Capitalism, commodities, and the bourgeois individual

Capitalism, commodities, and the bourgeois individual

Week 2: Gifts, commodities, and spheres of exchange

Ryan Schram
ANTH 1002: Anthropology in the world
Wednesday, August 07, 2024

Slides available at https://anthro.rschram.org/1002/2024/2.2

Main reading: West (2012)

Other reading: Mauss ([1925] 1990), 1-14, 39-46, 78-83; Marx ([1867] 1972), 319-329; Eriksen (2015); Bohannan (1959); Bohannan (1955)

Two objects

Look at these two objects.

What are the important differences between these?

Which of these is similar to a sweet potato, and which is similar to coffee seedlings?

Gifts are part of a system of total services

Mauss argues that in most societies, exchanges take the form of gifts, and gifts come with obligations: to give, to receive, and to reciprocate.

In Sydney, people think a lot about buying and selling. I would like to argue that in this society many exchanges are gifts also.

Mauss says that the essence of society is a “system of total services” in which everything one does is for someone else, and other people do everything for you (Mauss [1925] 1990, 5). It is a state of total interdependence.

No society is a perfect system of total services. Every society has that idea at its heart, even if people don’t know it or can’t see it.

Tiv spheres of exchange

What if everything you owned “wished to return to its birthplace” (Mauss [1925] 1990, 12)?

Everything of value would be embedded in social relationships.

In many societies the embeddedness of value takes the form of a system that organizes objects into distinct, ranked spheres of exchange. One example is the Tiv of Nigeria, who have three spheres:

• Women as wives
• Prestige items: brass rods, tugudu cloth, slaves
• Subsistence items: food, utensils, chickens, tools

Some things, like land, cannot be exchanged for anything, but are inherited (Bohannan 1955).

Money in Tiv society: Bohannan’s prediction

Bohannan claimed that money would disrupt the separation of spheres of exchange. However…

• Money was initially placed in the lowest of spheres, or even outside of the three spheres (Bohannan 1955, 68). It continued to mainly be exchanged against low-ranking items (Parry and Bloch 1989, 13–14).
• Other scholars have noted that money does not have this revolutionizing effect on similar systems (Hoskins 1997, 186–88).

Commodities and capitalism

• Commodities are bought and sold for a price.
• You can think of commodities as a “sphere of exchange.” When you exchange commodities for money, and back again, you are following certain rules.
• The sale of commodities generates a profit.
• A system of producing, selling and distributing commodities as the main form of economic system is associated with capitalism.

Private property creates a new kind of society

For capitalism to emerge, first the concept that one’s property can be owned privately has to be instituted.

• Private property gives me the right to exclude other people from my property, like a fence.

Talk about selling out…

A worker under capitalism brings “his own hide to market and has nothing to expect but – a hiding” (Marx [1867] 1972, 343).

What do you think he means by this? Buzz about this. What do you associate with the word Capitalism? Marxism? When did you first hear these words? Have you ever read the Communist Manifesto?

Capitalism is…

• Capitalism is a system in which the means of production (capital, or productive wealth) are privately owned by one social class, the bourgeois class.
• Capitalism is a system in which nobody else has access to the means of production; in order to live, people have to sell their labor.

Either gifts or commodities?

This might sound like a simple dichotomy:

• societies based on gifts, reciprocity, and a system of total services;
• capitalist societies based on commodity production and consumption.

Instead, consider this possibility:

Every society is based on a system of total services, even if its members don’t know it and cannot see it.

Some societies impose a specific set of social fictions:

• valuable things can be private property, and
• your body and your labor power is your private property, and you can sell it if you have to.

We see both the reality of society and the fiction of individual alienation in every society, and they interact in several different ways.

A side note: There is a paradox in our concept of society

Bourgeois culture teaches us that we are each individual economic actors and that there is no society on which we depend.

But societies are real. We really are all part of a system of total services.

Yet, also, every society is based on a fiction.

We need to be part of a social order

But any one social order will involve lying to ourselves.

• And some social fictions completely obscure the existence of any social ties.

References and further reading

Bohannan, Paul. 1955. “Some Principles of Exchange and Investment Among the Tiv.” American Anthropologist, New Series, 57 (1): 60–70. https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.1955.57.1.02a00080.

———. 1959. “The Impact of Money on an African Subsistence Economy.” The Journal of Economic History 19 (4): 491–503. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022050700085946.

Eriksen, Thomas Hylland. 2015. “Exchange and Consumption.” In Small Places, Large Issues: An Introduction to Social and Cultural Anthropology, 4th ed., 217–40. London: Pluto Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt183p184.16.

Hoskins, Janet. 1997. The Play of Time: Kodi Perspectives on Calendars, History, and Exchange. Berkeley: University of California Press. https://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft0x0n99tc&chunk.id=d0e7605&toc.depth=1&toc.id=d0e7388&brand=ucpress.

Marx, Karl. (1867) 1972. “Capital, Vol. 1.” In The Marx-Engels Reader, edited by Robert C. Tucker, 294–438. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.

Mauss, Marcel. (1925) 1990. The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies. Translated by W. D. Halls. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. https://archive.org/details/giftformreasonfo0000maus/page/4/mode/2up?q=total+services.

Parry, Jonathan, and Maurice Bloch. 1989. “Introduction: Money and the Morality of Exchange.” In Money and the Morality of Exchange, edited by Jonathan Parry and Maurice Bloch, 1–32. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

West, Paige. 2012. “Village Coffee.” In From Modern Production to Imagined Primitive: The Social World of Coffee from Papua New Guinea, 101–29. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.