ACFM - ACFM Trip 30: Gifts

Episode Date: December 18, 2022

Adam Smith claimed that “the propensity to truck, barter and exchange… is common to all men”, but anthropologists know that this isn’t the case. In fact, humans tend towards the opposite. So why do we feel compelled to give away our wealth? Nadia, Jem and Keir unwrap the cultural and economic pressures on doing pressies […]

Hello, dear listeners and welcome back to the final ACFM of the year. This is producer Matt with a little gift from us to you. If you're listening with children in the room, well done for getting them started early. However, do be aware that around 22 minutes in, Nadia Keir and Jeremy discuss a big man with a red coat and a fluffy white beard. The information contained within may not be something you want to share with those young ears, so please be aware of that. While I'm here, just a reminder, we've got a rolling playlist. featuring all the music discussed on the show. You can find the link for that in the show notes.

We have a semi-regular mailing list where we send out bonus bits as and when they come to us. For the dedicated fans in the Navar Media Shop, we have beautiful enamel ACFM pin badges. Stick them on your lapel, sticking on your badge. Show other people out in the open

that you too are a follower of ACFM. And remember if you listen to SoundCloud, you will be getting the heroic dose of ACFM. That means more music. music and audio colleges for the full Technicolor 360 trip. However, if you're listening elsewhere, don't worry, you're still getting all of that neat, sweet conversation from Jeremy Kier and Nadia. Okay, on with the show. Welcome to ACFM, the home of the weird left.

I'm Nadia Idol, and as usual, I'm joined by Jeremy Gilbert. Hello. And Keir Milburn. Hello. And today we're talking about gifts. So, guys, this is a pretty festive topic. I think this was yours, Kea. Do you want to tell us a little bit about why you wanted to chat about gifts on the podcast?

Because Christmas is coming up, of course. and I like to receive gifts and grudgingly give them. No, I actually enjoy giving them as well. But, you know, Christmas is a good excuse to talk about gift giving and what it means. Because on the surface of it, it seems as though giving gifts to people, it sort of seems as though it breaks with the sort of economics and mentality of capitalism. Although, of course, Christmas in particular is this huge extravaganza of consumerism. So there seems to be a contradiction there.

There's also lots of interesting theories, anthropological studies, about what gifts are, which might help us change our minds in it. So it seems like a really interesting topic and obviously timely. What about you, Jeremy? Yeah, well, there's a lot to say about the idea of giving and the idea of the gift. As Keir said, there's a lot of philosophical investigation which is sort of preceded from some of the anthropological studies of gift giving, which are really sort of central to the development of anthropological theory in the 20th century and they raise all kinds of interesting questions about the nature of exchange and the way just the idea of gift and giving and the given sort of functions even in like everyday language i think is always really interesting to think

about yeah i guess i'm really interested in that bit as well like how it functions in contemporary society. And I guess another thing that would be interesting to think about specifically is having mentioned capitalism, like how the experience of gift giving and gift receiving is different under kind of late capitalism. So like are the particular pressures that are associated, which we know that there are, with giving gifts and whether capitalism has properly co-opted the experience of gift giving at a time like Christmas, where the question for me then is, is it more anxiety inducing than it is pleasurable? Like, has capitalism also taken that away from us? Or does the experience of this mass gift giving around Christmas actually end up producing an affect that

sits outside capitalism? And what capitalism would like to do about that? So that's some of the interesting reasons why I would like to talk about gifts. I mean, the other way into this is to think about, I would just start with our own sort of gift-giving practices. I very much remember a gift of cheese from Jeremy June the start of COVID, which I very, very much appreciated. And I reciprocated by the gift of chocolate to both of you, actually, I think, if I remember rightly, some Argentinian chocolates. And yeah, so you can see sort of like, you know, this, how gift-giving fits into, you know, developing friendships and social bonds and these sorts of things. But, of course, the other thing to talk about at the moment is Christmas. And I think it's an interesting angle,

actually, Nad, the other thing you said about, is it pleasurable or anxiety producing? And that probably changes depending on how much money you've got, on whether you feel poorer than the people you're exchanging gifts with, for instance, because that I imagine can produce huge amounts of anxiety. Obviously, parents having huge amounts of anxiety, but not being able to give their kids, the sorts of gifts that ever, ever kids are getting, etc., you know, that's this huge huge reservoir of not just like anxiety, but like anxiety is rooted in social shame, which like would give us, get us somewhere, I think, towards thinking about what seems like a simple thing gift giving is actually quite complicated embedded in all sorts of economic and psychological

and basically socially produced dynamics, I think. My family's really into Christmas. On my mum's side of the family has always really, really, really been into Christmas and, like, you know, ridiculously into giving gifts. And I think it's because my mum's family was quite poor when she was a kid, when she was young, because my granddad died very early, very young, I mean, so they didn't have much money, but they were quite a big family of five siblings. They were part of a bigger extended family with 13 siblings, my great grandmother,

had 13 children, so she had many grandchildren and great-grandchildren, et cetera. And so there was this quite a weird, complex web of family relationships that my mum and dad had to sort of navigate in terms of gift giving. But the long and the short of it was that that whole side of the family was really into gift giving when they were younger, like homemade gifts to a large extent because they didn't have that much money. Compared to my dad's side of the family, where Christmas wasn't such a big, big thing.

A New Year was a slightly bigger thing because there were some Scottish parts of that family. Does that resonate with you two? I come from, I guess, quite a generous, but not particularly occasional, occasion-based gift-giving family. So, yeah, I don't come from a Christmas celebrating family. I didn't grow up in a Christian culture.

And I'm not sure that my family is particularly typical of Egypt in any way, I guess we're quite a secular family, in a way. We're probably quite an anti-ritual family more than other people, I guess. So in terms of gift-giving when I was a child, I do remember specifically for Aide, for the first Eid, for the small Aid, getting crisp notes, which is a thing, that you get money, but you get new money. And maybe there's something there, which I haven't done enough research on about it not being an hand-me-down or not being money that has been used by other people. So you get these crisp notes. Now, they might only be like one pound or two pounds or whatever. But it was quite underplayed in my family anyway. So I have nothing like

your experience, Keir, of like the occasion where everybody exchanges presents. I certainly don't have that with Christmas. I do now, I guess, because I live in the UK and I love Christmas. And I love giving gifts. I have to say more than receiving them. How great, because I enjoy receiving them. This is a magical circle between us we lick the plate clean. You're not the first person to react in that sort of way when I said this. But I think it's because there is also a superstition thing, which I definitely grew up with,

which is that if something good happens to you, it's your job to share it around. So I feel better. I guess that tugs on like something that I was brought up with, that if something good happens or if I want good to continue to happen to me, I have to give things away. And having said that, though, like I love token gifts. And I do love it when somebody gives me something, which I feel is very specific to me.

So if somebody gives me something and I think, wow, you've really thought about that, then I find that really moving. And I like to do the same. I just find the pressure of, oh, I have to think about these things. for these people around Christmas, I find that quite stressful. I much prefer going about the year. And then if I see something, I think, oh, this person would really like that. I've been from other waves of that where you sort of build up these people who buy your Christmas

presents, so you have to buy them back, and that sort of obligation thing that goes on. And that really does cut against this, what you were saying, Nadia, the sort of, like, personalized present, the sort of, like, the ideal present is to buy somebody something that they didn't actually think that they wanted, and then they realized. they did want it. If you're buying presents on an industrial scale, that doesn't happen. It becomes much more of a sort of calculated. Is this roughly in the right amount of money to spend on this person? Is it too much or is it too little? That's sort of what you fall into when you've got this huge web of people that you have to reciprocate to. So already we're building

up this sort of picture of gift giving with words such as reciprocation and obligation and that sort of stuff, which basically sallies the more pure idea of a gift, which I think you capture an idea with this idea that what you're trying to think is, you're trying to get something which really, really suits that person. And of course, you can do that through the year if you haven't got like 50, 34 or 50 people to sort of buy presents for it. Well, the first track we should definitely play is the gift by the Velvet Underground, which is a very unusual, sort of spoken word track from white light white heat their second album their most probably their most experimental album and i've always liked the idea of sort of instrumental rock was spoken word over

it i think it's an entire genre of music that could have happened and didn't uh and the gift is a pretty exemplary uh you've really got to listen to the whole thing because the whole thing it's basically a short story involving something strange being sent in the mail and it's not very Christmas City. But there you go, the gift of Old Underground, 1968. Waldo Jeffers had reached his limit. It was now mid-August, which meant he had been separated from Marsha for more than two months. Two months, while he had to show with three doggie letters and two very expensive long-distance phone calls. True and school had ended and she returned to Wisconsin to the two locust, Pennsylvania. She had sworn to maintain a certain

fidelity. She would date occasionally, but merely as a result. Can I just ask another question to you guys about whether there is a specificity around, like if there's a different culture in your families, around the gift necessarily being a thing as opposed to an experience or something to eat? No, I don't think so. I don't think those things are necessarily devalued. Right, okay.

