Reciprocity
Peer Production is a form of non-reciprocal exchange, but it can also be called "Generalized Reciprocity". Reciprocity most often refers to situations where a return is expected.
Description
From the Wikipedia article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reciprocity_%28cultural_anthropology%29
"In cultural anthropology and sociology, reciprocity is a way of defining people's informal exchange of goods and labour; that is, people's informal economic systems. It is the basis of most non-market economies. Since virtually all humans live in some kind of society and have at least a few possessions, reciprocity is common to every culture. Marshall Sahlins, a well known American cultural anthropologist, identified three main types of reciprocity in his book Stone Age Economics (1972).
Generalized reciprocity is the same as virtually uninhibited sharing or giving. It occurs when one person shares goods or labor with another person without expecting anything in return. What makes this interaction "reciprocal" is the sense of satisfaction the giver feels, and the social closeness that the gift fosters. In industrial society this occurs mainly between parents and children, or within married couples. In other cultures generalized reciprocity can occur within entire clans or large kin groups, for instance among the east Semai of Malaysia. Between people who engage in generalized reciprocity, there is a maximum amount of trust and a minimum amount of social distance.
Balanced or Symmetrical reciprocity occurs when someone gives to someone else, expecting a fair and tangible return at some undefined future date. It is a very informal system of exchange. The expectation that the giver will be repaid is based on trust and social consequences; that is, a "mooch" who accepts gifts and favors without ever giving himself will find it harder and harder to obtain those favors. In industrial societies this can be found among relatives, friends, neighbors, and coworkers. Balanced reciprocity involves a moderate amount of trust and social distance.
Negative reciprocity is what economists call barter. A person gives goods or labor and expects to be repaid immediately with some other goods or labor of the same value. Negative reciprocity can involve a minimum amount of trust and a maximum social distance; indeed, it can take place among strangers." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reciprocity_%28cultural_anthropology%29)
Discussion
Contemporary Reciprocity
"In experiments and surveys people are not stingy, but their generosity is conditional. Moreover, they distinguish among the goods and services to be distributed, favoring those which meet basic needs, and among the recipients themselves, favoring those thought to be "deserving." Strong reciprocity and basic needs generosity better explain the motivations that undergird egalitarian politics than does unconditional altruism. By "strong reciprocity" we mean a propensity to cooperate and share with others similarly disposed, and a willingness to punish those who violate cooperative and other social norms--even when such sharing and punishing is personally costly. We call a person who acts this way Homo reciprocans. Homo reciprocans cares about the well-being of others and about the processes determining outcomes--whether they are fair, for example, or violate a social norm. He differs in this from the self-regarding and outcome-oriented Homo economicus. We see Homo reciprocans at work in Chicago's neighborhoods, in a recent study that documented a widespread willingness to intervene with co-residents to discourage truancy, public disorders, and antisocial behaviors, as well as the dramatic impact of this "collective efficacy" on community safety and amenities.1
Homo reciprocans is not committed to the abstract goal of equal outcomes, but rather to a rough "balancing out" of burdens and rewards. In earlier times--when, for example, an individual's conventional claim on material resources was conditioned by noble birth or divine origin--what counted as balancing out might entail highly unequal comfort and wealth. But, as we will see, in the absence of specific counter-claims, modern forms of reciprocity often take equal division as a reference point." (http://bostonreview.net/BR23.6/bowles.html)
Political Implications for Egalitarianism
" Aside from unconditional altruism, there are two distinct reasons why people might support egalitarian policies. First, many egalitarian programs are forms of social insurance that will be supported even by those who believe they will pay in more than their expected claims over a lifetime. Consider unemployment, health insurance, or other social programs that soften the blows during the rocky periods that people experience in the course of their lives. Even the securely rich support ameliorating the conditions of the poor on prudential, that-might-happen-to-me grounds. Assuming people are broadly prudent and risk-averse, then the insurance motive is consistent with conventional notions of self-interest. The second reason for supporting egalitarian programs, in contrast, is not fundamentally self-regarding: egalitarianism is often based on a commitment to what we are calling "strong reciprocity." It is little surprise that people are more generous than economics textbooks allow; more remarkable is that they are equally unselfish in seeking to punish, often at great cost to themselves, those who have done harm to them and others. Programs designed to tap these other-regarding motives may succeed where others that offend underlying motivational structures have been abandoned.
