, Zed Books, London, 1989.

phallus-word-money, creates the scarcity which burdens and discredits giftgiving, making it impossible or sacrificial. Continuing to practice giftgiving in spite of scarcity requires enormous effort and an almost obsessive sense of purpose. Women have often been branded masochistic because of it.

Instead, the burden of proof should be placed on those who are creating the scarcity and on the system which creates them. Their motivations are to be found in their attempt to heal their childhood change of gender category. Perhaps in our maternal tenderness, we are inclined to understand and humor them, but this must stop. It is not an appropriate response to the consequences of their actions and institutions--the deaths of millions by war, starvation and disease and the ecological destruction of the planet.

Scarcity has several advantages for patriarchy. It makes giftgiving difficult so that it cannot offer a visible and viable alternative to exchange. It punishes mothers and the giftgiving way for having given their boys away to the category of the father, at the same time providing the boys with the enticement of accumulating more than anyone else of the general equivalent. Moreover, those who succeed in becoming privileged samples can also materialize their priapic economic excesses in phallic symbols of all kinds. If citizens do not succeed in accumulating more individually, they can perhaps participate in a body politic which has more--bigger guns, airplanes, bombs.

Having this excess, while others do not have enough goods to survive, allows those who have to consider themselves superior and to distribute small charitable gifts in manipulative ways, controlling the behavior of the have-nots. The masculating definition is also used directly to manipulate those who need positive judgments which have also been rendered scarce--judgments of intelligence, beauty, efficiency or expertise. These are often accompanied by monetary judgments, which they complement.

The economies and the eco-systems of the earth are being altered by the attempt to accumulate large amounts for the few, while depleting the resources of the many. The relative size of the possessions of the few increases by this means. The desire for security is also intensified by the use of the threat of scarcity, and it may seem that without a considerable margin, even males risk being transferred back from the category of the haves to that of the have-nots.

Perhaps we may be excused for looking at the market and patriarchy in this irreverent way. It seems to be a sort of tragi-comic passion play, in which the alienation of the boy from his mother into the category of his father is replayed endlessly. The symptom of our psychological disorder occupies our minds and time, preventing us from following the mothering way, while millions of real children of both genders starve. The eyes of the visitor from outer space would fill with tears of pity for this excellent species which has gotten itself into so much trouble for what, after all, begins as a small and innocent mistake.

As for me dear reader, I howl in the night.

If you understand, maybe you do, too.

Chapter 14

Deserving to Exist

Human Contradictions in the Market

I have always wondered how profit could be derived through individual equal exchange. The answer I want to give is that profit flows through gifts that come to exchange and the market from nonexchange areas. These gifts come first from our giving value to equality (as do mothers with the son's similarity to the father), second from our giving value to ego orientation and exchange itself, third from nurturing the worker and fourth from giving to the capitalist through surplus value. There is another 'equal' exchange, between worker and capitalist, to which value is given from the outside. The worker agrees to work for a salary, but only because s/he can't survive any other way. Extra time, attention, labor and loyalty are gifts given in exchange for the 'privilege' of being paid the going rate for labor of a certain kind. Going 'up' a logical step, in scarcity the chance to have a paid job is a 'gift.' Care, honesty, loyalty, work excellence, and good humor are given in reciprocity for the 'gift' of the job. (We could look at this almost as a reciprocal exchange of gifts--as happens in some pre-capitalist societies.)While market exchanges may be equal at one level, at another level unseen gifts are constantly being given to, through and around them.

Marx's 'surplus value' is the value of labor in excess of a salary based on the cost of reproducing the laborer. Actually, surplus value constitutes a gift from the laborer to the capitalist. Since the wife's or mother's gift labor is uncounted in the reproduction of the laborer, its value also flows into surplus value. Scarce jobs are over-valued, and gifts flow to them and to those who have them from those who do not have them.

Economic operators usually do not pay attention to what the source is, but only to the accumulation of quantity for future use

without qualitative variety. They are justified in this by the hall-of-mirrors, the self-similarity of all of the equal exchanges going on in the market and at different levels which constitute the context of each exchange. Moreover, the homogeneity or 'one word' character of money allows the market to replace the qualitatively varied vocabulary of language with the quantitative hierarchy of prices.¹ In the market, the only way we could name and thus recognize and appreciate a gift as a value is by exchanging it for money, which would contradict its gift character. Thus the gifts remain unvisible and unvalued.

Profit derives, in part, from our giving to equality and valuing it over need. Because someone participates in the equal exchange, s/he receives the gift of being valued instead of someone who only has a need. Any surplus that might otherwise have gone to the person who only has a need is thus 'free' to flow as a gift into the profit of the equal exchanger. The person with the need is seen as unequal unless s/he also has some other product or money as the result of a previous transaction. Actually, being equal as exchangers only implies that people practicing the behavior of exchange have produced for and exchanged with a group of others who are equally self-interested and adversarial. Their equality as actors and as values in the exchange process implies exchangeability--reciprocal substitutability, and their lack of bonds implies indifference.

There are needs which come from the process of exchange itself--like the needs coming from the process of masculation--which must be satisfied by gifts given to that process from the outside. The giftgiving way stands aside for exchange to take over, transferring its own ignored potential value as the mode of distribution to it, nurturing it and those who practice it. If it competes, if there is an abundance of a product, through over-production, for example, prices go down. If prices go down, more of the product's value is given to the consumer as a gift, and future production for exchange is jeopardized.

¹Prices constitute a differential system like Saussure's langue, which is organized according to quantity by numerical progression rather than quality.

The market, like the masculated ego, is an artificial psycho-socio-linguistic invention using decontextualization. Like the ego, it needs to receive value directly (without an exchange) from giftgiving, while at the same time competing with it and winning. The people who are participating in the artificial invention, doing the exchanging, develop a need to be valued as opposed to those who are outside the market. They also need to be maintained by others. In order to be motivated to engage in this artificial practice, they include an extra recompense for themselves (an 'incentive') in the price of their products. The profit they receive is a gift, not only from the producers of surplus value (and those who nurture the producers), but also from the buyers of scarce goods. It is a contribution of gifts from the unknown and the unknowing many. Scarcity of jobs and scarcity of goods function together to keep the equal exchanges high and the flow of gifts going towards the 'haves.'

De-serving is a self-similar way of giving value not only to the exchangers but to exchange. Those who produce for the market de-serve a recompense. Exchangers receive the value of being equally defined as adversaries belonging to the same contradictory class. They are seen as superior to those who are unemployed or unemployable, those who cannot sell or buy. The equality of their products to money seems to imply the (mutually exclusive) equality between them, just as the ability to use the same words regarding similar things implies a (mutually inclusive) equality between interlocutors.