The permanent status of the object doesn't have any particular. People often get each other nice things to eat. They wouldn't get each other. They wouldn't get normally. I think if anything, that's like, you know, it's a way of signifying that you're sort of indul, you know, it's a way of signifying to the other person that you want them to just have some sort of pure enjoyment rather than utility out of it. Arguably that is part of the ideal of the gift, that it should be something that generates

pure enjoyment rather than necessarily having utility. I know that's the case that certainly like my kids have this quite demarcated attitude that if it's a utilitarian object like a bike or something then they shouldn't that shouldn't be a Christmas present that should be something they just get anyway. I mean it's partly because they're spoiled like middle class kids. But within that economy yeah there is there's a sort of demarcation between utility and luxury I think. This is partly wife the socks as a gift have this kind of comedic status in the culture because they're just because they're just you know they're the most utilitarian imaginable thing but then of course there's also a set of like comedy tragedies or cultural moments or like in media around the

husband giving the wife something super utilitarian like a hoover or a new iron which and that obviously has is something that you laugh about. about because of the gender bias that is associated with. Is that not acceptable? What have you got? I'm just going to go through my return policy on this. I am, of course, only joking. I haven't bought Alice a new...

The new Dyson's really good, though. I'd be quite happy with one of those. When you're an adult, you know, if you've got, you know, not loads of money, but enough money, you tend to buy, you know, stuff that you want, you know what I mean? So then you're trying to, and especially when you've been in a relationship with somebody for a long, long time and you've bought gifts for them for several decades, you know, you're stuck on this thing off like, well, they got everything I would buy them normally for what you'd get them. I got me and Alice got into this cycle of buying each other experiences to go back to that question. Nadia. If I thought, actually it was May bought me a Zorbing experience. So Zorbing is when you get strapped into a giant plastic ball and rolled down a hill. It's excellent. I would love that if anybody wants to buy it. That's amazing. The Sorbonne experience was horrific.

I can imagine it sounds bad. You want to like trap yourself to a giant ball and roll down a hill. Well, it was me and May getting strapped into a giant ball. Were you in the same ball? Inside the ball? Inside the ball. Inside. Inside. Outside it would be suicidal. I was imagining you like outside the ball. Well, there's two...

With like a crash helmet. Why is it's pissing it down with rain? Well, there are two versions, because one version is you're not strapped in inside the ball, but there's lots of waters, so the ball rolls round, but you sort of stay at the middle and the bottom. Well, like you're in the amniotic fluid of the wound. Basically. Yeah, yeah. I've not tried that rebirthing experience.

Like a float. A float, a float, a flotation tank float. At a 45 degree angle. Yeah, exactly. A floatation tank. travelling down a hill at many miles an hour. This one was me and May to get strapped in and she was quite young,

so she totally bottled it and had to persuade her in. And as soon as it got, it was really violent, incredibly violent, because you're thrown against your straps all the time, every rotation. So May was screaming and crying her eyes out. It was one of those gifts which seems like a good idea. But you didn't forget it.

No, no, no. No, no. Amazing. Me and my therapist, yeah. Okay, let's go back to the improving gift for a minute, though, because I think you said something really interesting, Jeremy. And I was wondering whether the improving gift also could not be understood in a, you know, patronizing way by the receiver if there's a kind of relationship of mentorship.

So if you are like the older sibling or if you are, you know, maybe, I don't know, like somebody that you have a relationship of like learning and teaching from, and they give you, you know, a book or a text or an experience or something and they think that this, you know, this is going to be good for you. I'd imagine that there are situations where that is seen as like, oh, that's lovely. Whereas in other situations, be like, what are you saying, basically? Depending on the relationship, are you saying that, you know, I'm ignorant or I need to learn, etc. That will depend on the relationship. I'd imagine, what do you think about that? Surely the best sorts of improving gifts are when you want to improve somebody in the

direction of your own interests. And if it's just lying about the house, well, you may as well use it as well. But isn't that like every single socialist who's going to give someone the, you know, the communist manifesto or something for Christmas, be like, read this. Yeah.

In my example, it would be the new comic version of the new graphic novel of Capital or something like that, which I'd quite like that. like to read, but now I can get it as a gift for somebody else and read it on the sly. We said we'd play some Christmas songs on this episode, and my one contribution to our Christmas song list is Lee Scratch Perry. Merry Christmas. Happy New Year. Lee Scratch Perry, the great genius of Jamaican dub. And to my knowledge, this is his one Christmas song. Merry Christmas, happy new year.

Oh, my baby. Merry Christmas. Happy new year. The thing that is obviously a feature, a really weird, a really weird feature of a day. Christmas giving culture, like in contemporary Western culture is this whole mythology, this whole kind of live action role-playing game of Santa Claus, the idea of Santa as the person who brings the presents for kids. And it's amazing how ubiquitous it is. I don't know, did you do that here when May was little? Oh yeah, absolutely. I mean, we left out a mince pie

for Santa and a little bit of carrot. Yeah, yeah. Rudolph. Yeah, everyone does that. We had to bite I take a bite out of the mince pie and a bite out of the carrot. Did you? I just had to eat them both. I think we had to leave a little bit. Does Santa not eat a whole mint pie? Well, he's got a lot of mince pie to get through.

That's, but by the time they're old enough. By the time they're old enough for that to be an issue. It's like the curtain is closing on them. But it's just, it's just great, like I was incredibly surprised. I know that people exist who don't do it on sort of good secular humanist rationalist ground but I didn't I haven't met any in my own life like I knew when I was a kid

I sort of knew people who knew people in which they didn't do Santa in their family and it was associated with being like a radical atheist or you know maybe a communist or something but my own growing up my own like raising of kids like I haven't met anyone who doesn't do it it's kind of incredible I don't remember when they was young

I used to have this thing when I try to answer a question as fully as I could. And so, like, you know, lying to was quite a rare experience. And then, like, Santa was this noticeable thing where you would, where it was social convention to produce this lie, which would gradually be revealed.

Like, basically, when the child sort of suspect Santa doesn't exist, they were not meant to, they went to play along and not, not reveal that, basically. So it's an odd thing, in it? Well, it's a game. I think the thing is, my conceptual isolation of it is, it's a game. Like if you just think of it as a lie, then it becomes quite sinister.

Okay. But I think it's a game. Just a larp. We're laughing. It's a game, but it is a game that the child doesn't know he's a game at a certain, until a certain age. But why is it? Why this compulsion to attribute the giving of the gifts to this mythological figure? Because I think it's important to externalise the responsibility of whether you've been good or you haven't been good to someone who is not the parent in the household. It's the externalised super ego. It is. But that idea, the idea of like the child being punished for bad behavior by not

receiving gifts, I'm just not sure that, that again, like everybody knows that doesn't really happen. I'm sure it does somewhere, though. I don't know. I don't know. I mean, maybe it did at one time, but I'm not sure. I think the idea that it did at one time might be part of the mythology. I don't know.

But maybe it's at least a way of, you know, you know, know, getting the child to fall in line with all the things you want it to do for the whole of December at the very least, because the child wants to receive the gifts. It does have a, yeah, it has that sort of disciplinary function. It's true. It's a good point. And it is one of those, I have to say as a parent, it is one of those not growing up with any sort of theistical mythology at all to kind of, as a way of framing, like the reasons

for good behavior and a way for thinking about good behavior and sort of selfless behavior. It is itself, it is quite challenging. I also think, though, that part of why parents do it, to take us back to a recent episode of ACFM, is, you know, to create a little sense of an enchanted world to try and keep this sort of like enchanted element of the year special for the kids. It's not wanting to acknowledge that what's going on is intensified commodity exchange.

Yeah, yeah. Isn't it? That's not what you said to me when she, asked the question, did she? No, that would have been what... Intensified, commodifying. About most other things, I probably would have said that. But, you know, Santa for some reason I wanted to go along with.

Is it because you look well dapper in a Santa outfit? Well, the tradition of our family was always that there'd be loads of presents under the tree and then whoever was giving out the presents would put a Santa hat on. No, the other Santa tradition was that we'd have to. wait until the kids were sleeping and then sneaking, take their empty stockings and replace them with the full ones. And like, all the adults get stockings. Everyone does that. You're always, you keep saying, we did this stuff, we did this stuff. And it's like, I just, it's the, there may be people, I'm sure there's lots of variations on

that practice, but every family I've named, that's what they do. Well, my most, what's some of my most distinct childhood memories are waking up on Christmas morning and then going and feeling around to see if the stocking was full or not. So I might wake up at like half past 11 at night and the stock is still empty. And as soon as the stockings fall, it's like the excitement gets. Wow. Okay, that's intense. Right.

