So many of our carols mention making Christmas last all year, but it’s obviously one of those ritualistic phrases that we’re not supposed to think very much about. With malls and stores marketing for Christmas shopping as early as October in some cases, we can certainly see some headway to make the “holiday shopping season” last all year. Christmas gifts account for a full quarter of the personal spending that takes place in the United States, so the desire is obvious. But what would it mean to the rest of us, if we took those songs seriously, and actually did make Christmas last all year?

Last year, amidst rising gas prices, one poll¹ indicated that as many as 68% of people in the United States wanted to give gifts like savings bonds or piggy banks for Christmas; over 90% said they’d noticed a rise in the cost of living, and more than 66% attributed that to rising gasoline prices. 87% said that “the holidays should be more about family and caring for others rather than giving and receiving gifts.” And, “only 28% of those polled said that it is necessary to spend a lot of money in order to have a fulfilling and enjoyable holiday and nearly four out of five Americans surveyed said that they would like to have a more simplified holiday season this year.”

Even so, the “holiday shopping season” continues to be a consumerist orgy. Christian groups have tried to discourage that and remind Christians of “the reason for the season” (by which they somehow mean Jesus, who was almost certainly not born on any day even close to Christmas,² and not the earth’s orbit around the sun). Pope Benedict XVI has said that consumerism “pollutes” Christmas.³ One particularly slick group of Mennonites have even gone so far as to start “Buy Nothing Christmas.”

Neither is this simply a problem for Christians losing their holy day to corporate marketing; environmentalists, too, are concerned with the consumerist orgy of the holiday season.

Christmas fuels consumerism. Production lines and shopping centres are waiting for Christmas to arrive. They are seeking greater sales and greater profits this Christmas than the last. Thus Christmas fuels consumerism. But in turn, consumerism fuels global warming.⁴

Only a few centuries ago, Christmas was a rowdy drinking holiday, more akin to what we think of St. Patrick’s Day now. That’s why the Puritans who first came to America banned it.⁵ The images of a Victorian Christmas are largely due to the fact that Queen Victoria assembled a number of writers, artists and poets—including Charles Dickens—to reform Christmas into the family-oriented holiday we know today.⁶ The practice of exchanging gifts may find precedence in the ancient festivals of Kalends or Saturnalia, and even a Christian basis in the story of the magi,⁷ but the phenomenon as we know it is a modern one.

Gift-giving at Christmastime was rare in Europe or America prior to the 19th century. The first advertisements for Christmas gifts in the United States were primarily for children’s books. In the 19th century gifts tended to be made by the giver and were practical (eg, mittens or food), but modern gifts tend to be more frivolous, fun or luxurious. Half of the year’s sale of diamonds, furs and luxury watches happen in December.⁸

All societies exchange gifts—they are a vital kind of relationship, not with the gift itself so much as the relationship it creates between giver and receiver. Perhaps the most authoritative word on the subject of gift-giving is Lewis Hyde’s The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property. He makes quite clear from the outset precisely what kind of gift he has in mind:

I speak of the inner gift that we accept as the object of our labor, and the outer gift that has become a vehicle of culture. I am not concerned with gifts given in spite or fear, nor those gifts we accept out of servility or obligation; my concern is the gift we long for, the gift that, when it comes, speaks commandingly to the soul and irresistibly moves us. (Hyde, 1983)

Humans did not evolve as economic creatures at all, but rather, as gift-givers. The oldest form of human economy—and the only to ever exist on its own—is the reciprocity, or gift economy. The exchange of gifts creates bonds of gratitude and indebtedness. The exchange of things is always enmeshed within the social framework of the tribe; there is no purely utilitarian relationship. Economic activity becomes a subset of social activity. Because of that, there is no balance being kept. There is no expectation of immediate return. In a gift economy, worries about giving a gift that’s too extravagant might be concern for the boastful (see the seasonally-appropriate but largely unrelated classic piece by Richard Lee, “Eating Christmas in the Kalahari” [PDF]), but they should never be a cause for concern in and of themselves. The result of such a network is that everyone is indebted to everyone else, and so ultimately, everyone is indebted to the tribe as a whole. As a result, debts are simply not tracked at all; everyone is so deeply indebted to everyone else that it’s safe to assume at any given moment that you owe everyone around you anything you can share. The result is one where wealth is not accumulated, so much as circulated.