If our communitary selves are developed through language and material giving, then exchange, the material interaction of not-giving, can be understood as the basis of a particular kind of self. Materially it develops a private owner, while psychologically it develops an ego which is functional to the process and to ownership: competitive, striving to have more, to have and/or be the definiendum, and to become the masculated privileged one.

Those with the ego type adapted to exchange enter the dominant class of the self-interested many, all of whom are attempting to be privileged ones. The individual macho

competitive action coincides with the logic of substitution by taking the place of giftgiving. So does the masculated nation, class, race or religion, over-taking others who are constrained to give up and give value and goods to the conquerors. Self-reflecting and male-reflecting groups overcome other-oriented groups and are nurtured by them. The egos which are produced by exchange define their expansion and the expansion of the market system as 'civilization.'

The Definition as Model:

Another Turn of the Self-Similar Screw

Gender is actually something that we create and impose on ourselves as we go along, but it is made by cultures to seem biological and, therefore, impossible to change. We tend to see gender roles as constants and consider individual adaptations as variables. For example, differences of individual temperament are read as gender differences. An aggressive girl is said to "act like a boy"; a compliant boy is seen as "acting like a girl." The idea that a characteristic of ours is our nature causes us to look deep within ourselves to find it. But if it is a cultural construct we are looking for, it is, at least at early stages, something that doesn't already exist within us--we have to make it, according to the models and definitions that are given to us. Language itself is an important modeling element. Let us look again at how it functions in masculation.

We have not realized how cultural factors are responsible for the definition of gender because the form of the definition is tangled up in the content of gender, and its genesis is involved in its present practice. These are complex and confusing cultural factors. The definition of gender incarnates the structure of definition itself in its content, as male takes the place of female. Male behavior strives to carry out the general, over-taking position of the definiendum. We recognize this behavior as a thing related to the word 'male' and feed it back into the original equation, causing a social self-similar structure. There is a meta

Figure 22. Gender roles and the definition coincide, creating self similar images at the levels of form and content.

level involved, perhaps without our knowing it. We feed the form of the definition itself into gender. Then we feed gender back into the form of the definition.

Immersed in language as they are, gender terms are disguised to look like other terms, and the disguise adds to their potency² as self-fulfilling prophecies. The self-similarity of gender terms--with their aggressive and over-taking referents in the case of terms for males, or in contrast the self-similarity with things which give way in the case of terms for noncompetitive females--appears to embed the behavior mandate of those terms within the terms themselves. (See Figure 22.) The mandate appears to reside 'inside' the terms but actually depends on an external context that has already been influenced by it for generations. The father's gender behavior has already been influenced by the self-fulfilling term 'male' when the son takes him as model. The

²Some languages do not use gender specific pronouns. Others compassionately extend gender distinctions to all nouns, as if to comfort children by showing that everything else is also similar to or different from the mother, and that this has little bearing on their value.

mother, like her mother before her, reinforces the mistake by giving up being the model for the boy. As she gives him into the other category because she is female, she becomes a model for the girl of giving up and giving-way.

The father, who is related to the word 'male' as its sample, also assumes in the family the position of the word, taking the place of the mother as sample. Meanwhile the 'thing' (the mother) related to the word 'female' steps aside as a sample, assuming the relative position as one of the many (and the girl follows her example). The analogy here with our concept process forms specifically in regard to the moment in which the word takes the place of the sample, which is then no longer necessary as a point of comparison to maintain the common quality of the relative items.

The mother gives up the sample position and takes a position as a thing among the many things related to the word which now maintains the polarity for that category. The (self-reflecting) sample position of the father coincides with the word because, like the word, he over-takes the mother as sample. This family situation is also repeated in the definition, where the definiens performs a service and gives-way, functioning like the mother. The definiendum takes over as a permanent equivalent and substitute for things in that category functioning like the father. The father possesses the phallus and the mother and is the 'incarnated word-sample' for the concept of the boy--and perhaps for all concepts (as children of both sexes might see it).³ Again, the situation in which male takes the place of female (and patriarchal values take the place of women's values) repeats the situation in which the whole process of exchange takes the place of giftgiving.

Women serve and step aside, and the gift economy steps aside, while men step forward and take over as the equivalents in

³The fact that the definition as a whole is a service which is being performed by a speaker or a writer for a listener or reader is often forgotten, so that the relation of over-taking and giving way seems to be taking place among the words themselves without human intervention. Value is being given to the words and to each other by the interlocutors from 'outside' the sentence, but this is not usually considered.

the focus. This pattern can be seen reflected in yet another way in the definition. The character of definiendum reflects back on the definiens when the content is male. Vice versa, when the content is female, the definiendum becomes 'feminine,' more like the definiens. For example, in 'Women are the weak sex'--'weak sex' as the definiens weakly stands aside, and 'women' takes over as the definiendum. Thus, the content (women as things or beings who give-way) resonates with the giving-way transitional function of the definiens. The 'things' (women) related to the definiendum in this case have characteristics of the definiens.

'Men are the strong sex' functions in the opposite way, with strength resonating or repeating the 'over-taking' characteristics of the definiendum, which takes the place of the definiens. The 'things' (men) related to the definiendum in this case have the characteristics of the definiendum. A bridge is thus constructed by self-similarity between the level of content and the level of form in the definition. Neither level is necessarily that way, but each has been weighted by the function it performs in the social construction of gender. After the definition has been incarnated into masculated 'over-taking' behavior, the definition of gender resonates with its own heterosexual behavioral image.

The epistemological level, constructed according to the giving and receiving grain, is surely influenced by the way we do our definitions and infected with our cultural mis-interpretations of gender. Human beings are artificially driven into 'male' and 'female' roles because we mistakenly interpret our physical 'givens' to imply that we belong to drastically different categories, almost different species. The male artificially creates a content for his gender by retracing some of the steps of categorization, and this pattern reflects back onto the linguistic mechanisms by which the categorization was imposed. Females enable the repetition of this pattern by serving it, which causes them to enter into it because, in fact, it is an asymmetrical pattern of nurturing and categorization-domination.

The giftgiving way is thus locked into a relation with categorization which opposes it. Then it gives-way as a

consciously viable principle and is canceled by domination, which, in a self similar motion, takes over. There is complementarity of the two conflicting ways at the object level and at the meta level. The naming of the boy as 'male' is projected into the human relations of the society, and these reconfirm the naming of the boy as 'male.' (See Figure 23.) Thus every definition becomes an exercise in artificial hetero-sexism. Every definition resonates with the social projections of the gender definition. Then the gender definition is continually projected back into the individual consciousness through our speech, our capacity to self-define and to define others. The definition itself becomes the norm and discounts not only the service of its own feminine definiens but the importance and even the right to exist of those who do not correspond to its heterosexual patterns.