Anyway, we're getting into, we're getting into granular Christmas. And I think one day we're going to do. I know, but I'm getting excited. I know. I think one day we're going to do an episode about just Christmas. So I'll probably save my funny Santa stories for that. Yeah, so we're talking about Santa and why, like, the function of Santa. Yeah, well, exactly. Yeah, I think it's interesting, isn't it? If you think about this in terms of commodity fetishism, I mean, the basic Marxian analysis of commodity fetishism is that it's the process by which commodities themselves, the objects themselves, come to take on a kind of magical quality and the imagination of the consumer in a capitalist society. And the capitalist consumer is distracted from the fact that, in fact, those commodities are still the product of social relations and social activity and labour.

as they would have been in a pre-capitalist society. And in some sense, the mythology of Santa and his elves and his workshop, like bringing the objects personally, it's a sort of phantasmatic deconstruction or a sort of treatment for commodity fetishism. Like it's a mythicized de-fetitization of the commodities because it involves a whole story about where the stuff comes from rather than the stuff just coming from Amazon or coming from the shop or something. And it sort of mythologically humanises the problem.

process of making the stuff and bringing the stuff. So there is something going on there, and I think it relates to something I've said lots of times before, I think I've said it on the show before, probably, that within Anglo-Saxon culture, like one of the points of resistance to the complete subsumption of the culture by capitalism is even on the part of people on the political right, even on the people on the part of people who are conservative or quite neoliberal, is this just intuitive sense. You have to protect children from capitalism and capitalist social relations, if they're just fully exposed to it

and unprotected from it, and they're not trained ethically to operate according to different norms before they become fully exposed to it, then they'll just become totally psychotic. And I think there is something going on there with Santa as a sort of myth which serves to, it tries to,

at an imaginative level, it tries to protect children from the kind of brutal anonymity of capitalist commodity exchange. And, you know, a similar interesting thing that's come to mind when you were saying that, Jeremy, is also the use of Santa's workshop as a kind of image by workers' rights campaigners as well, because for the same reason, because Santa and the elves and the workshop is actually something that

you can imagine, where the elves are actually making the gifts, that's usually used as a metaphor for, you know, like the importance of workers' rights and what happens if the elves go on strike, etc., etc., etc. I also wonder, I mean, sometimes, I suspect that there's something as well with Santa though about the fact that the excessive generosity that's displayed at Christmas, the excess of giving at Christmas also has to be depersonalized or has to be displaced onto another figure. Because, I mean, one of the things I wanted to think about today is, I've had a bit of a thing ever since I was a kid about the fact that I think Anglo-Saxon, to capitalist, Protestant culture in particular, and sort of middle class was

petty bourgeois culture historically is historically very unusual for being a culture within which generosity is generally frowned upon in most cultures like at every level of society from from the beginning of like human society that we know of have just it's naturally assumed that being generous and hospitable towards others whoever they are is obviously an ethical good and is a moral good and is something that should be encouraged. And, you know, one of the features of capitalist, proselyton cultures since the 17th century is this idea that actually, you know, frugality, like looking after your own, harboring your resources, like nurturing your investments, that's the good thing.

And so you can't, to some extent, you know, the bourgeois parent who's giving loads of gifts, like to their kid, for no other reason that they're nice things to have, is sort of breaking with those norms. And I think it's probably significant that Santa really, emerges as a cultural myth, precisely in the period between the wars, really, which is precisely the moment historically when the modern consumer economy is emerging out of the previous iteration of industrial capitalism, wherein which most people had to practice austerity because it was forced upon them by low wages and expensive consumer goods. And you're moving into a society in which actually it's going to be more and more the case that society can only keep going

if people buy more and more stuff and if people at most levels of society buy more and more stuff. And so there's this tension between this historic austerity preached by everybody from the Puritans to the Victorian moralists and this new world in which

actually everybody has to buy stuff and capitalism needs us to buy stuff. To some extent, the fantasy of Santa, I think is like resolving that tension or it's a way of containing that tension. I mean, the other way to look at that, which you might have been arguing slightly as well, I think, is, you know,

that world, that sort of like, that ascetic, Protestant world without, like, gift-giving, without love, basically, without solidarity. It's just basically not a world that people want to live in. So, you know, basically capitalism has to colonise these things that people won't knuckle down to basically. They want to do gift-giving. They want to feel themselves within this web of social bonds, et cetera, et cetera. And that's also related to, you know, the Protestant things.

about earning. And what gifting is supposed to be is you're not earning this. It's not something that you've earned. Right? And that's why it's really, that's why it sits I think that's right to frame it as outside. Yeah, but the idea of Santa rewarding the good children makes it

something they've earned. Yeah, that's a good point. It makes it something you've earned. Oh yeah, actually. Oh, you should have really harsh my Christmas buzz now. We've ruined it. My favourite Christmas song is Felice Navidad by Elvez. So Elvez is a Mexican-American version of Elvis, basically, Elves. He's great. You should check him out.

He's got great politics. The other thing we could play is Felice Navinada, which is a mashup of Felis Navidad by Elvese and a song by Pill. we have been talking quite a lot about Christmas actually we should talk about other occasions when we give gifts and perhaps in sort of non-Christian cultures of occasions in which we give gifts because obviously there's birthday gifts

but like there's wedding gifts as well presume those are sort of with the idea that you want to help help people start off in life or is it a do you give the wedding gift and in reciprocation you get the wedding meal I'm not sure

yeah I mean the wedding gift is like the most formalised and institutionalised form of gift giving today isn't it people have those lists and you just go to the shop and I'm sure that everybody listening to ACFM

is going to be just shocked to hear me like Jeremy Gilbert say I find the wedding industry kind of distasteful but like on that bombshell it seems kind of

yeah it is well it is that isn't it it's this sort of historically is this idea that you give the new couple the penniless new couple stuff to start their home but it's become completely bizarre because the middle class norm

has become you only get married when you've got loads of money so you can afford you can afford the house and the mortgage and stuff so it seems completely gratuitous that the people are then expecting people to buy them like a blender and a TV and stuff. But it depends on who is supposed to front up the cash to make the marriage happen in the first place because, I mean, I'm not sure how it works in the UK, but actually I don't

know anything about this, you guys can tell me, but like, isn't it like the parents of the bride or the groom that kind of pays for the entire wedding or then pays for getting all of the stuff? And if they can't, if they can't in the modern day, then it's pushed down to the guests effectively, right? That's what's happened. Yeah, I think that's true. Some sort of socialised dowry, I like it, yes. Yeah, exactly.

That's another thing anthropologists talk about, isn't it? There are cultures where almost all cultures have some norm around one, around the parents of one or the other of the heterosexual marrying couple, giving a large donation to somebody. But in one set of traditions, it's the dowry. of the woman who have to cough up the money in some form. And then in others, it's the bride price. It's the parents of the groom have to basically buy the bride from her family.

Exactly. So, you know, it's all, in a lot of cases, it's all an extension of, you know, the woman being the object that is exchanged, right? And what's related to that. Yes. Yeah, it's true. But it's not just occasions that are, let's go back and talk about some of the other kind of cyclical events

because Christmas is a cyclical event like it's something that comes every year round right and like so so is Aide so is the same and the big Eid there's two Aides the big the first reed is kind of the in my experience in Egypt at least the crisp bank

notes and new clothes for the kids reeds but then there's the second which involves giving away like a 2.5% of all of your wealth every year very mathematical, Zacquette, Zaka, or Zaka or whatever, which is like a very, again, like a very specified thing and that comes round like every year and it has a certain social function.

And then there are the kind of so-called one in a lifetime events like kind of weddings. And then there are the birthdays, which are also, you know, come around every year. But I would assume that with most people, birthdays matter more when you're younger. Maybe not in Kyr's family, but like, or whether about. birthdays matter at all, they don't really that much in the Middle East compared to other places unless you've been westernised. But what sorts of events or what sorts of moments, maybe things like, you know, graduation or like marking moments in your life when you might receive gifts? Or also, like having a baby, stuff like that. Well, again, there's an, I guess there's an interesting

distinction between those ones like the baby shower or the wedding gift, which are some sort of inheritance from even pre-capitalist societies where people would, the community had to make some material provision for the family. And then there's others that are just complete inventions. The best one is like Father's Day. Father's Day is just completely invented by hallmark cards in the United States in the 20th century. It's absolutely, there's... Thank God for that, I should. More socks. Socks twice a year. Well, I do, the thing, it's kind of, well, it's funny.

Well, I do, like, I've tried to protest against it. Like, I just don't, I'm not, I get enough presents in the year. Like, I don't feel any need for it. But the kids love it. The kids sort of love the sense of occasion. And also, it doesn't, it's interesting because it does, for there to be a mother's day, not a father's day, for the to the kids, doesn't seem to fit at all with the whole kind of liberal, feminist, egalitarian norms of their culture.