Both historical and contemporary experimental evidence support this position. Consider first the historical evidence. In his Injustice: The Social Bases of Obedience and Revolt, Barrington Moore, Jr. sought to discern if there might be common motivations--"general conceptions of unfair and unjust behavior"--for the moral outrage fueling struggles for justice throughout human history. "There are grounds," he concludes,
"for suspecting that the welter of moral codes may conceal a certain unity of original form . . . a general ground plan, a conception of what social relationships ought to be. It is a conception that by no means excludes hierarchy and authority, where exceptional qualities and defects can be the source of enormous admiration and awe. At the same time, it is one where services and favors, trust and affection, in the course of mutual exchanges, are ideally expected to find some rough balancing out."
Moore termed the general ground plan he uncovered "the concept of reciprocity--or better, mutual obligation, a term that does not imply equality of burdens or obligations." In like manner, James Scott analyzed agrarian revolts, identifying violations of the "norm of reciprocity" as one the essential triggers of insurrectionary motivations."
(http://bostonreview.net/BR23.6/bowles.html)
History of Strong Reciprocity
" One is tempted to consider strong reciprocity a late arrival in social evolution, possibly one whose provenance is to be found in Enlightenment individualism, or later in the era of liberal democratic or socialist societies. But this account does not square with overwhelming evidence of the distant etiology of strong reciprocity. The primatologist Christopher Boehm finds that
with the advent of anatomically modern humans who continued to live in small groups and had not yet domesticated plants and animals, it is very likely that all human societies practiced egalitarian behavior and that most of the time they did so very successfully. One main conclusion, then, is that intentional leveling linked to an egalitarian ethos is an immediate and probably an extremely widespread cause of human societies' failing to develop authoritative or coercive leadership.
And anthropologist Bruce Knauft adds:
In all ethnographically known simple societies, cooperative sharing of provisions is extended to mates, offspring, and many others within the band. . . . Archeological evidence suggests that widespread networks facilitating diffuse access to and transfer of resources and information have been pronounced at least since the Upper Paleolithic . . . The strong internalization of a sharing ethic is in many respects the sine qua non of culture in these societies.
Far from being a mere moment in the history of anatomically modern humans, the period described by Knauft and Boehm emerges roughly 100,000 years before the present and extends to the advent and spread of agriculture 12,000 years ago. In short, it spans perhaps 90 percent of the time we have existed on the planet.
One group of contemporary foragers, the Aché of Eastern Paraguay, has been particularly closely studied, with close attention to the amounts and nutritional values of food acquired and consumed by members of the group. Sharing is so widespread, researchers have found, that on average three-quarters of what anyone eats is acquired by someone outside the consumer's nuclear family; even more remarkable, in the case of meat and honey (the main goods foraged by men):
women, children and adult siblings of the accquirer receive no more . . . from their husbands, fathers and brothers respectively than would be expected by chance, and men eat from their own kills a good deal less than would be expected by chance.
The Aché are probably unusually egalitarian, and there is evidence that hunting prowess is rewarded, if not with more food, then with enhanced social esteem and increased mating success. Nevertheless it is typical in foraging societies that families with less successful hunters, and indeed those unable to hunt, are nonetheless adequately provisioned by the group.
The resulting egalitarian distribution of resources is not simply a byproduct of ecological or other constraints; it is deliberately sought. Using data from forty-eight simple societies, Christopher Boehm concluded that they "may be considered to be intentional communities, groups of people that make up their minds about the amount of hierarchy they wish to live with and then see to it that the program is followed." He found evidence that potentially arrogant members of the group were constrained by public opinion, criticism and ridicule, disobedience, ostracism and assassination.
It seems likely then, that "politically assertive egalitarianism" has characterized most of human history. The modern welfare state is thus but an example of a ubiquitous social form. Sharing institutions--from families to extended gift-giving, barn raisings, tithing, or egalitarian division rules for the catch of the hunt--have cropped up in human history with such regularity and under such diverse circumstances that one is tempted to place them among what Talcott Parsons called "evolutionary universals": social institutions that confer such extensive benefits upon their users that they regularly reappear in course of history in otherwise diverse societies." (http://bostonreview.net/BR23.6/bowles.html)
How do Netizens experience reciprocity?
Michelle Rowan:
"So, what exactly does reciprocity mean for netizen?
Balanced and Generalised forms of reciprocity are compressed and altered. The exchange offers maximum trust (ie. that unkown users aren’t going to use the information/material in an untoward way), but also allows for maximum social distance through the global network. Youtube is a good example of this. Some users post videos expecting nothing in return, they do it because they know the community will appreciate it. Others share their videos, but expect that one day they will be ‘compensated’ ie. someone will post an equally valuable video at some stage in the future.