For example, the judgments of right wing bigots have a self-confirming aspect because the heterosexual form of the definition (and naming) bears out dominance and discounts the importance of those who give way to their definitions. From the epithets used by teenage boys to dominate teenage girls, 'bitch' and 'whore,' to the judgments expressed by bosses, husbands or other authority figures, 'incompetent' and 'dumb,' women are required to give-way to the over-taking definiendum when it is spoken by the masculated men whom they serve.

Gay bashing, racial, ideological, religious, ableist etc. derogatives also often 'degenerate' into actual physical violence. The definers take over and the defined give way. The over taking definers have 'become' the definiendum, the defined have become the definiens or the 'thing' giving way.

We do not recognize the heterosexualization of the form of the definition partly because we have given it a 'sample' which allows us to ignore its genderized functioning. That sample is the abstract equation, which appears to be the form or 'essence' of the definition itself. Using alphabetical notation 'A = B' substitutes empty place-takers for words or 'values.' Because they are empty

Figure 23. The reciprocal action of masculation and the definition spawns social self-similarities.

place takers, not general like word-gifts are as substitute samples, they seem to imply reciprocal substitutability: if A = B, B = A.⁴ Moreover, the equation can seem to be simply a more complicated version of the (completely reciprocal) tautology: A = A. Taking the equation, which is a simplified and abstract imitation of the definition, as the 'sample' for all definitions, their model or 'form,' allows us to leave aside as irrelevant the overtaking and giving way that are actually taking place in the heterosexualized definition.

In fact, the reciprocal, neutral (should we say, 'sanitized?') equation takes over from the definition much as exchange takes over from barter and giftgiving and even from forced servitude. Then we give value to this image of neutrality or 'equality' and the overtaking, giving and giving way processes begin again.The equation of value for the market already takes place only among those products which (like masculated men in the OBN) already belong to the valued category and only deals with quantity of that value. It is used exclusively with things that are already considered exchangeable. Though the equation between a product and its price appears neutral, money becomes the incarnate definiendum which physically takes over while the product in exchange physically gives way. At the same time the whole process of exchange for money takes the place of giftgiving.

The feedback of the heterosexualized form of the definition into the definition produces self-similar patriarchal images at different social levels. Women's inferior position (like the definiens) serves as something unseen for the form of the definition to feed back into (and cancel). Then the unseen giftgiving activity coming from this position gives value to the form of the definition and the equation and lets its place be taken by it as the model for human interaction. In fact, a proliferation of self-similar images ensues.

⁴In language, communicative need is a determining consideration. The abstract values of the equation seem to be closer to those of perception: perception X = perception Y would seem to be an appropriate content for an equation. But there is no need for us to communicate that to ourselves or each other in our ongoing daily lives because we already know it. Our perceptive apparata function. What we perceive is usually already a given as far as our consciousness of it is concerned. Our communicative needs arise in relation to others, regarding what perceptions we are paying attention to and their relevance to collaborations, understandings, collective or personal ideas, myths, histories, views of the world, etc.

Women, the 'lower' classes, the many, children, the past, the future (everything but present tense, gifted and dominant men) play out the role of definiens to the men's definiendum. On a macroscopic scale, the relation is repeated among nations where one dominates and many serve. For example, the US dominates the nations in its area of influence, which give way and serve its cultural and economic hegemony. These gift relations are invisible to the majority of people in the US.

Self-Similar vs. Other-Tending Selfhood

The definition (along with its sanitized mirror, the equation) is incarnated inside us in the processes of the ego. It over-takes other-oriented giftgiving and gives value to itself. It makes others give value to it because (like any definition) it needs to have value given to it from the outside in order to function. In the market, at the micro level, in each exchange there is a shift 'up,' which also takes the place of giftgiving. Each exchange, with its equation of value over-taking giftgiving, functions in a way which is similar to the macro level of the market itself, which takes the place of giftgiving as the mode of distribution. The micro and the macro levels confirm each other (because similarity seems to confirm). At the same time, much value is being given from the outside to the market as the over-taking totality made up of innumerable exchanges--and hence to each exchange over and above giftgiving. Similarly, in masculated ego thinking the micro level of equation and definition is equal (in its structure or process) to macro level expressions of a self-reflecting and self-similar male identity which overcomes.⁵

Large scale incarnations of the word and of the definition, in exchange and in hierarchies, in commercial organizations and social, religious, and political institutions, function as macro levels, which again confirm the micro levels of the masculated ego and the form of the (hetero-sexualized) definition or judgment. These

⁵When a pecking order is established in which one male becomes the 'sample' or over-taker with regard to other males, those who give-way can still maintain their identities as 'samples' and over-takers with regard to their wives and children.

institutions also provide niches for masculated egos to play out their social destinies, creating chains of domination. We have created social self-similar structures and different scales at which they can 'reflect' each other. The form of the definition (and masculation) repeats again and again, justifying the importance given to similarity over difference--and the value of conceptual norm-based one-many processes over giftgiving need-directed processes.

No explanatory capacity is allowed to giftgiving, so gift-based activities (such as the attribution of value itself) are explained by valued professors as deriving from categories and concepts, from systems of mutually exclusive elements, from hierarchies of marginal choices under scarcity, or from sui generis psychological or physiological processes, or they remain a mystery.⁶ Our society is trapped in a hall-of-mirrors, and we are carrying mirrors in our minds, in our organizations, and in our purses.

The giftgiving, 'other-tending' self is not dependent on thinking for being because its bearer becomes socially relevant by satisfying the needs of others and receiving from them. Probably much of masculated identity also comes from participating in unacknowledged giftgiving and receiving, but the identity-forming capacity is attributed to thinking, to equivalence, to mirroring, and to 'finding oneself.' The identity of gift givers and receivers is created and validated by performing the process of material giving itself, rather than by performing only or mainly its analog, in language and thinking.

Moreover, since the one who derives his/her identity from thinking has many other needs, the giftgiver satisfies them and validates him (usually, though not necessarily, a male) as 'deserving.' If the person with the more abstract identity achieves a general social position, his/her nurturer is sometimes seen as

⁶Even Marx's 'labor value' could be viewed as a portion of gift value trapped and filtered through the definitional process of exchange. If labor could directly satisfy needs, it would result in co-munication and would attribute value to people. However, given the market, labor expended on one product is expressed relative to labor expended on all other products through the equation of value, as exchange value. In this, it is like a thing related to a (quantitatively divided) word. Marx did not include any of the other gifts that are given to the labor processwomen's work in the home, gifts of higher or lower prices, or gifts of natureas contributing to labor value.

giving to society as a whole transitively through him/her. (This is also the case for those in hierarchies who are in giftgiving positions serving those in higher social positions.)