So it, so it would, so it seems to them really natural. or I guess I still have a really a sort of residual memory of the sense that you know the mother as the housewife had to be like specifically rewarded for her perpetual subjugation

whereas the dad didn't really seem to need that I mean the other thing that goes along with all of this so that baby shower made me think of this is the tradition of of gifting your baby clothes passing your baby clothes on to people who've got younger children, you know, it makes sense because you basically, because they're

grown at such a rate that, you know, the clothes aren't used enough, basically, they're not worn through or anything like that. But underneath all of this calendar or event-based giving, gift giving, is the more everyday practice of gifting, either time, attention, or perhaps money, etc., with the expectation that you, that that will be reciprocated in a time of need or something like that, you know what I mean? And then that helps you get at this idea of gifts as something through which bonds of solidarity are sort of formed. Even like bonds of social security, you'd probably put it that way, perhaps. Yeah, let's come back to that idea about gift giving as forming bonds of solidarity and talk about the sort of more mystifying, mystificatory aspects of gift giving

perhaps. Or more enchanted, depending how you look at it. Ah, nice, yeah, yeah. I like this idea. We've started using concepts around enchantment more since we talked about it and I like it. I think it works as a frame as opposed to magic like not magic. Yeah, no, exactly. Christmas, the whole function of Christmas is just to deliberately collectively enchant what would otherwise be the shittest time of the year. And I like that. That's the great thing about it. We've all agreed we're going to participate in this set of rituals and practices, which are going to make what would otherwise be the shitter's few weeks of the year. That's really fun. I find a lot of these practices confusing in the UK. Like, even though I've been here for 20 years, I think it's more me than it is

kind of my cultural indoctrination, but I don't feel necessarily responsible to return a gift if someone gave me one. But I think that's a personality thing mostly. But if I was invited round to somebody's house and it involved food, that is where I would feel I should bring something with me. There's a common phraseology around that in Arabic. Like, you can't go in with empty hands is a thing if you're invited for dinner. But what I also wanted to talk about is a little bit about where the gift sits in terms of superstition and how that works, perhaps works, around a form of redistribution. So definitely in Egypt and possibly in other places in the Middle East,

if something good happens to you, then you should give gifts. So an example of this, which would be most starkly different to the UK, is that if you pass your exams or you've got the new job or the good thing has happened to you, then you're buying the round. whereas it's the opposite here in the UK. So if something good happens to you, people will buy you around. And the way I think it works in definitely in Egyptian culture and a lot of Middle Eastern culture is that if something happens to you, you want to keep the evil eye away from you

because people might be jealous of you because the good thing has happened to you. Therefore, you immediately need to give part of that goodness away. So the gift there fulfills a function of redistribute. to keep away the jealousy that might give you a hard time in your new role or in your new future, because that is socially seen as like a really difficult thing that you have to get rid of. You have to move the jealousy away. Does that make sense? Yeah, yeah. I was just about to say that, you know, the point about if you're the one that something good happens to, you're supposed to buy the gifts, that if you come into money, I think you, like, what would not,

what would quite often be said, perhaps half jokingly, oh, great, next round's on you sort of thing, which made me think about the tradition of buying rounds in pubs, etc, where everybody who sat around a particular table or you've gone out with, you know, you'll take it in turns to buy drinks for everybody. That can be a sort of ruinous sort of gift giving because it depends how big the party is, you might have to stay for like 10 rounds of drinks or something if there's a big party and you want everything to be equitable and all that sort of stuff. But so, like, yeah, there are like those little sort of traditions or practices such as buying a round of drinks, which is about like basically, it's not gift given exactly, but it definitely is in that,

you know, it is expected to be reciprocated, although it is actually acceptable to say, oh, thanks, I've had nine beers now. I'm not going to help but if you can even speak. Yeah. But even so just to finish on that, okay, maybe take it away from the round. So don't think about it as like the round because you're right. The round is a very specific thing. which fulfills also it's about social control and about drinking and the role of drinking as well

and everyone kind of going down together or going up together, which I think we could even do a whole episode on itself. But it's the idea that you're buying the drinks. You are the one who is putting money into the thing now because something happened to you and the expectation being on you because the good thing has happened to you. That doesn't exist. in Western culture in the same way that it does in the Middle East. So this could be something like the idea of buying holiday gifts,

etc. So if you've been on holiday, you'll buy a little trinket to bring back. Particularly like with a parent or kids, you know, you'll buy something. Or you've gone away, I'll bring something back.

So, okay, absolutely. Okay, absolutely one of my favorite songs, I think, This is one my kids loved when they were really little is Fox the Fox, Dutch Electropop Group from the early 80s, and this is the one big hit I know of,

Precious Little Diamond. I think we should play the Shepet Pettibone mix because that's my favourite. Precious Little Diamond, I give it all to you, is the lyric. There's some contention ever what it means, but the song addresses the listener as a precious little diamond. So I always thought of my kids when I played it. I still would eat.

Refusing gifts. What are the context that you can refuse a gift? I mean, definitely there's culturally a lot of this around mock refusal. So you're supposed to pretend to refuse stuff, and it's seen as rude if you don't at least refuse in the culturally appropriate amounts of times. So that definitely, there's cultural stuff around that in the Middle East. You really, really need to push and say,

no, you shouldn't have. I can't accept this from you several times before you accept. it. Well, I mean, it's a dangerous game, though, because so Alice and her best friend, Lou, they get caught in this round, this cycle of I'm paying for this. Oh, don't you dare. Don't you dare. I'm going to pay for this. No, I'm paying for this. That's also a Larry David stick, isn't it? Yeah, I have to live through it quite often. It goes on and on and on until somebody cracks, basically. I don't know quite what's going on.

Well, that's actually, that sounds very Middle Eastern and also how it is, I think, in some far eastern countries where it's it's really the idea of splitting the bit I mean this is a slightly different topic but the idea of splitting the bill is unthinkable it's it's incredibly weird and one person is going to pay and so you fight over who's going to pay rather than who's not going to pay that is quite a common thing yeah so that so the thing is oh well look you paid for it last time so it's my turn now that's a sort of that reciprocation type of affair that does happen around like paying for meals and so forth. Yeah.

I mean, I think it is interesting. I think I know in my own experience when I was, when I was in my 20s and 30s, I did very much like, you know, picking up the check, as the Americans say,

for dinner for people and, and, you know, buying rounds and whatever. And I think, and these days I don't, I'm just less bothered about it. Like,

I'm happy to pay. I'm happy to do it. And I'm happy for other people to pay and happy to share. And I think, I think for me, it was partly just about associating it with adulthood.

It's about associating with adulthood. Now I think there is something to you that in those stronger traditions of people wanting to be the one who pays for dinner definitely. It's about occupying the position of the symbolic position of the elderly authority. Yeah. Yeah, because it's the job because it's the dad,

the symbolic dad, whether it's actually literally a male parent or just a person who symbolically occupies that position of the daddy, you know, their job is to provide. Their job is to to be the person who, you know, does that. I distinctly remember my dad giving me money to buy around when I first started going to the pub and so forth.

Yeah, yeah. Especially if I was with his friends, it would be like, yeah, your turn to buy around. She has my money for you to go and buy around. Well, that's, well, of course, yeah, and I think, of course, I mean, you can get, I mean, if you want to get into fine-grained analysis as well, of sort of class differences as well,

I mean, it's something I was quite conscious of growing up. I thought there was, I mean, it's partly my hang-up about attitudes towards generosity comes from the fact that I, my perception, whether it was right or wrong when I was growing up, was that people from more sort of traditional working class backgrounds seem to me to have a rather healthy, a sort of healthier attitude towards giving and receiving than people from more middle-class background, he seemed to just be very hung up about it, one way or another, because my idealised E.P. Thompson-esque account would be that, well, People from a kind of working class tradition have a basic culture of solidarity and egalitarianism and sharing being necessary and reciprocity being necessary to collective survival. Whereas the middle class tradition is much more bound up, partly with puritanical notions of austerity being the virtue, more than generosity, and partly around competitive competition for status as well. So it just seemed to be generally much more kind of neurotic, and people from much more traditionally

working class families seem to have this very different type of attitude giving words which in some ways you know it produced phenomena like you know the family saving all their money for the big christmas splurge every year and things like that that were quite different from a more middle class attitude where you're sort of trying to constantly raise the standard of everyday life like more than you're trying to save up for these ritualized moments of success but i did have this quite intuitive sense that I now think I have successfully theorised that these middle class attitudes were quite unhealthy. The whole E.P. Thompson thing actually, that opens up a way of thinking about gift giving and reciprocation. I hadn't thought of before this moment. So E.P. Thompson

makes this distinction between like a moral economy and a market economy and a moral economy is based on this sort of idea of customary expectations. The customary expectation is that people will behave in this sort of way in a market economy can come along, really disrupt that. So the way he got out that was to think about early forms of things such as food riots, etc, where people would like raid the miller's house and sell the flour that they'd taken from the windmill or whatever. They'd sell it at what they thought was the moral price rather than the market price because the market price had gone up. As you could sort of see how gift giving could fit into that conception of a moral economy, which is in some sort of tension with a market.

economy, even though they overlap. Well, it's a timely observation because the question of price controls as a potential way of dealing with the cost of living crisis has come back on the political agenda. And it's always worth keeping in mind under those circumstances that to some extent, the idea of price controls is the thing that marks the boundary between the pre-capitalist and the capitalist economy. The thing which defines the emergence of capitalism as such is the move away towards the idea that the market has to set the price, whether it's for labour or for consumer goods.