Negative is reserved primarily for ecommerce sites, be it Amazon or Ebay, and is largely unchanged.
In sum, web2.0 technologies not only change the way we view exchanges within our community, but change the frequency, type and access to different forms of reciprocity. Through social networking, we can exchange information with those in our outer circles, and in doing so, expand ourselves as we transgress the divisive social circles through online exchange." (http://michellerowan.wordpress.com/2008/02/12/circles-of-reciprocity-and-web20-have-the-circles-shifted/)
Kevin Carson on Reciprocity in the Mutualist tradition
Kevin Carson:
"The norm of reciprocity seems to be very deeply and universally ingrained in human nature. Human relations normally involve the mutual conferring of benefits, with both parties participating in a relationship because they see them as beneficial. Exploitation results from the intrusion of power relations, so that the party with superior power is able to derive a lopsided benefit from the relationship, receiving benefits from the other party while providing unequal benefits in return. Exploitation is unequal exchange resulting from an inequality of power.
The concept of "equal exchange," specifically, has tended to assume reciprocity in terms of equal amounts of effort. According to Proudhon, it is the common sense understanding, even of illiterate peasants, that a commodity is "worth" that amount of another commodity which "can be made in the same time and with the same expense" (<a href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/2428324/What-Is-Property">What is Property?</a>) This reciprocity of effort was reflected in the medieval idea of "just price." It also underlay the classical political economists' conception of a "natural price." Both conceptions were based, as James Buchanan argued in <a href="http://www.econlib.org/LIBRARY/Buchanan/buchCv6Contents.html">Cost and Choice</a>, on a common implicit understanding of man as a rational utility-maximizer. Regarding Smith's illustration of the exchange of deer for beaver, he writes:
If, for any reason, exchange values should settle in some
ratio different from that of cost values, behavior will be modified. If the individual hunter knows that he is able, on an outlay of one day's labor, to kill two deer or one beaver, he will not choose to kill deer if the price of a beaver is three deer, even should he be a demander or final purchaser of deer alone. He can "produce" deer more cheaply through exchange under these circumstances.... Since all hunters can be expected to behave in the same way, no deer will be produced until and unless the expected exchange value returns to
equality with the cost ratio.
Describing the same principle from a slightly different angle, Franz Oppenheimer argued that under the inducements of a truly free labor market, labor would distribute itself among employments until incomes became "equal"--in our terms, equal in relation to given quantities of subjectively perceived effort [Eduard Heimann, "<a href="http://www.franz-oppenheimer.de/eh44a.htm">Franz Oppenheimer's Economic Ideas</a>," Social Research (February 1949)]. Oppenheimer, in "A Post-Mortem on Cambridge Economics," quoted with approval Adam Smith's claim that "[t]he whole of the advantages and disadvantages of the different employments of labour and stock must, in the same neighbourhood, be either perfectly equal or continually tending to equality." He also quoted, with like approval, Johann Henirich von Thuenen's posited equilibrium at which "labor of equal quality is equally rewarded in all branches of production...." ["<a href="http://www.franz-oppenheimer.de/fo43a.htm">A Post Mortem on Cambridge Economics (Part I)</a>," The American Journal of Economics and Sociology 1942/43].
The principle of reciprocity is built into the normal functioning of a free market. When exchange is free and uncoerced, it is impossible for one party to benefit at another's expense, for the reason described by Buchanan. The ratio at which goods and services are exchanged will move toward a value that reflects the respective costs of the parties, including the disutility of their labor. If one party is able to find another exchange that provides a higher degree of utility, he will choose it in preference to the lesser utility. And if one party receives a producer surplus or rent above his costs, and market entry is free from barriers, others will find it profitable to offer a better deal.
Coercive intervention, on the other hand, forces one party to a contract to accept a lower-ranking preference than he otherwise would, in order to provide the other party with his preference at a lower cost.
So if equal exchange is the norm in the absence of coercion, why do we see so much inequality in the real world? R. A. Wilson argued in The Illuminatus! Trilogy that unequal exchange would occur to a certain extent "because some traders will be shrewder than others."
But in total freedom... such unequal exchanges will be
sporadic and irregular. A phenomenon of unpredictable periodicity, mathematically speaking.... [But in the real world, we observe], instead, a mathematically smooth function, a steady profit accruing to one group and an equally steady loss accumulating for all others. Why is this...? Because the system is not free or random, any mathematician would tell you a priori. Well, then, where is the determining function, the factor that controls the other variables?... Privilege, I... call it. When A meets B in the marketplace, they do not bargain as equals. A bargains from a position of privilege; hence, he always profits and B always loses.