Women have been nurturing men along with their mirrors. But rather than distributing mirrors to everyone, we need to put the mirrors down and turn our giving towards each other and towards solving the social problems they have created. Women need to nurture and solve general social problems directly ourselves, not to turn over our authority to masculated self-reflecting males. We need to care for society as a whole, promoting the giftgiving model at a general level, for all. Not only do we practice other-tending in our personal lives and in the solution of general problems, for example, by giving money, time, and imagination to satisfy general social, economic peace and environmental needs, ending hunger, war and pollution, but we propose giftgiving as the model of a necessary paradigm shift for all.

Thinking and Being

"I think; therefore I am" are the words of the exchanger as privileged 'owning sample.' Descartes' cogito denied the importance of the existence of others, the mother, society as a whole, and nature, for the individual's own existence. Descartes took on a position of radical skepticism--not accepting anything as a 'given.' His first step was to decontextualize himself from giftgiving and receiving and to try to find the self-evident basis of his being. Because the disqualification of other-orientation does not allow the exchanger to find the confirmation of her/his existence in the satisfaction of the needs of the other and the continued existence and well being of the other, s/he also has to find her/his source in mirroring her/himself alone. The receiver's lack of gratitude toward the giver also results in his/her ignorance of the other as source.

There is an aspect of self-similarity in the process which influences the ego formationand particularly the masculated ego formation in the cogito. Here, as in exchange, there is a shift to the

logic of substitution which takes the place of the logic of giving. An example of the logic of substitution: 'thinking' is provided, by which the use of the verb 'to be' (I 'am') is justified. There is also a shift from discourse to definition and self-definition, leaving aside contingent communicative needs. Because it is decontextualized (or does that to itself), the ego usually has to continue being validated and over-valued in order to continue to exist. Descartes provided an internal validation of the ego by focussing on its self-similarity. The cogito is influenced by the equation and the self-similarity of exchange, and it involves valuing equality (even tautology) and logical consequence over need. The equality of thinking and being do indeed stem from the same source which is language-in-denial-of-giftgiving.⁷ Usually the being of the self would include relations with others!

Descartes' gift to patriarchy was the satisfaction of the ego's co-municative need for a logical proof of its existence. This need is derived from the denial of the giftgiving-and-receiving which already proves and creates human existence materially. Self-similarity in thinking constructs a norm, a sort of ceiling mirror to refer to, a reflection of the self, which is actually its product. It is a re-verberation in the microphone that we mistake for a message from the universe or from the structure of communication and selfhood--and it appears to be evidence that the self is the source of the self. As in the concept where the sample male is related to the word 'male,' "I think; therefore I am" is self-similar, self-referential. Descartes recognized thinking as definition; then the definition of itself became the tautological ('I am I') underpinning of "I think; therefore I am." Here the definition has an over-taking source--himself.

Definitional thinking reflected in the equation becomes the 'mark' of the 'one' who is the sample for the concept of existence. Both are over-valued, like exchange. Like the phallus, the self-similar 'mark' which puts males into the privileged category, the kind of thinking which Descartes was

⁷Similarly, the equation of work and money stem from distribution in denial of giftgiving.

doing at the moment he thought up his immortal phrase puts those who do it into a privileged category as 'existing' and thus takes the place of giving as the justification for being. Definitional thinking and the verb 'to be' both function using substitution, and 'to be' brings thinking (the acts of substitution related to the word) into the present. Thinking is defined as definitional, equational, and logically consequential--if/then--instead of as transposed giftgiving.⁸

But something's 'being' just means that it is socially valuable enough for it to be related to words (for others), by an act which may be substituted by the verb 'to be.' So, thinking is a socially valuable activity, and the social subject who is doing it 'is'--especially if s/he succeeds in making this valuable (to others). Descartes' saying he is thinking brings forward a social general character of thinking, which he identifies with himself. 'I am thinking' is self-referential and seems obvious or clear because it is self-similar: We call the activity--expressed in such phrases as 'I think,' 'I am' and 'I think; therefore I am'--thinking. There is a shift into substitution in the

⁸Perhaps the homunculus, the little man seen by philosophers sitting inside our minds recognizing endless regresses, is the internalized image of the phallus which corresponds with all things in the 'sample' position everywhere. But, as philosophers saw, he is only a figment of our imaginations, a reflection of reflections. They reasoned that, if knowledge is based on the reflection of reality, and we have a picture of reality in our minds, we would have to recognize those pictures and, therefore, have pictures of those pictures. There would thus be a kind of little man in our minds with pictures of the pictures, and a little man in his mind with more pictures, etc. What philosophers don't reflect on is that the homunculus should be replaced by a little woman--or better, a little mother, a matericula). Instead of just sitting there making pictures, recognizing the image of the baby crying, a mother recognizes the need and intervenes, does something about it (feeds her, for example). Thus, if matericula were there in our minds, she would recognize the picture of the baby crying but would feel a need to do more than that, to satisfy the needs the picture suggested to her. The division between internal and external would be bridged in different ways by matericula and by homunculus. The reason for this is that recognizing similarities is more static, less informative, than the process of satisfying needs. Thus, when satisfying needs is transferred to an internal scenario, it can remain an active process. Homunculus is totally dependent on matericula's care, since he can't do anything but reflect. But he does not seem to make pictures of matericula, either in 'his' own mind or in the external world. Perhaps she moves too fast for him. Perhaps she moves as fast as the electric charge going from one synapse to another. In fact, couldn't we see brain activity in terms of giving, a movement from an abundance towards a lack? In that case, wouldn't we be doing something on the physiological plane that more or less matched what we are doing on the linguistic plane and in the external world? Perhaps those interested in the brain-mind questions might try to satisfy their needs with this moving-picture theory of reality.

sentence itself, as there is with the verb 'to be.' And he satisfies others' ego needs to know they exist, when they read his book. What a gift!

But Descartes was not really alone, even though he was de-contextualized, because thinking had to be valuable to others in order for it to be related before him to a word as its name as well as to other words contingently in discourse. Both thinking and the words are evidence of the existence of others, and of the context in which the (supposedly decontextualized) thinker is operating. Value has been given to thinking by the many in the past.

But value is also given to the thinker in the present, not only by her/himself but by all those who are nurturing her/him generally as part of society, and individually as a person they know. The formula is: take thinking as the important quality (the sensory in variant?) of the thing that's the sample, then say we are doing it, so equal to the sample, so substitutable by the sample and by whatever words substitute for it, so our acts are all substitutable by the verb 'to be,' so they and we, exist. It's another 'having' that makes us 'deserve' to exist. We correspond to 'existing.' Perhaps I could call all this 'Anti-Cartesian Linguistics:' Descartes was just re-writing thinking as being, or vice versa, and (like Chomsky and the many other thinkers who have been misguided by masculation) over-emphasized the importance of the rewriting (re-naming) process itself.