Indeed, Thompson, and also many cohorts of anthropologists, many historians and sociologists have pointed out that most cultures or societies have been conscious of the idea that you might allow the market to set prices and have regarded that as a practice which would obviously lead to various kinds of social pathology if you did it and have not done, have chosen not to do it and have authorized themselves not to do it on the basis of some notion of, you know, Christian morality or traditional custom or customs of hospitality or whatever. But politically for us now, though, as well, is that price controls is a big ask. The minute you start talking about price controlled, capitalist panic because it is like built into the DNA of capitalism to be

resistant to the idea of the community controlling prices in any way. But we actually do have price we have a price control on energy at the moment yeah adequate and only for six months and yeah it's very much backing back in vogue basically partly because you know we're in this very weird stage where where we've had very very low inflation really historically very unusually low interest rates and inflation for a long long time and so we've had very very low wages and all of a sudden we're running into this period of high inflation we'd probably continue i think not not as high but will continue in some form, i.e. we're out of the era of low interest space and low inflation, partly to do with climate changes, so these sorts of things. So that's why

this price controls and these sorts of things are really up on the agenda. And they could have, you know, they do have potential to open up space in which even more radical things can emerge. While you were speaking, I was just thinking about interestingly, the way that that price control has been formulated is to make sure that it doesn't look like the government is giving a gift back to our topic to, you know, individual households because they're effectively subsidising energy companies. Yeah, that's where they, that's a direction of the gift. Also, they're not just saying to price to energy companies, you cannot charge more than X. Exactly. They're subsidising it. That's not price control. I'm going to pick you up

on that care. That's not price controls. They have refused to impose price controls. Instead, they've subsidised. They've introduced a subsidy, which is, unless I've misunderstood what they doing, in which case correct me. But the whole point, the whole reason why they've introduced an incredibly, a cripplingly expensive subsidy rather than introduce price controls is because of this fundamental prohibition on controlling prices. Let's be clear for the list. The price control is not a price control is when the government just says to the supply, you cannot charge more than X for this product. You can't. It's not like we'll give you an extra tenor. Let's say you can cut the price to the consumer by a tenant. That's not a price control. That's a subsidy.

Yeah, the effect on a consumer is as a price control, and it is incredibly expensive to do it that way, because it's around energy from fossil fuels, basically, from primarily gas in the UK. Even a price control would also be really, really expensive for the government, basically. Or it would cause a huge amount of collapse amongst energy providers and these sorts of things. But yeah, so it's in effect as a price control on the consumer or for the, the from the supplier side is a subsidy. But the most important thing was they were pushed into it or pushed into price control or an energy subsidy on this sort of scale by the threat of a non-payment campaign and on payment of energy bills campaign. And we know that because the energy companies went to the government, did a presentation and said, if don't pay, don't pay UK, the ones who

were organising this non-payment campaign. So this is back in the summer. They went and said, you know, If you don't do something now, basically the whole energy supply industry will be out of business. Like it's going to cause companies to collapse if that number of people don't pay. So it's a complicated sort of energy cap. I think you could put it in the sort of realm of energy caps. But of course, the only interesting thing about them is like, what is the political effect on whom? I can't put it that way. But yeah, so it is interesting.

The gift is definitely going to, the subsidy is going to the energy companies, basically. Yeah, they're the ones, they're the ones getting the gift. They're the ones getting the present. Politically, the government needs to not be seen to give money directly to citizens, according to its own ideological framework. That's what furlough was. Yeah, I don't think that's true. I think it has to be, it would rather not be seen to be that, I agree, but I'm going to keep

maintaining. It would still rather do that than be seen to tell, simply to tell companies, you must limit your profits by X amount. Yeah, I agree. Yeah, I agree. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, another song we could play, which is also about wanting to be able to give the beloved person something.

Unsurprisingly, this is another one from the mid-70s. Patti Smith, free money. When we dreamers, when you dreamen, where you dreamer, where dreamer, dreamer, dreamer, dreamers, dream about me. So let's get on to think of the idea of the idea and the gift and the social function of the gift and the very abstract phenomenological concept of the gift. The study of gift economies is sort of really foundational to anthropology, isn't it? I think you know more about Malinowski than I do. So maybe you should talk about that.

I hope you know very little about Malinowski. In that case, I know slightly more than you. Is Malinowski before Mouse or after Mouse? Yeah, so, yeah, he's before Mouse. And like, so the really, really big figureness is Marcel Mouse and his like 1925 essay, really, the gift. And that is a response to like this Malin, Malinowski's. Malinowski, his study of like the cooler ring.

So this is sort of like in the Pacific, the fundamental observation of this is that like people seem to be going on boats, going on hazardous journeys across huge distances in order to give what looked like very minor gifts to people in other parts of that of the world. And that seems to be in a big ring. And in fact, particular items would circulate, you know, so the person who got that gift or the society it turns out, really, they got that gift would then pass it on. and the gift would go round and round. It's like, well, why would you do that? Why would you take those sorts of risks? But what Marlonowski's sort of solution to that was, was that like what looks like this selfless gift is actually behind that

is some sort of self-interest because you're setting up relationships of obligation, you're going to get something back, etc. And so like when Mouth does his essay, the gift, you know, his answer is, look, it's not, that you can't really make sense of that. You know, if you, when we say, like, behind the gift is self-interest, because of this thing of reciprocation. We're just sort of like we're not getting outside the frame of resonance as our society.

We're reading different forms of societies through a sort of market logic. And in fact, that doesn't really make sense because in these sorts of societies, it's not an individual, it's the collective that are exchanging gifts. And, you know, they don't really make sense to think about sort of self-interest or an individual in the way that we sort of understand them. Do you know what I mean? So what's happening is you're undertaking these journeys in all. to secure and to maintain these bonds of these social bonds within this sort of ring,

et cetera, et cetera. And so basically saying, look, this is not some sort of self-interested manipulation of the gift. In these societies, the whole of society is basically a whole network of gift-giving bonds of obligation and reciprocation, etc. And the worst thing that could ever happen would be that a gift would be fully reciprocated because then the bonds are broken and you have no social bonds between these different groups

and all sorts of things could emerge out of that including a war, do you know what I mean? That's the sort of cycle I think between Malinowski and a mouse, that sort of idea. So it sets up this whole field of study about what's going on with these, you know, can we think about how that relates to our own gift giving in which we don't want to fully reciprocate because we want to keep this relationship of gift giving going

and that sort of thing? Yeah, yeah, I think that's all right. Moutes is following his uncle, Emil Dirkheim, for whom one of the big questions of sociology and social theory is how is solidarity possible. Of course, that's partly because I would say he's responding to the dissolution of bonds of solidarity and the conditions of industrialising market society.

What year are we? Well, Dirkheim is like late 19th century, and then Mouse is early 20th century. Yeah, his famous essay about on the gift is, yeah, mid-20s. I guess my reading of Mouse is always influenced by the fact that, you know, I came to Mouse through Jacques Derrida writing about Mouse and so this is sort of deconstructive reading in this sense that mouse can never quite really resolve the tension between

whether the gift is a sort of commodity that's perpetually circulating in relations of exchange or whether it's something which absolutely the whole point of it is it's not a commodity that you give it and the person keeps it kind of like we were talking about earlier and it's occupied as a different sort of economy and it's a different sort of object but all these people are observing something about the way in which relationships of exchange are fundamental to building certain kinds of social bonds especially between groups that don't necessarily have face-to-face relationships with each other.

Part of what Mouse is sort of getting at with this is, or part of what he's trying to undo is not just like Malinowski's sort of analysis for the cooler ring. He's trying to undo the sort of origin myths of capitalism or perhaps the origin myths of economics, sort of classical economics. And so the origin myth of that is you have individuals who produce stuff, they produce too much of something, but they don't produce everything so that then they'll go and barter perhaps one chicken for some milk or something like that.

