Exchange

Typology

by Geoffrey Holsclaw:

"Relying on the work of the French sociologists Marcel Mauss and Jean Baudrillard, Chauvet outlines the different levels of value and exchange that are governed by the overarching distinction between value and non-value. Beyond “use,” “exchange,” and “sign” value, all of which occur within the logic of the marketplace in the form either of barter or exchange via money, is the non-value of symbolic exchange. In this exchange, the gift functions outside the logic of the market such that what is being exchanged are not objects, but rather, through the gift of yams, shells, spears, books, or a rose, “the true objects being exchanged are the subjects themselves” in a process of mutual recognition. Because every giving of a gift creates a relationship, it follows that every gift obligates the receiver to give a return-gift, minimally as a thank you, in order to complete the symbolic exchange, otherwise the relationship expressed would descend into that of the marketplace. Therefore, symbolic exchange, as the generation of subjects and the mediation of relationships, can be summarized as the process of gift–reception–return-gift.

For Chauvet, this symbolic exchange within the symbolic order is the proper arena for discussing God’s grace because from the beginning it situates grace within the realm of non-value. The non-value of grace is seen in its graciousness (freely give) and gratuitousness (abundantly give) because it can never become the “object of a calculation, of a price, of haggling” and because grace “can in no way be demanded” and “we can in no way justify” it. Theologically, graciousness and gratuitousness belong not only to the initial gift, but also to the entire process of gift–reception–return-gift, such that “even the return-gift of our human response thus belongs to the theologically Christian concept of ‘grace.’” This return-gift is vital in constituting and verifying a true relationship between God and humanity, and as we will see, for overturning the money changers’ tables.

Modes of Exchange and the Capitalist Nation-State

Now, keeping Chauvet’s theological appropriation of symbolic exchange in mind, I turn to Kojin Karatani’s account of the market economy and its various irreducible, yet interrelated, modes of exchange. Karatani distinguishes these different modes of exchange precisely to show how they combine into the formidable trinity of the capitalist nation-state.

The first mode of exchange consists in the reciprocity of gift and return occurring within agrarian communities. This mode is based on the principles of mutual aid and reciprocal exchange. It is rooted in the functional exchange within families, which is called love, that is extended to the local community according to its own communal rules. This mode of exchange is very similar to, if not synonymous with, Chauvet’s symbolic exchange.

The second mode of exchange, rather than being within a single community, is between several communities and is in the form of robbery and redistribution, or plunder and protection. A feudal lord’s taxation of local communities, for example, represents this type of exchange. This is a mode of exchange because, if a feudal lord hopes to keep plundering a community in the form of extortion or taxation, then he must also protect the community from other plunderers. Also, the feudal lord must restrict the amount of robbery to a level where the peasants can actually survive, and indeed, he needs to make provisions for the agrarian community so that it will survive. These provisions come in the form of a redistribution of funds, in the guise of public works. According to Karatani’s analysis, what initially occurred in the form of plundering transformed into a system of taxation, and the peasant’s compulsion to pay the feudal lord morphed into an obligation or duty in return for the protection and public works the feudal lord provides. With time, what began as extortion became a national tax, and the feudal lord’s personal local armies and local bureaucracy eventually became state functions. This mode of exchange is the basis for the emergence of the state. The matrix of the modern nation-state emerges from a combining of these first two types of exchanges.

The third mode of exchange is commodity exchange between communities via money, ultimately blossoming into capitalism. This commodity exchange is “definitively different from the exchange of plunder/redistribution” and is irreducible to that of reciprocity and return, even though it could not exist without either of them. The exchange of commodities via money occurs through mutual consent established by contract, creating an asymmetrical relationship between commodities and money that privileges money. This asymmetry of money will be discussed, but it is enough to say that money allowed for trade between communities outside of the type of exchange established through the plunder/redistribution by feudal lords, even if the former is dependent on the latter. It is dependent because if the contracts of mutual consent established between parties are to be valid, they must be enforced under threat of violence, a violence only held by feudal lords, and then later by the state. Commodity exchange is also dependent on agrarian communities for the production of the land and the perpetuation of labor through biological reproduction, both of which occur outside the realm of value according to market exchanges.

Between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, the emerging monarchies conspired with the merchants to topple local feudal lords, even while they sought to foster national identity, both for the sake of consolidating power for the monarch and creating a homogeneous market for the merchants. Since this point in history, each mode of exchange began mutually reinforcing the others, creating the formidable trinity of the capitalist nation-state, impervious to attack. This makes it relatively impossible to undermine only one aspect of this unholy trinity of capital, nation, and state, for

when individual national economies are threatened by the global market (neoliberalism), they demand the protection (redistribution) of the state and/or bloc economy, at the same time as appealing to national cultural identity. So it is that any counteraction to capital must also be one targeted against the state and nation.

For Karatani, unless we truly understand how the exploitative trinity of the capitalist nation-state was formed and sustained, we will never truly know how it might be decomposed, a decomposition occurring at the site of the circulation of money rather than production of commodities.” (http://www.theotherjournal.com/article.php?id=978)

Discussion

A critique of exchange from Genevieve Vaughan in her book For-Giving.

From http://www.for-giving.com/fg2/fg2.htm :

"By satisfying the needs of the infants who are dependent upon them, mothers actually form the bodies of the people who are, and live together in, the community. They also care for and maintain the implements, houses and locations where the community interactions take place. We communicate with each other through our gifts of goods, through co-munication. Each gift carries with it something of the thought process and values of the giver and affirms the value of the receiver. In fact, goods and services that are given freely to satisfy needs give value to the receiver by implication.2

Exchange, on the other hand, is self-reflecting. It requires attention to be concentrated on equivalence between the products, and the value that might have been given to the other person instead returns to the giver in the satisfaction of her own need. In exchange, the satisfaction of the need of the other is only a means to the satisfaction of one's own need. When everyone is doing this, the co-munication that occurs is altered and only succeeds in creating a group of isolated, unbonded, independent egos, not a co-munity.

In their isolation, these egos tend to develop new artificial needs for nurturing and bonding and use domination to procure for themselves the sense of community and identity they lack, forcing others to nurture them. They use everything from personal violence to manipulation of abstract systems to achieve the satisfaction of their needs, satisfaction which they are no longer receiving from participating directly in gift interactions.

Abstract systems of laws and hierarchical organizations like the government and the military are delivery systems for gifts, taking them away from the needs of the many in the community and directing them towards the needs of special groups of exchangers who have been socialized with an ego hungry to have 'more.'

While we may be grateful to the exchangers (entrepreneurs) for creating jobs, we should realize that the jobs are ways of getting for the entrepreneur what Karl Marx called 'surplus value'--what we could call a free gift of labor time given by the worker. In order to survive, the worker also has to receive many free gifts from his or her nurturers. Gifts are distributed from the bottom up in the hierarchy, from the poor to the rich, from giftgivers to exchangers, while it looks as if the flow is going in the other direction.

The interaction of exchange itself has seemed so natural that it would not require investigation. However, it is actually artificial, deriving from a misuse of co-munication. If we no longer consider exchange natural or one of the mainstays of reality, we can stop considering our participation in it as the criterion of our worth." (http://www.for-giving.com/fg2/fg2.htm)