Being is Masculine

Membership in the privileged category is a prerequisite for possibly eventually becoming its norm. For boys, this is the possibility of becoming a man, a father, a sample for the family and for 'human.' For both boys and girls, it now might imply being in a top position in a profession. Being a member of the privileged category creates a need to continue to be relevant in that way, to merit the definition. For boys (and other

exchangers), it is a need to develop a masculated (exchange) identity--which means over-taking, giving up the mother and giftgiving, etc.

The gift the boy (or the exchanger) gives up is his 'feminine' (actually human) nurturing identity. He/she is validated by others because of this, economically anyway, and is rewarded with the self-esteem allowed to those of us who act according to the masculated norm, becoming successes 'in the system.' Such successes seem to exist and 'deserve to exist' more than those who do not succeed. We embrace the paradigm of exchange, much as at an early age we embraced language, or boys took on their male identity. It seems to be just the way things are.

We have been saying that the verb 'to be' substitutes the acts of substitution of the other words in the definition, giving to being a partial similarity to masculation and to the shift into exchange. 'Is' becomes similar to '$.' The degree of existence of males seems superior to that of females, as it does of some races and classes over others. If we then add the idea of deserving, we can see how the different 'shifts' to a 'higher' level all validate the supposed superiority of white upper class males, who seem to 'deserve to exist' more than others.

By playing out the role of the definiendum in the tautology ('I am I') or ('I am a thinking being') males are substituting the act of substitution, like the verb 'to be' substituting the act of substitution in the definition. Being seems to imply being masculated, and the most masculated (or most-often masculated) over-takes the others, and 'deserves' to exist the most. This occurs because 'being,' like masculation, is already connected with substitution and exchange.

The masculated egos are the categorizers, who include themselves in the category as samples, validated by the verb 'to be' and by money--so they 'naturally' use money to further their own existence. How could they deserve to be categorizers if they did not deserve to exist? Then those women or classes or races or sexual preference groups who are made to believe they don't deserve to

exist (they are not 'good enough') have to justify their own existence by taking care of, serving, those who do 'deserve.' (They can also be just anyone put into the category of the undeserving by those who control the definition.) 'Existence,' then, becomes just another privileged category.

Existence by Proxy

Exchange places people and things into a special category, which receives value from the outside. In their role of giving value to that category, the many who serve the deservers also deserve. They seem to participate, to some extent, in the privileged category by proxy. By giving value to the system and helping another person succeed in it, we put ourselves in a chain of transitivity, so that some goods flow to us from the exchanges of those in the category. This is the case for 'nonworking' wives who receive the table scraps of exchange. The fact that some goods do come back to them makes it appear that exchange is the source of gifts, the great nurturer.

This is one reason why women continue to nurture exchange and the exchangers with our credence, our love and our un-monetized work. The model of masculation appears more attractive and deserving than the model of mothering, and we mother it. At puberty, we choose the masculated model over the mothering model, as more viable. Many daughters leave their mothers (at least in spirit) because they become convinced that masculation is human, and it is their duty to nurture someone in that category or to become someone in that category--someone who 'contributes' and who, therefore, deserves to exist and to be nurtured.

The person who does not somehow succeed in deserving to exist remains in a no-person's land. Her lack of 'self-esteem' is really due to the co-optation of (privileged) existence by successfully masculated women and men and their help-meets. Both deserving and existence bring with them the substitution of masculation and exchange for giftgiving. We must either

join the substitutes and give up giftgiving, or we must nurture them if we want to deserve to exist.

Being Balanced

It may seem to women that they can 'balance work and family,' maintaining a nurturing attitude towards their husbands and children, while working in the exchange economy. This very balance, however, validates the masculated mode. By giving equal value to giftgiving and to exchange, we hide the creativity and fertility of giftgiving, constraining it into a comparison according to the principles of (equal) exchange and eclipsing its capacity as a model--draining the energy of the givers. We validate exchange again by using its principles to regulate giftgiving.

Men are also encouraged to 'rediscover the feminine' in themselves, mitigating the extremes of masculation without shifting paradigms. Like reformism or charity, these attitudes only make patriarchy more livable for some of its members. The principle of 'nothing in excess' is used excessively. Privileged groups 'balance their masculine and feminine sides' while reaping the advantages of an exploitative masculated economic and ideological system, which forces the many into a position of giftgiving towards them. Again, equations are overvalued and needs are ignored. The golden mean which quantifies caring (balancing it equally with not caring) is just that--mean. It allows privileged groups to live more comfortably with each other, without solving the problems that are causing the unhappiness of the whole.

The model of balance, like the more completely masculated model, really discredits the originary and creative aspect of giving and receiving. It confuses the issue by integrating the feminine according to the masculine standard. It keeps us from looking at the needs that are crying out to be met. There is, first of all, a meta need for us to go beyond balance, in order to satisfy the needs of all. But, of course, this is not a balanced point of view. The

principles of masculation and of mothering battle it out, causing a see-saw effect. We are like a person shifting from foot to foot, never becoming unbalanced enough to take a step forward or a step up to a true meta level--or even to put a foot down to take a step to stop the destruction of the planet.

Everyone embraces the masculated model. Daughters admire their fathers and boyfriends while taking their mothers for granted. Mothers over-value their sons and husbands, under-valuing their own giftgiving way for themselves and for their daughters, who often eventually do the same thing. Feminism is changing this somewhat, and women's caring thought and behavior is recounted in stories and poems and even sociological studies, but we do not yet attribute to it the kind of value we attribute to exchange and to masculated thinking and behavior.

Nurturing is the origin of our species--not competition and hierarchy or the survival of the fittest. Human mothers ensure the survival of the unfittest--infants. And all of us are unfit in many ways; our soft skin, vulnerable bellies, short teeth, and varied diets make us animals with many needs that others' gifts can and must satisfy. Our very adaptability allows a proliferation and specification of needs and desires. (I am hungry--not just for anything, but for tamales like they make in South Texas--even though I don't know how to make them myself. My need--in this case, my delight--is specific and comes from my history.)

The process of identifying needs and satisfying them--during which we learn the culturally specific varieties of goods and services that can be provided for a great many needs and desires, and then actually learn to provide for them and also to receive that provision from others--is the basic human process. Giving more value to giftgiving, and in this case to the handing down of culture, might allow us access to the generality we now seem to find in money and other one-many social structures. Now the artificial need to exchange has been extended to everyone and creates a degree of generality in the means of

exchange which is rivaled only by heads of state--whose images, after all, are stamped upon it.