And of course, bartering like that's a bit different. Hang on, I've got one chicken, but I don't want all of that milk. So we need, so that basically then you produce money as something to solve that inconvenience. And then everything else emerges from that, you know, other sorts of, you know, banks, credit default swaps, derivatives all emerge from this, addressing this problem of barter. And that's so what anthropologists can do is say, well, look, there's not really any evidence. that society's based on BART have ever existed. And in fact, when you look around, you see relationships based on gifting

and like the sort of social obligations of gifting, etc. do seem to be everywhere. And those are not relationships between individuals in these anthropological terms. They're their relationships between groups of people, basically. So it's sort of, and does that origin myth, basically. So you'd have to look elsewhere for where money emerges from. And like basically, you know, the understanding is money emerges. it's from the need to pay taxes.

So states create money in order so that people can pay taxes to them. And so that really disrupts the ideology of classical economics. And so put it that way. Yes, yeah. And at a sort of fundamental level, it's getting away from the idea, the classically bourgeois idea that it's trade that produces social relations. For the classical bourgeois economists,

trade comes first, like truck and trade. Truck and trade. These spontaneous human activities. And then social relations are built on them. Social relations emerge organically from them. And you can't ever really interfere with them because they are the fundamental processes which makes sociality itself possible.

Not just society, but sociality. It's like being social. And the point about a lot of, this anthropology of indigenous societies is to point out that that description just doesn't seem to apply that social there are all kinds of things which enable sociality other than truck barter and trade and that truck barter and trade is sort of comes quite late and it's sort built upon these already existing relationships of which are relationships of reciprocity but which don't make any sense if you try to understand them in terms of a kind of logic of

transaction yeah and so what a part of what what mouse has said saying is, you know, like, what's unusual about our society is that we have, we try to create a sphere called economics, which we pretend is outside of the rest of social relationships, sort of autonomous from it, and, you know, something we don't have to have to think about in terms of the social relations that it produces. We talked about this really early thing of like this reification. You talked about an earlier gem about commodity fetishism, you know, this idea that the commodities are these things that get exchanged. But like, behind that, what's important is the social relationship produces and the, you know, the historically specific

social relationships that it produces. And we don't want to look at that if you're a capitalist ideologue because then what you see are relationships that you're quite unequal, even though they're supposed to be reciprocal. They're based on this, this real inequality and they're very asymmetrical between, you know, the worker and the capitalist, for instance. And so part of what what mouse is saying is that, look, you know, this idea that there's a separate sphere of economy is really odd, and it depends on something like a market, something which abstracts, which can be abstracted on money, something that can be abstracted from the specific social relations that's embodied in. There's all sorts of very weird sort of spiritual elements to something

like the cooler ring, for instance, in that the same object gets passed around. So it's not about acquiring that object, because you're going to give it on. But when you give it on, it's a little bit of you as left in it. Perhaps that relates to the idea of gifting that we were talking about earlier, where something really, really personal would perhaps remind you of that person. You'd want to keep it around, so perhaps you wouldn't want the experience, although, of course, I've never forgotten Zorbing, and I do always associate it with my daughter May, and not a happy memory. Yeah, so it's that sort of idea. In some ways, it's a way of de-reify, by concentrating on this exchange of gifts, you're de-reifying it and saying, well, yeah,

but the important thing is not the gift. It's not you having that gift. That's not the important thing. It's the social relations and the social bonds that that creates, then bonds of potentially solidarity, that's the important thing. You get rid of the concentration on the thing, the commodity,

and reposition it within social relations. Yes. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, well, look, the gift, the book, the gifts, or the essay really, but you buy it. Lesse on the gift. Right, okay, yeah, yeah. In English, it's just called the gift.

I know. Check it. Google it on Amazon now. Yeah, so it starts off with a description of this practice called Potlatch in sort of North West Pacific Native American cultures, sort of pre-Columbian cultures. In a pre-Columbian time, it was just a really rich ecosystem in the Northwest Pacific around Seattle and above and below around that sort of area. And so basically there were societies with a lot of surplus, basically. And the whole idea of potlatches, it's a gift-giving thing, but it's got a particular, that the expectation is you would always return a gift or reciprocate a gift with something much more valuable. And of course, it doesn't take long to think that that's a ruinous cycle, because if somebody gives a gift, you have to give more, then they have to give more back.

That's a sort of like, you know, it's a feedback loop that goes on and on and on. And so they can be ruinous, basically, and it leads into things such as traditions in which you basically, instead of giving a gift, you've, very publicly destroy something very valuable and that somebody else has to destroy something very valuable back again, if you know what I mean. He starts off as that as this. It's almost like the most extreme example of gift giving, gift giving, which can be ruinous, socially ruinous, basically. And that's something that's picked up by lots of people. I think the situationists, the first situationist magazine was called potlatcher. Oh, really? But they're getting that from George Batai, who is a theorist, somebody close to sort of surrealist circles, a sort of strange sort of activist in France, sort of writing in the 1930s in particular, I think.

And he wrote a book called The Accursed Share, which picks up on this idea of potlatch, links it to things such as human sacrifice and human sacrifices when the way he interprets it. saying like Aztec societies, whatever, you have human sacrifice, where the priest cuts the heart out of the sacrificial victim, etc. But how by time interprets that is that that is the destruction of a valuable item. So like a slave would be very valuable in those sorts of society. You're destroying something really, really valuable. And from that he gets, particularly in this book,

The Accursed Shear, gets this idea of, if you want to understand a society, put it this way, if you want to understand a society, you need to think about how it deplore, or destroys it's surplus. And so, like Gem talked about it, earlier, this idea that what, perhaps in some societies, what's going on is that you're destroying a surplus

to prevent something else happening, to prevent that surplus for being used for something else. And so, Kastres, what's his, Pierre Kastro. Clastres, Pierre Klastres, is his classic book, Society Against the State. He sort of says that the societies who were doing these sorts of practices, what they were doing was they were sensing that there were social

possibilities on the horizon when you move from hunter gathering into things such as growing crops such as grains or grain can be stored and it can be moved it's a form of wealth it can be stored and move then like meat meters of no use at all for those sorts of purposes and so you would have societies which would try to destroy those surpluses to prevent someone else occurring so that could be destroying something in order to ensure that existing society and existing hierarchies remain the same but his his idea was that they sense the possibility of a state emerging with a separate class of people and they were trying to do away

with that sort of idea. For Batai, like, you know, he would then go on and sort of think about, like, he would say, look at the pyramids. Like, the pyramids is this gigantic wasting of surplus, basically. What's the surplus of those societies? Creating these huge monuments and he says,

you know, you could look at the Palace of Versailles and say the same. In those sorts of societies, ostentatious waste by those at the top of the hierarchy was a way of destroying. surplus, so prevent something else occurring. Do you know what I mean? And so his analysis of capitalism is, you know, capitalism is a very strange version of that because you don't have this ostentatious destruction of surplus. Instead, surplus, that's the very definition of capitalism

is, you know, the surplus that is created through the investment of capitalism is invested back into production or whatever in order to create more surplus. So once again, you get this ruinous sort of almost cancerous growth of surplus. But of course, once again, that's all, in a way, that's just another way of wasting surplus, basically, because you're constantly investing in order to increase the zeros on an accounting sheet, really, rather than using that surplus to address people's needs. If people's needs get addressed, that's a byproduct of the real aim of capital, which is just to increase the amount of capital in the world. So in a way, that's like, that is almost like destroying surplus, but it has no limit to it, basically. Do you

know what I mean? There's a cycle that just keeps going on and on and on. And so, there are counter tendencies. So this gets into like Deleuze and Guatari pick up on battai and stuff like that and talk about anti-production. There are sort of counter-tendencies within capitalism in which surplus is destroyed. And they talk about war as one of those counter-tenancies. I think they talk about the advertising industry as well as another sort of one of those, one of those like counter-tendencies. But I think the war example makes sense because when you have a depression that emerges because, you know, capital is produced too much perhaps and it's not enough. You know, people can't buy what's being produced, these sorts of things.