Anna Morgenstern, of <a href="http://tranarchist.blogspot.com/">Tranarchism</a> blog, <a href="http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2007/11/chapter-seven-draft.html#c3248258353808433210">described</a> the phenomenon in terms quite similar to Wilson's:
Once a pocket of unmet demand is discovered, under
anarchy, capital will flow in that direction and will arbitrage out the profit opportunity pretty rapidly.
So while there will always be profit making going on somewhere in the economy, it will never consistently flow to the same people. If it does, that is prima facie evidence of violent intervention or fraud,
IMO.
But since this is no free market, what we observe is the "Matthew Effect": "To him that hath, more shall be given." A more scientific term for it is "Pareto's law." A study by physicist Victor Yakovenko found that income distribution among the top 3% of the population <a href="http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7107">followed a power law distribution</a>--Pareto's law--but that incomes for the bottom 97% more closely resembled the spread of energies of atoms in a gas.
Privilege--coercion--creates a zero-sum situation in which one party benefits at the expense of the other. There is a symmetrical relationship between one party's gain and the other party's loss.
A monopoly creates artificial scarcity; the holder of the monopoly privilege benefits at the expense of the public, who, forced to pay for something that is not naturally scarce, are absolute losers in the transaction.
Individualist anarchist <a href="http://fair-use.org/benjamin-tucker/instead-of-a-book/socialism-what-it-is">Benjamin Tucker</a> treated state intervention as a zero-sum game:
Wealth is made by legal privilege a hook with which to
filch from labor's pockets. Every man who gets rich thereby makes his neighbor poor. The better off one is, the worse off the rest are. As Ruskin says, every grain of calculated Increment to the rich is balanced by its mathematical equivalent of Decrement to the poor. The Laborer's Deficit is precisely equal to the Capitalist's
Efficit.
Or as <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Haywood">Big Bill Haywood</a> said, for every man who gets a dollar he didn't work for, there's another man who worked for a dollar he didn't get.
The primary effect of privileges, as <a href="http://www.progress.org/hgjr2b.htm">Henry George, Jr.</a> described it, is to "empower their holders to appropriate, without compensation or adequate compensation, a large or small share of the produce of labor."
At the root of all forms of privilege is artificial scarcity. The present global corporate economy, for instance, depends primarily on the enforcement of artificial scarcity by so-called "intellectual property" (although old-fashioned land theft and eviction of peasant subsistence farmers still deserves honorable mention for its role in promoting sweatshop labor and reducing the bargaining power of those engaged in it).
Privilege is what <a href="http://www.franz-oppenheimer.de/state1.htm">Franz Oppenheimer</a> called the "political means" to wealth: the creation of artificial scarcity, by enforcement of artificial property rights, and the collection of rents on such artificial property.
For Adam Smith, as <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=gM0YnzLX2NwC&pg=PA207&lpg=PA207&dq=%22automatic+regulator+of+scarcity-value+with+the+quantity+of+labor-pain%22&source=web&ots=wZ47a_tU7b&sig=FOPTR0sCWG1ZMnBN71f1ejt_DXo&hl=en">John Commons</a> observed, the disutility of labor was the cause and regulator of value. Labor's disutility created value by restricting output of reproducible goods, when the worker considered the income to be too low relative to the labor-pain entailed in production. It regulated value by shifting labor from employments where income was low relative to pain to employments where it was high relative to pain, and thus equalizing pain per unit of income. This was also the basis of Smith's critique of mercantilism and other forms of privilege. Privilege resulted in an unequal distribution of labor-pain per unit of income, and imposed pain on some for the benefit of others:
Having identified his automatic regulator of
scarcity-value with the quantity of labor-pain, Smith proceeds to inquire why it is that, upon the labor-market, the price (exchange-value) of labor does not, under existing conditions, coincide with the quantity of labor-pain delivered in exchange for the produce. All of these discrepancies we shall find to be various aspects of artificial scarcity controlled by custom, sovereignty, or other collective action, instead of regulated automatically by quantity of labor-pain.... Among these restrictions were exclusive privileges of corporations (guilds), long apprenticeship, understandings between competitors, free education at public expense, state regulation of wages, price fixing, tariffs, bounties levied in order to maintain a favorable balance of trade, and obstructing the free circulation of labor and stock [capital] by poor laws.