The Creation of Scarcity

By Those Who Deserve to Exist

Exchange challenges us to prove that we can satisfy others' needs, making our own survival dependent upon our being 'fit' enough to produce, in an 'unnatural selection' process. Some species of animals develop hierarchies in times of scarcity while, in times of abundance, the dominance model is relaxed--and mating and feeding take place in less structured ways. The creation of scarcity which facilitates exchange among humans makes the hierarchical mode seem essential to survival. We imitate the hierarchical behavior of animal groups beyond which we had already evolved through generalized mothering. The giftgiving in language still maintains our evolutionary leap on an abstract plane, while concretely we seem to have leaped backwards by making nurturing as difficult as possible, acting in ferocious, parasitic and adversarial ways.

Technologies of various kinds, including earth-friendly technologies, have the potential for providing abundance for all. This abundance threatens exchange by making it irrelevant and unnecessary. Giftgiving in abundance can provide for everyone, and abundance is necessary for effective life-enhancing giftgiving. In abundance, forced giving, as it appears in exchange and hierarchies, has no reason for being because needs can always be satisfied by a multitude of ready sources.

Hierarchies are used to continually re-create scarcity by siphoning off surplus wealth. They thereby maintain exchange as the mode of distribution for all. Wars are fought to counter the challenges to hierarchies and markets by other hierarchies and markets. These wars destroy resources, creating scarcity, thereby ensuring the continuation of an environment appropriate for exchange. Preparing for the wars and spending the money necessary for high-tech armaments and the support of large armed

forces also depletes the civilian economy in 'peace time,' so that abundance does not accrue.

The appearance is the opposite. Employment in national war industries is highly visible and lucrative and appears to 'contribute' to the economy. However, these are jobs which produce nothing, gifts from the public to the workers. Paid for by tax money and devoted to the protection of the group or system, they seem to have the generality and social significance to which all in the society aspire. Unfortunately, the content of that generality is not nurturing but the propagation of death. The products of that labor never enter the nurturing economy; they are used instead to destroy the potential abundance of the local and global co-munity.

The increased government spending that is necessary in wartime (and the gifts of time, energy and enthusiasm given by patriotic citizens to the national effort) inject more elements of giftgiving into the economy as a whole, which stimulate it (creating more profit) while allowing a 'use' of the output--its destruction in fighting the war--which does not threaten the system of exchange by remaining in the economy and creating abundance.

Colonies and conquered territories provide the (minimally monetized) gift labor and resources necessary to allow excessive profit-taking by a few in the colonialist countries, which can then be reinvested as capital in war industries in the colonialist countries. The gifts thus come from 'elsewhere' and do not threaten the 'developed' monetized economy with their abundant presence, because they can be quickly cycled out in waste production--of armaments.

Now, in spite of the geographical distance, the North has found it useful to create scarcity in the South through World Bank and International Monetary Fund loans,⁹ structural adjustment, and environmental depletion. This makes it possible to channel the gifts of the many with even more precision into

⁹Typically, the money from these loans has been quickly cornered by the elites, while the nations' poor are extenuated by trying to pay the interestand the principal hangs fire.

enterprises that do not create the abundance which would challenge the system.

Instead, the stream of gifts--cheap labor (labor of which a large percentage is a gift) and low cost (high gift-quotient) raw materials--create an abundance of consumer goods to which only those working at a certain level in the exchange economy have access through their 'effective demand.' These goods again distinguish the 'haves' from the 'have-nots.' The communications industry uses radio, television and computers to broadcast 'free' information, music and images--products of our artistic gifts. These products are 'chosen' by the market and, therefore, usually help not only to sell other products (by modifying needs and desires), but also to create a consensus around the market system itself.

All of these extreme results come from the co-validation of masculation by a large number of overlapping, misinterpreted self-similar structures. From government to language, from economics to religion, from the military to academia--these structures overlap, repeat and validate each other. The ways we formulate our ideas of existence, being, and decontextualized thinking validate masculated males through similarity between their processes and the process of masculation (which originates in naming and the definition anyway).

Exchange, as the substitution of the logic of substitution for giftgiving, brings up the question of de-serving as well as the question of power, and of inclusion or exclusion from the category to which value is given. Our assertion of 'being,' though it may be logically and developmentally prior to exchange, validates exchange through similarity and vice versa, after the shift has occurred.¹⁰ Many of the different substitution processes--masculation, the verb 'to be,' exchange, and the judgments of correspondence and deserving--hang together to form a self-structuring and self-perpetuating 'reality,' a sort of servo-mechanism which, at

¹⁰See George Thompson on the influence of the development of money and philosophy. Studies in Ancient Greek Society, vol. II: The First Philosophers, 2nd ed. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1961 [1955].

many different levels, takes the place of and overpowers an ever-present and still possible gift-based world.

The 'new' reality seems to be more valid, more 'real' than the earlier one which, nevertheless, continues to support it. Although it is unacknowledged, the giftgiving process, like an oyster making a pearl out of a grain of sand, keeps on giving to the harsher reality of exchange, making it viable and humanizing it (to some extent). The masculated status quo, with its hierarchies and privileged ones, is maintained by the gifts of women and men both inside and outside it. As what is, it seems to deserve to exist more than its alternatives (the alternative realities of so-called 'primitive' peoples, for example) and we nurture it.

Meanwhile, not to be outdone by hidden givers, those who have succeeded in the exchange economy sometimes balance their egotism by dispensing a (usually not abundant) bit of charity to the underclass, or by proposing tendentious solutions to the social problems they have helped to create. For example, I recently heard of a proposal according to which the children of mothers who were on welfare would be sent to orphanages, as if paid professional 'experts' in an institutional setting were better for children than their single mothers. Having reduced the mothers to direst poverty, making nurturing almost impossible, politicians and 'social thinkers' propose to take their place with one more paternalistic, monetized model.

The reward for these thinkers lies in 'showing' that the masculated model is not only more efficient but more compassionate than mothers doing direct nurturing. Mothering becomes one more job from which women can be fired, with power over the inclusion or exclusion from the category given again to masculated men and institutions. The mothers' identities as giftgivers is unrecognized and, even though the job is unmonetized, it can be taken away from them. Robbed of their children, they are also dispossessed of their giftgiving identity and their exchange identity. They have no way to create an identity or to deserve to exist. Lacking all possibilities for masculation by inclusion in superior categories, these women give to the

privileged categories by contrast, and they receive the punishment for lacking which allays the fear and envy of the havers, thus expiating the crime of proposing the model of mothering without men.

In fact, the state steps in as a substitute for the father, once again eclipsing women's way. Whether as capitalist welfare or as management of resources by a communist or socialist state, the law or the charity of the collective fathers discounts and often defiles the reality of giftgiving life.