Basically, war, the destruction of capital, is one of the traditional means through which you can get out of recession and restart the process of capital accumulation. The Trond glorious, 30 glorious years, the post-war settlement, you know, that's something that emerges after this huge destruction of capital in the Second World War. Yeah, that's right. That's all I wanted to say, those few short words. Yeah, that's good. I mean, I think, I mean, one of Batai's ideas as well as general economy, isn't it? The idea that some, that you have to understand societies is operating according to a certain economic logic, but it's not necessarily the generalized economic logic that, you know, Adam Smith and the,

the bourgeois economists to imagine. They operates according to some of these patterns that Keir's been describing. I mean, Batai is important in the history of social theatre. because he's one of the people trying to conceptualize the kind of relationship between, you know, what would later be called a libidina economy, like the processes of the psyche and social and economic processes. I mean, arguably, that series of books that he publishes, what was it, is in the late 30s, the Casey Chair and the others that, I mean, arguably it's the most up to that point, I think it's the most ambitious, sort of attempt to synthesize things that are coming

out of psychoanalytic theory they're coming out to Marxism, coming out to anthropology. Yeah, he's one of those thinkers. He's not been very well served because in recent decades, because the people who picked him up during the theory boom of the 80s and 90s tended to be quite dodgy

in various ways, frankly. He's the first of the theorist to be read by Nick Land as basically a sort of, you know, a sort of a narco-capitalist, nihilist and then other people, I mean other people, there were people trying to sort of promote Bataille

and he's, I think it's a shame really because he's really interesting. He's into weird stuff, he's into weird esotericism. The story is he was a member of some secret society that wanted to practice human sacrifice as part of some Asafal. Yeah, and they all, he and loads of the

others all volunteered to be the sacrificial victim, but none of them would do the sacrifice. Like, none of them were willing to wield the knife. So, and he was, he sort of sometimes remembered as having, you know, he fell out with Andre Breton. He was the leader of the surrealists. And it was partly kind of political falling out over Breton's loyalism to the Comintern, the International Communist Party. So that's been in, that split has been interpreted in multiple ways.

I feel like I'm not an expert enough to judge it. Yeah, he is, I mean, he's some, I mean, the followers of Breton accused Bataille of having fascistic leanings, which they associated with his, his leaning towards sort of dark forms of esotericism, with some of the fascists we're into. But I think, I don't think there's much evidence he did he, what he did really. Basically, I think that, you know, he wasn't a fascist and he didn't have fascist leanings either, I don't think. No, I don't think. I think that was just sectarian slander, really. In my opinion, yeah. One of the things that's really interesting about is he's he's trying to think through utility basically and that the limitations

of utility once again like he has this idea that like the real problem of of economics is not scarcity so like basically economics as we understand it now is the science of how to redistribute how to distribute scarce resources in a most efficient way that's how it sells itself and he says well it's not the problem isn't scarcity it's excess it's it's surplus and he starts with this image of like an excess of solar energy on the earth, basically. He calls it the solar anus, shitting energy onto the universe. And the main problem has been what to do with that surplus, what to do with the excess, how do you do it? And so he sets up all these ideas such as like gift giving as a way, perhaps a form of like homeostasis. You know what I mean? You destroy the surplus and

or to keep things to say, which is what we were talking about earlier. But what he's really, he's not particularly interested in that. What he's really interested in is his most sort of radical end is like how you can, how to create change out of that, how that surplus could be used in order to facilitate something different, a different form of society. And he's sort of quite interested, particularly at certain points, as like as revolutions as one of these sorts of, you know,

this huge destruction of surplus through destroying the ruling class, basically, that sort of idea. But like it sets up this really interesting thing about utility in a sort of limited, we've got a very limited sense of what utility is, of what use is, our form of what utility is. We are very limited forms of that now, and it's not the general form of utility. It's something bigger than that.

And so he's quite interested in ways in which, you know, we should waste resources in order to discover new things, perhaps it's one way to put it. So basically that relates to that Graber article from ages ago. I think it was called Where's My Jetpack or something, where he argues that, like, technological development has slowed down and one of the reasons it slowed down is because universities and places where knowledge is produced has been swept by this very limited

form of utilitarianism i. The one form of measure that was trying to be introducing to universities now is what's the average earnings of a graduate in two years time who's done this degree basically of course that's going to eliminate all sorts of things from which the new emerges and so Graber says, look, you know, universities used to be this place where the weirdos could go and be, you know, let them get, or give them a little bit of resources, let them get on with things. And they won't be focused on what's the most useful thing now. But that's where, you know, the great discoveries of science come from, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So there's that weird thing between non-utility and utility. Unemployed negativity talks about this, you know, anyway, I don't want to get into unemployed negativity. Don't to bring things down. Batai is a sort of predecessor and there's an influence on that generation of philosophers who have become really active in France in the 60s and 70s. And among them, Jacques Derrida, who is quite influenced by Batai at the point where he himself is occasionally writing about the idea of a genuine economy.

He tries to bring that, he tries to do a sort of post-Betaiian reading of Hegel and things like that and sometimes think about hints that the implications might be for Marxian economics and what have you. And then Derrida in the 80s writes a series of essays which get translated into English in mostly in the early 90s, I think, which are explicitly around its concept of the gift. So there's a couple of books. There's a book translated in English as Given Time and another one called The Gift of Death. And the starting point for all this really is his encounter with the thoughts of people like mouse. I'm not going to get into technicalities around Derrida's philosophy, but one of the really

interesting and thought-provoking questions he raises is this tension between the idea of the gift as the thing which is given without the expectation of reciprocity. And on the other hand, the fact that social reality seems to be that gifts are always in sort of relations of exchange. I mean, to some extent, part of his point is that Mouse isn't entirely successful. Part of his argument in claiming to have completely detached the gift conceptually from any notion of reciprocity any system of exchange, because although Mouse might be right, the simplistic account of the border economists, according to which, as we said before, you know, trade relations are the kind of basic basis of all social relations.

It's also the case that Mouse does show that there is this scent in which gifts are sort of it's so they sort of circulate and they sort of like mannowski says and they sort of you know they do have a sort of social function and it is a function which has to do with ideas of reciprocity even if it's not simply transactional it's not like you give me this I give you that it's something more complicated than that and so then the question becomes well what would it mean to give a gift like what would a gift be that is completely outside of any relation to reciprocity and transaction and to think about that you you partly have to think about things like the Abrahamic traditions, like Jewish and Christian traditions, for example. I don't know

about how Islam treats this issue, within which the ideal of gift giving, the ideal of charity is that it has to, is that for it really to have maximum spiritual value, it has to be completely devoid of any possibility of allowing the giver to derive any kind of real social benefit from it. You know, there's that phrase people will have heard of from the Bible, the left hand shouldn't know what the right hand is doing. And what that refers to, that's a passage where they're talking about what it means to give charity in a properly moral way. And it should be that the ideal should be that you shouldn't even remember that you gave that charity. You shouldn't, you should be no conception that the person you gave to you owes you anything. They shouldn't

know who you are. So they shouldn't be able to feel any sense of obligation to you. And of course, that is the origin of the Santa. I mean, Santa Claus is St. Nicholas. And the story of St. Nicholas, from which the Santa myth derives is the St. Nicholas was a bishop who left gifts for poor girls who didn't have money for their dowries and did so anonymously so that nobody would know where it had come from so they wouldn't feel any sense of obligation or indebtedness towards him. Well, that's interesting, actually, yeah. There's this Christian idea. You know, it's something that can be said about the, to some extent the Jewish, and especially the Christian tradition, is that there is this tendency to want

to break with, like, older ideas of, of reciprocity, whether it's in, in, in, around ideas of justice, like an eye for an eye or tooth for a tooth, or whether it's around the idea that you have a covenant with God, like you, you've done a, I mean, the, the, the Abrahamic idea is that you've done a deal with God. So, uh, you're going to follow these rules and do these things for God and God is going to do certain things for you, going to look after you. And then what kind of, what emerges with Christianity is this idea that, well, God is so, like, incredibly, it's so superior to human beings in terms of power that you couldn't possibly really give him anything. Therefore, grace and salvation have to be conceptualized as things

which are given completely freely and that are received completely freely. And this is partly why within Christian theology and Christian ethics, like going back to St. Paul and St. Augustine, it's really difficult. The whole idea that actually you get rewarded for being good by going to heaven is really problematic. They basically are always trying to get away from idea, because even though it seems like it's a natural idea to people, it doesn't really fit with the Christian metaphysics, according to which, well, you couldn't possibly be good enough, like, to earn a place in heaven. So you're just going to be given it by God, and you just have to recognize that you're just being given it as a sign of God's infinite love and mercy.

And then that idea gets picked up by, for example, the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, who's another big influence on Derrida, who's a sort of Jewish, sort of Jewish existentialist philosopher of the mid-20th century. And Levinas also famously picks up on these ideas of debt and indebtedness. But his idea is that, well, actually, you know, the debt which we owe to the other, which might be God, or it might just be every other person in the world, or it might be a particular other person, is infinite. So there is a sense of debt and obligation and reciprocity, but it's incalculable. And as soon as you start to try to calculate it, you get into this realm of, this bourgeois realm of transactionality and selfishness.

And the only way to escape those things, the only way to be truly ethical, which is Levinas's preoccupation, is to accept that there can't be any real, there is no limit to what we all owe each other. There is no limit to the hospitality we owe to the stranger. There's no limit to the debts to each other and to the world and arguably to God. And I think that is all really interesting.