But even if these mercantilist interferences with liberty were eliminated, there were still two other proprietary claimants, the landlords and the capitalist employers, who, even under conditions of perfect liberty, prevented the accurate proportionment between labor-pain and wages. These other two claimants, who introduced the factor of proprietary scarcity, were examples of the Common Law of Private Property. "As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed, and demand a rent even for its natural
produce."
As most of the radical classical liberals argued, much if not most nominal "private property" in land is artificial, and thus a form of artificial scarcity created by privilege. And as individualist anarchists <a href="http://libertarian-labyrinth.blogspot.com/2005/08/mutual-banking-writings-of-william-b.html">William Greene</a> and Benjamin Tucker showed, much of the value of capital results from artificial scarcity created by the state's banking laws.
Thomas Hodgskin, writing in <a href="http://www.econlib.org/library/YPDBooks/Hodgskin/hgskPP.html">Popular Political Economy</a> of the illegitimate "property" rights of England's landed oligarchy, made the <a href="http://www.econlib.org/library/YPDBooks/Hodgskin/hgskPP11.html">crucial distinction</a> between natural and artificial rights of property. Natural property rights are simply "a man's right to the free use of his own mind and limbs, and to appropriate whatever he creates by his own labour...." Artificial rights, <a href="http://www.econlib.org/library/YPDBooks/Hodgskin/hgskPP1.html">he said</a>, are "the power of throwing the necessity to labour off [one's] own shoulders... by the appropriation of other men's produce," and "[t]he power... possessed by idle men to appropriate the produce of labourers...." [Popular Political Economy, Chs.
Artificial property rights in land--namely absentee titles to vacant and unimproved land--are paradigmatic of all privilege. Oppenheimer distinguished political appropriation of the land from actual appropriation, and Albert Jay Nock <a href="http://www.barefootsworld.net/nockoets4.html">distinguished "labour-made" from "law-made" property</a>. The same distinction in principle is made, in analogous manner, between natural and artificial property rights in all other areas. The same principle applies to patents and copyrights, business and occupational licenses, and every other form of privilege. In every case, the distinction is the same: natural property rights reflect scarcity, while artificial property rights create it; natural property rights secure the individual's right to his own labor-product, while artificial property rights entitle the holder to collect tribute on the labor-product of others; natural property rights entitle the holder to a return for his contributions to production, while artificial property rights entitle the holder to collect a toll for not impeding production.
Because of the near-universal appropriation of land, most of it vacant and unimproved land held out of use, labor's ability to create wealth for the laborer is impeded, and instead becomes a means of creating wealth for the proprietor. Artificial property rights in land give the proprietor, as a result, property rights in the labor of others
Privilege enables the holder of property rights to appropriate the productivity of nature or society for himself, and to stand in for "society" or "nature" in charging users according to their benefit from the improved land and technology that make increased productivity possible--despite the proprietor's having done nothing to provide that benefit. The "value" of the service, the price he is able to charge for access, depends entirely on its positive utility to the buyer; so he is able to follow the standard method of monopoly pricing and target his price to the buyer's ability to pay.
Proudhon, in What is Property?, quotes J. B. Say's assertion that "the land is also an instrument whose service must be paid for...," and responds:
Did [the proprietor], by the efficacious virtue of the
right of property, by this moral quality infused into the soil, endow it with vigour and fertility? The monopoly of the proprietor lies just in the fact that, though he did not make the implement, he
requires payment for its use....
The land is productive, in the sense of creating use-value; but its productive forces are freely given by nature. They can contribute to exchange value only when the free gift of nature is monopolized. The landlord's only "contribution" to value is that he sits atop the free gift of nature, without using it himself, and charges others a fee for access to it.
As Benjamin Tucker <a href="http://fair-use.org/benjamin-tucker/instead-of-a-book/economic-hodge-podge">pointed out</a>, "[w]here there is free competition in the manufacture and sale of spades, the price of a spade will be governed by the cost of its production, and not by the value of the extra potatoes which the spade will enable its purchaser to dig." Only when someone has a monopoly on the supply of spades, can he charge according to utility to the user rather than cost of production.
The normal effect of market competition is for the productivity benefits of new technology to translate directly into lower consumer prices. It is only through artificial property rights that privileged sellers can charge the consumer in proportion to his increased utility, regardless of the cost of supplying the good. Patents, for example, impede the normal process of market competition by which technological innovation translates directly into lower consumer cost.