The visitor from outer space would recognize the importance of the fact that women do some 60% of the world's agricultural work, yet own only about 1% of the world's property. Feminists usually think of this strange disproportion in terms of justice--that is, of creating change to make women own as great a quantity of property as men do. I would like to propose that the reason women own so little property is that we have a different way of relating to our surroundings. We need to dismantle the structures of patriarchy, including the structures of ownership that are based on masculation, and propose a women's model of property based on giftgiving.

Does Giftgiving Exist?

Money is the means for satisfying co-municative need in the community of exchangers, private property owners. Exchange value is the relevance of products to that kind of contradictory mutually exclusive co-munication. Like the verb 'to be,' money substitutes the act of substitution of one product for another.

I believe that the co-municative value of things is expressed in words, which take their place as gifts in creating human bonds. Words may also be seen as having a positional value relative to each other in the system of the langue.¹¹ If kinds of things were not relevant to human beings repeatedly, they would not become related to words as their names (though they could still be talked

¹¹Though their basic relation of words to each other in Saussure's langue is that of purely differential mutual exclusion, they do have some similarities that look like Vigotsky's complexes.

about in sentences). Thus, the reason anyone has any words given to her/him by others is that they are in use in the collective, which is made up of many others whom each of us will never know.

The value of something for the collective is outside the individual communicative interaction and outside the individual money exchange transaction. It is really for others. The identity of a cultural item can be found in its verbal substitute gift, outside the individual communicative interaction, in the collective. An analogous situation happens with the quantitative determination of a price. The price is determined by the value of the product for others in the society whom we will never know. If we look at the qualitative value of things for communication as expressed in words, and the quantitative value of things for the contradictory kind of communication that is material exchange, as expressed in price, and correct for the difference between qualitative value and quantitative value, we can understand the mechanisms of both.

In fact, for both, it is the importance of things for the community that brings them to the forefront of our conversation, or to the forefront of the market. They are 'for others and therefore for me.' Cats are called 'cats' in English because for each of us that is what they are for others. A can of coffee costs $4.00 because that is what it is for others, also. When the amount others will give for it changes, it changes for the individual, as well. We can look at the value of the different component parts of the coffee, the price of the beans paid to the coffee grower, the price of the labor paid to the workers, the price of the transportation of the beans, their grinding, the price of the can, etc.

Each of these, and whatever component parts it might have, depends upon what that part is 'for others,' what others give for it. For each linguistic or economic transaction, the identification of what something is depends on what it is for the collective--for the many--outside that transaction itself. We talked about the verb 'to be' being the substitute for the act of substitution, and money as having a similar process. For the linguistic and the economic realms respectively, something is valuable when it is

important enough to the collective to have its place taken by a word as its name, by 'is' as a substitute for that act of substitution, or by another product in exchange--and by money as its equivalent in the quantity of its price.

Both language and exchange leave co-municative giftgiving out of focus (particularly when exchange value has become the sample of value) and this happens in the collective mind. The gift aspects of life remain relatively unconscious and undiscussed. Gifts taking-the-place-of gifts has been assimilated to exchange (which is a very magnetic model) and to the definition influenced by masculation. For this reason, the value of giftgiving is not recognized collectively. It is almost not named.¹² It would seem paradoxical to say that giftgiving is valuable; value is the existence of something for the collective, and that giftgiving is not recognized by the collective as existing.

On the other hand, if we look at both the verb 'to be' and at money as substitutes for the act of substitution, we can see that giftgiving--which is not substituted--may reasonably seem to be not pertinent to language nor valuable to exchange. Thus if language and exchange both require substitution for the assertion of existence or of value, giftgiving, which does not involve substitution, may seem to be nonexistent and not valuable. Masculation, on the contrary, which is a construction of self-similar substitutions, appears to exist and to be very valuable. It is not surprising that it attracts the many gifts that are not given to giftgiving.

On the other hand, both 'being' and exchange for money are influenced and 'distressed' by masculation, which feeds back the principle of over-taking into the definition and into the economy--so that 'being' or 'being valuable' seem to imply over-taking or even being the one or sample. Again, none of this is our 'fault.' These contradictions are mostly just due to logical tangles.

Thus the verb 'to be' and money reflect the power we have given to language to take us away from our mothers and the

¹²For example, I have had difficulty using terms like 'nurturing' or 'mothering,' which bring with them too much focus on infancy.

Mother. We do not see 'being' or 'value' as having relevance to substitution because we deny the reality of what has been substituted, just as we deny the mother (and the earth) as substituted model--as if she didn't exist (especially if existence has to do with substitution). We 'for-get' that the mother is active and that she actively gives and compassionately gives-way. Our original framework comes from giftgiving but, through being masculated or through caring for those who have been masculated and their processes, we learn to give value to the definitional aspects of language and lifesubstitution, having, keeping and 'being'--rather than to the gift aspects and to giving.

The mother does not have to give way. If the mother did not give way, we might re-frame our view of the world and see how much of life is already in her giftgiving mode. We could see things as gifts from Mother Earthnot just as products of Adam's dominating names--and we would therefore treat them with the care which they need if they are not to be destroyed. Many of us are already doing this now, as we appreciate the gifts of nature, culture, synchronicity, good will, and the gift of life itself. What we sense as the immanence of 'being' is really the result of our creative receptive mode directed in gratitude towards the gifts of life and the earth, while suspending (for the moment) the distressed mediation of language and exchange.

Perhaps we could see community as part of the Mother, giving value to things as giving to us and giving value to us, and things giving value to their names, which we give to each other, giving value to us. The earth would co-municate with us through her fruit and birdsongs, our bodies and our giftgiving selves. We would participate in a co-municative relation with nature. Now the model of the community is formed of one-many mutually exclusive owners with owned property giving value-as-position to themselves and discrediting the categories of the 'have-nots.'

Property having to do with giftgiving (giveable and receivable property) is different from the private property that goes through exchange. We can create a caring relation with property rather than a relation of domination. Perhaps the gift

paradigm would require a lighter kind of ownership, more like the property of our bodies which (in safety) are basically shareable but usually not for the moment being shared. We would have a relationship of companionship with property, of use, gratitude, and stewardship. We could consider it according to the model of the breast, not the penis--the property of something that can give in an on-going way, rather than the property of a penetrating tool or a 'mark' that puts us in a superior category.

A women's model would pay attention to needs and, in abundance, needs could proliferate in variety and specificity. They might also include psychological needs for security and for a bond with one's surroundings, so that the one who cares for something is the one it is for. In abundance, the need for property would be less intense than it now is because the consequences of not-having would be only that gifts would come from some other direction. Where having and not-having are no longer psychologically invested with the nightmares of childhood, law and retribution would no longer be 'needed.' Nor would the state be required or allowed to step in as the collective father-owner.