I think it, because those questions we were asking, right, of the start, just really basic questions like, what does it mean to give a gift? What does it mean to give something that somebody would really want? And what does it, you know, what do you get from it? Now, they are these really persistent questions in these philosophical traditions, and there is a certain ideal of complete selflessness, according to which you would give, and you absolutely would not expect to receive. And you put yourself in a position where you cannot receive anything for it. I think that is really interesting. It's quite hard to think through that, how that would fit with a, a, a,

Gilbert Williams' version of interest, but perhaps that's for another episode. But as you were speaking, Jeremy, it made me think, because we were talking about, you know, Abrahamic religions, it made me think about offerings and whether offerings actually sit in a different class. Because for religions or, you know, traditions where you offer, you give offerings to the gods, that is quite different to a gift in some ways. I suppose that's a bit like sacrifice, isn't it? A sacrifice to the gods, the destruction of Yeah, being different to then give, yeah, than the role of the gift in that situation. Well, I mean, it depends what a tradition you're talking.

I mean, the classic pre-monotheistic tradition to sacrifice, mostly, you know, it was mostly did have a pretty, a sort of transactional ideal in some sense. I mean, it's something that philosophers were worrying about like hundreds of years before Jesus, saying, well, why would the gods even care? Why do the gods care if you, like, burn a bloody chicken for them? They're the gods. yeah but it is it definitely of course it is related

to sacrifice and the idea but is it like what about I'm thinking about things like when you go to temples and you put you know offerings for for you know the monkeys or the animal and you know I'm thinking about that sort of stuff

because it's not for the animals it's for the gods well it depends if you talk to I mean today if you talk to people who are active in those traditions they'll often say well actually it's for you it's because the act of giving, just the gesture of giving, is good. Like, it opens you out in somewhere. And it's because, because indeed, as like St. Paul, St. Augustine would say, the gods can't really

want anything from you. They're not. It's an anti-neurosis action. I see that. Because it's taking the focus away from yourself and your own problems and your own needs and making you think about others, which is by definition anti-neurotic. Yeah, I think that's right. Yeah. And it also, touches on this theme, which we've, I've mentioned before already, but this idea, the idea of generosity and the idea of the gift and generosity, I think that's something, we haven't really talked about this, because I think this is important. One of the things I sort of struggle with as a parent is to communicate to my kids, the idea that I'm really big on generosity for reasons I've already talked about. Like, I've sometimes said to them, that the most important

things are to be brave, kind, and generous. Those are the three important virtues for a secular as socialists. Be brave, be kind, be generous. And what it means to be generous is not to just give people something that is just really convenient to you to give them, that you don't even want to keep. That's not generosity. There's this sense it's only generosity if there's some degree of inconvenience to you, that you have deprived yourself of something. That's very difficult to practice. I mean, very few people give gifts, for example, that they can't really easily afford. And I'm not saying people should, or I'm not saying people should feel bad about that. But I think there's something in that and the idea of the thoughtful gift. There's something

in the idea that, well, even if we don't live in a society where it's feasible for people to give people presents that it's difficult for them to afford and nobody's supposed to do, at least you've genuinely expended something. You've expended something by putting in the thought and the effort. And that does relate to those Bata'i and ideas. I mean, Batae is partly interested in the idea of expenditure. He's interested in this idea of what does it mean to actually kind of give up something, like to no longer have something that you could have used otherwise. I think part of the intuition people have when they recoil from what people call the commercialization of Christmas or the kind of routineization of gift

giving is this idea that gift giving has devolved into a set of social routines which are transactional and which don't but don't involve actual expenditure. They don't involve the giver, like losing anything at all by virtue of the other person getting something. And that is something, it is built into the idea of sacrifice, it is built into the idea of offering, it's built into all of these traditions, this idea that will for it to be meaningful. Like, it has to cost you something. Even if it's something that it's not painful to cost you, it still has to be some sense of... But that's, I mean, that's true, but it's only true necessarily within a very technical understanding of what cost is. So, for example, if you

are baking some cookies as a present. Like, of course, it's cost you time and it's cost you effort, right? So by that definition, I understand what you mean. But that, but that's what you mean, right? Rather than cost you in terms of a debilitating sense of cost. Sure, but I think it's, I think one reason those things have taken, like making something for someone now does take on a particular significance is because under advanced capitalism, the one commodity that is scarce for absolutely everybody is time. Time is scarce for everybody. Like, you can be billionaire, and it was still, you know, you're still consciously, you're mortal, you're a finite being, you know, being for death, as Heidegger would say, and, you know, give a none to death.

And therefore, giving up your time is something that is irreplaceable, is always every moment of time from that perspective is irreplaceable. I think that's partly why that is such a powerful idea. And to some extent, it's a sort of leveling idea for people. Time is a cost, even if it's pleasurable, you're not getting that time back. I can't quite believe we haven't played this before that according to my records we haven't double exposure, love is free a classic South Soul disco record

from the mid-70s and the theme of the lyric is one of the greatest pop lyrics ever really is about the idea of free of love as a freely given gift which is not transactional doesn't cost anything it won't cost you one thin dime baby

I got to be like a little bit, oh, oh, baby, oh, baby, baby, oh, baby, oh. Now sometimes I get a little trouble. I get a little trouble. I mean, so one thing that's in the news at the moment is, is this idea of, objective altruism. And so it's like this ideology that comes out of utilitarianism a little bit. But it's been really, really taken on by oligarchs, basically. And I'm going to really, really gloss it. But, you know, the basic idea is the point of life would be, you know, you should try and make as much money as possible for basically whatever means, whatever means possible, in order for you to then be able to give it away for the benefit of humanity. It's in the news at the moment, partly because we live in an era

of oligarchs and oligarchs have to give meaning to these huge huge historically unprecedented amounts of wealth they're accumulating that they can't possibly spend so how do you give meaning to that they can't spend it on themselves particularly so the ideas you give it away you know bill gates giving away his money for the gates foundation etc and so effective altruism is something very attractive to the oligarchs i i imagine but just this recently there's been a collapse in in the crypto economy, the wider crypto economy, cryptocurrency economy is in a

really long, long period of the clang. And just recently one of the main cryptocurrency exchanges called FTX collapsed in a huge orgy of fraud, it looks like, fraud and incompetence. The owner of FTCS has exchanged, Sam Bankman

Frye, which is a perfect name for somebody, also known as Sam Bank run fraud. He was really into effective altruism. This is his, you know, he said that I'm doing all this so I can give it away a later date. Now the fraud is out of the way, you know, he's just revealed that that was. He's given interviews in which he said, you know, all of that effect of altruism stuff. That was just a nice moral story. That was part of the grift, basically. The grift to get people to invest in this

in crypto, et cetera, et cetera. You know, but I think as interesting about that is that, you know, we could see this gift giving by the oligarchs as the contemporary form of destruction of surplus, right? This is the way in which, and there are societies, meaning is created around these huge, huge collections of wealth because we're going to destroy it by giving it away. So there may be elements of genuine generosity in that, of course, the inequalities mean that instead of democratically deciding how we deploy our surpluses, that is given over to extremely wealthy people, for instance. But the whole crypto, in a way, the whole cryptocurrency economy is basically just a distraction of surplus. Because, you know, in order to create cryptocurrencies like

Bitcoin, etc., you create these huge amounts of processing power, you know, using it massive amounts of energy in order to sell pointless sums. That's how you mine Bitcoin's, basically. So all of it looks like just this, this, you know, this insane destruction, insane excess, destruction of the surpluses that we need to address society's problems. And on that, today's sermon. I think we should end by, and as the admission, is that we're having the annual ACFM, AGM in a couple of weeks at Jem's house where Jem is cooking us all Christmas dinner. We're going to test out his generosity. I shall be bringing some egg-noggy type drink I think Nadia is bringing a nut roast

She's created built Yep, bringing a net roast at her She has expended her own precious time of life to cook Well, that's all I want for Christmas is you guys Oh Well that is something I can I can give although I will also be bringing an egg-noggy drink

it sounds disturbing an egg-noggy doesn't it? It sounds so long. It sounds sincere. It sounds so wrong. It sounds sinister. Do you mean eggnog? Like, what's an egg-nog? It sounds like one of those substance, one of those things like

non-champain, like white sparkling. That's just vegan egg-nog. It comes in powdered form. This is so, Yeah, it's not indulgent if it's eggnog-like. If you mean it's vegan-friendly, that sounds nicer. Well, it's definitely not going to be that. Perhaps you could also go out on a solemn note with a wonderful hymn,

a wonderful hymn which will fill us with Christmas spirits. The best version of that hymn, the most meaningful, is by the punk band The Dickies. This is Silent Night by the Dickies Oh yes, yeah, I forgot to say Silent Night. and we're going to be like, and we're back on your head.