Benjamin Tucker, in "<a href="http://praxeology.net/BT-SSA.htm">State Socialism and Anarchism</a>," argued on the same principle that opening up the supply of capital and land to free competition would result in their benefits being socialized. Likewise, eliminating patents and other barriers to the free adoption of innovations will result in the socialization of the fruits of increased productivity.
So artificial property rights enable the privileged to appropriate productivity gains for themselves, rather than allowing their benefits to be socialized through market competition. But they do more than that: they make it possible to collect tribute for the "service" of not obstructing production. As Commons observed, the alleged "service" performed by the holder of artificial property rights, in "contributing" some factor to production, is defined entirely by his ability to obstruct access to it.
Marginalist economics treats existing property rights over "factors" as a given, and then proceeds to show how the product is distributed among these "factors" according to their "marginal contribution." By this method, if slavery were still extant, a marginalist might with a straight face write of the marginal contribution of the slave to the product (imputed, of course, to the slave-owner).
By the circular reasoning of marginalist economics, forbearing to impede production is a "contribution" to production, for which "service" the holder of an artificial property right is entitled to compensation from the productive labor which he helpfully refrained from impeding. And whatever the value of this "capitalized disserviceablity," whatever the amount this tribute for not obstructing production, adds to the price of the final product, is regarded by marginalist economics as the "marginal contribution" of the privilege-holder.
Capitalism, as opposed to the free market, could not exist without artificial property rights."
Book Review
From A book review by Bill Ellis:
"THE FABLE OF L'HOMO ECONOMICUS is destroyed by Dominique Temple and Mireille Chabal in: La Réciprocité et La Naissance des Valeurs Humaines (Éditions L'Harmattan, 5-7 rue de L'école Polytechnique, F-75005 Paris FRANCE, 1995, in French).
Modern Economics and the EuroAmerican culture are based on the assumed reality of homo economicus. That is, that the only motivation of humans is material self-interest. This book examines all cultures throughout history, including our own modern culture, and demonstrates that human motivations and human values have been distorted only in the last couple of hundred years, and more vehemently in the last few decades, to become based on values which are destroying the humanity and life on Earth. Reciprocity is more fundamental and more friendly to both humans and nature.
Reciprocity is the antithesis of exchange or selling. Reciprocity, or gifting, has taken on many forms in different cultures. In some it is imbedded in religion. People produce and distribute goods and services in celebration of their spiritual beliefs. Their work is a gift to the gods, to the Earth, and to humanity, without thought of material return. In other cultures production is for the common good. That is, people see themselves imbedded in their families and communities. They exist only because of their relationships to other people and their bioregion. And these relationships depend on the productive role they play -- how much they can support and give to society. In still others, material welfare is paramount; but one gains insurance of her or his material well-being by giving to others. "To him who gives shall be given." Each person gains prestige in society by how much s/he gives. That prestige demands reciprocity to the giver and to the family of the giver. The more one impoverishes himself in betterment of the community the more the community is beholden to the giver.
This reciprocity on which almost all cultures are based is uniquely vilified by neoliberal economic theory which refuses to recognize that production and distribution can be based on anything but greed and exchange -- giving up something only to gain something else. This distorted economic theory of exchange goes well beyond just the market. Economic reasoning has invaded sociology, education, politics, ethics and the law. Homo Economicus is believed to base all values and judgments on economic exchange values, what one can gain materially. It is only in this distorted Western society that reciprocity has been subjugated to the concept of exchange.
Bronislaw Malinowski, Claude Levi-Straus, Marcel Mauss, Marshall Sahlins and other anthropologists have shown the deep roots of reciprocity; Aristotle, Homer, Hobbes, and other political philosophers trace reciprocity from the Greeks as the base of our Western society; and Hegel, Adam Smith, Durkheim and Polanyi and other economists, describe reciprocity's relevance to the age we are in. But it's the future which really concerns Temple and Chabal. Money, exchange, and globalism have replaced the human values inherent in reciprocity with motivations which are leading to social, ecological, economic and political destruction. Reciprocity exists deep in ourselves, our families, and our communities; but it is suppressed by our belief system and its resulting social institutions. We see reciprocity in President Bush's thousand points of light, in the burgeoning NGOs around the world, in volunteerism, in our familles, in our communities, and in many grassroots social innovations. Our future can be assured only if we release this constructive force of reciprocity.
Or as the authors end this book, "Si l'esclave veut etre libre, il ne lui faut pas seulement différer la mort, mais dominer sa propre vie par le souce de celle d'autrui, maitriser la vie avant qu'elle ne le condamne a mort." (http://futurepositive.synearth.net/stories/storyReader$223)