At present, the kind of property that involves sharing with ease and the enjoyment of nature and her abundant resources is usually reserved for the wealthy as a reward for having more. The point is not to keep everyone, including the rich, from enjoying the abundance of nature and culture but to extend that possibility to everyone. All of us need to realize how deeply our society is under the spell of a collective psychosis. We urgently need to heal it and ourselves.

Indigenous peoples have often had cultures which used the mothering model and the giftgiving way much more than our own. It would be interesting to find out to what extent they integrated linguistic mechanisms along with their giftgiving and what different kinds of property they propose. The Iroquois, a matriarchal society in which a council of women had important decision-making power, and which used the word for woman (instead of the word for man) to mean 'human being,' gave different proper names to each of the tribal members. A name

became available only when the person bearing it died.¹³ The names of the tribal members thus constituted a langue, and we could see the members of the tribe as the socially valuable 'things'--a culture, a world--related to those words. In European patriarchy--or puerarchy--we have made some people into things: women, and some into words: men--and we mediate between their 'properties' with the 'money-word.'

Our patriarchal state of affairs is certainly not a more rational way of organizing the society than the gynarchical way of the Iroquois. All of the different cultures that existed before they were overtaken, destroyed and redefined by the White Man and his ways were socio-economic experiments engaged in by the many. Some of them gave value to mothers and to symbolic and co-municative giftgiving. We can learn alternative ways of living from them.

In the gift mode, 'being' is actually co-munication with the earth or other humans, and we are actually still in the gift mode a lot in spite of our participation in exchange. Our experience itself involves receiving sense perceptions and information--giving destinations to the world as we experience it, in needs which we can satisfy, whether they are other's needs, our own, or needs of our surroundings. Needs grow according to the means of their satisfaction, the ear becomes educated to the kinds of music it hears. Some needs are more basic than others, but even they diversify into tastes and preferences for the different means of satisfaction, the different gifts Mother Nurture and Mother Nature provide.

Women's existence does not consist in giving-way or being owned or owning but in a completely different relation to the world (and to property), a relation which is potentially not mutually exclusive but need-destined, 'other-destined.' Boundaries are only made necessary by fights among 'one-manies' striving to be larger 'samples.' If we gave value to needs and

¹³See Elizabeth Tooker, "Women in Iroquois Society," in Iroquois Women, An Anthology, ed. W.G. Spittal, Iroqrafts, Ohsweken, Ontario, 1990. "By Iroquois custom, each clan holds a set of personal names. When a child is born he or she is given a name 'not in use.' This 'baby name' is usually later changed for an 'adult name' that is not then 'in use,' that is, one belonging to someone now deceased or to someone whose name has been changed" (112).

recognized and appreciated their complexity, we would also recognize and satisfy each other's needs for keeping and for independence. Women's care extends logically to the environment. Giving value to needs at all levels also allows us to give value to large-scale general needs.

At present, the need to heal the planet is a need of the collective, and it is being collectively addressed--without, however, passing through the human mothering model. Many of us are concerned about Mother Earth but still consider human mothering unimportant. It is in mothering, however, and being mothered that we can fi nd the framework for living in peace with each other, so that we can stop over-taking and destroying the earth.

If we could diminish the exchange economy and its castration envy motivations of having and not-having, we could live in harmony with a kind of semi-private property, which was also pertinent to the collective as environment. The forest would no longer be seen as valuable to the logging company that owned it, but rather to those humans and animals who live in it and use its direct gifts respectfully with gratitude, cherishing them. The forests transformed into logs do not satisfy a real need of the collective, but only the profit motive need of the private owner. The need of the buyers with effective demand has to be created. Whether the trees are to be transformed into toilet paper, chop sticks, or building materials, alternatives exist and the needs of the public can be educated towards them and towards the collective and environmental good.

Instead, on the large scale, capitalistic exchange uses the collective as means to the satisfaction of everyone's need for the means of economic communication, for money. The need for profit is abstract. Everyone needs the same thing. This common unitary need for (more) money distorts our view of other needs. The value of money is like the linguistic value of everything, of 'being,' seen as substitution (over-taking), not as the immanence of the gift.

Nothingness is not the opposite of being. What is really the opposite of being involves a reinterpretation of the verb 'to be', which includes nonsign giftgiving connected to language through the gift, not through over-taking or substitution and giving-way. Similarly, the opposite of the one-many property¹⁴ relation is not not-having but woman-based gentle property. Because of masculation, an abundant nurturing relation with property seems to be a prize of the privileged haves. Similarly, a nurturing wife seemed to be a reward given to men for being male. Keeping property away from others makes us unable to receive and transmit its value, and unable to appreciate its relevance to a sharing collective. According to the linguistic logic, it is for ourselves and, therefore, not for others and therefore--not for ourselves. When we keep something within the system of mutually exclusive private ownership, we cannot imitate the mothering model with it.

Recently, reports of so-called 'primitive' people have become popular in the US because they describe ways of living which center around giftgiving, based upon a spiritual source. The story of the Australian Aborigines,¹⁵ who travel with no supplies across the outback, depending on the gifts of the creator for their survival--and receiving them--is an example of a gift-based way of life (though at this point taking place in scarcity). Such stories become popular in the US because they point to an attitude which is healing for us, although we are practicing an economy which contradicts it.

Religions and New Age therapies promote gratitude for our blessings, putting us into a gift framework. The questions that arise here are, "Can we heal individually or spiritually while the society of which we are a part marauds the earth and destroys the very people who inspire us with their faith and alternative ways?" and "Can our individual healing change the paradigm, rather than reinforce it by assimilating some of its principles on an individual basis?" Our attempts to heal individually and

¹⁴Including 'one-many' property of the State.

¹⁵Marlo Morgan, Mutant Message Down Under, Harper Collins, New York, 1994.

spiritually must connect with attempts to heal the collective and the planet.

Vice versa, attempts to heal the collective, such as the feminist movement, the 'left' movements for social and economic change, and the environmental movement must also pass through individual healing. The model of the mother exists on both the individual and the collective levels. The gift paradigm, with mothering as its carrier, is the functional and poetic norm to which society can return.

According to the logic of exchange, women's way of property deserves to exist because of what it has already contributed to humanity. If we want to shift paradigms towards women's way, however, we cannot use the logic of exchange, re-instating a paying-back mode. For-getting the mother involves embracing exchange, turning away from the mother and getting something else in her place. When we are for-getting, we are not for-giving the mother and the way of the mother. Instead, we must all be consistently for-giving if the gift way is to function. And we need to keep our definitions on the verbal plane rather than incarnating them.