For the Massim, wealth confers status and provides a measure of personal virtue, but possession is best expressed in the act of giving or sharing. Gifts that remain too long in one house are a cause for gossip and concern; they should move, go out of sight and out of control, and thus engender and reinforce trust in the whole process of gift giving. By traveling in a large circle, a gift cannot belong to any one member of the circle. This kind of economy typically requires that a gift increase as it passes from one person to the next. The history of a gift adds to its value…⁹

Naturally, this violates some of our general “rules” of Christmas gift-giving; for instance, that we shouldn’t give a gift too extravagent, as that would put the other under undue pressure to supply a similarly extravagent gift, or that “re-gifting” is a terrible thing, and if done at all, must be kept absolutely secret. Both of these are examples of how market economy attitudes have seeped into our reciprocity. The taboo of “re-gifting” is a fine example of how deeply marketing can mold our psychology, and compel us to buy needlessly new things, rather than allow an item to accumulate history, and thus, value. The pressure of an extravagent gift is only felt if a gift exchange is quid pro quo, with immediate reciprocation. In other words, it is a pressure only insofar as the gift ceases to be a gift, and instead becomes an economic transaction. The pressure is felt because it creates a relationship. If a relationship is desired, there should be no pressure; there will be ample opportunity to reciprocate in the future. On the other, if no relationship is desired, then the gift that forces such a relationship can be quite stressful.

That is the origin of the market economy. Humans evolved in tribes, practicing systems of reciprocity, but with agriculture and population expansion beyond the limits of human scope like Dunbar’s number, the resulting breakdown of feasible human society had many effects, several of which we have discussed in detail elsewhere. One major consequence was that economic exchange could no longer be a subset of social activity. There are simply too many people; some means was needed of exchanging goods with strangers. The market economy addresses this need. It allows for impersonal, alienating relationships; it allows for the possibility of treating people as commodities, rather than human beings. This is its raison d’être. The principle of quid pro quo, and the meticulous tracking of debts in and out, are essential to such a system. Things flow through a gift economy; in the market economy, ownership arises.

Above all, Hyde is interested in examining the effect our current immersion in the market economy and the myth of the free market has both on our view of gifts and on our ability to give and receive them. The market economy is deliberately impersonal, but the whole purpose of the ‘gift economy’ is to establish and strengthen the relationships between us, to connect us one to the other. “It is this element of relationship which leads [Hyde] to speak of gift exchange as ‘erotic’ commerce, opposing eros (the principle of attraction, union, involvement which binds together) to logos (reason and logic in general, the principle of differentiation in particular). A market economy is an emanation of logos.”

In a market economy, one can hoard one’s goods without losing wealth. Indeed, wealth is increased by hoarding—although we generally call it ’saving’. In contrast, in a gift economy, wealth is decreased by hoarding, for it is the circulation of the gift(s) within the community that leads to increase—increase in connections, increase in relationship strength. Through this book, Hyde helps us focus on the importance of gifts, their flow and movement and the impact that the modern market place has had on the circulation of gifts.¹⁰

This is perhaps the most fundamental distinction between civilization and tribalism as systems, something Ran Prieur noted:

In a tribe, purely utilitarian relationships are forbidden! The economic is a subset of the social, and in a land-based tribe, the fundamental social relationship is between the people and the land. But in civilization, the social and the economic are carefully separated. It’s uncool to accept money from your family—you’re supposed to “earn” it through a utilitarian deal with strangers. We don’t want to chat with the person behind the counter—we just want our coffee. We love people we don’t depend on, and we depend on people we don’t love, or even know.

This is what enables a large-scale domination system! Tribes can be repressive, abusive, even ecologically destructive, but they can’t be big, or grow past a certain size, because everyone has to know everyone for them to work. And for a tribe to be mean, everyone in it has to be mean. But you can build a global hell-world out of nice people with just one trick: the purely utilitarian relationship. It’s the basic chemical bond of Empire. And we can dissolve Empire, one cell at a time, by befriending the people we exchange money with, and building gift economies on our friendships.¹¹

Jeff Vail, too, notes the centrality of this system of relationships in A Theory of Power.

The abstract notion of ownership serves as the single, greatest perpetuator of hierarchy. When one steps back and examines the notion of “owningâ€? something, the abstraction becomes readily apparent. Ownership represents nothing more than a power-relationship—the ability to control. The tribal institution of “Ownership by useâ€? on the other hand, suggests simply that one can only “ownâ€? those things that they put to immediate, direct and personal use to meet basic needs—and not more. A society crosses the memetic Rubicon when it accepts the abstraction that ownership can extend beyond the exclusive needs of one individual for survival. Abstract ownership begins when society accepts a claim of symbolic control of something without the requirement of immediate, direct and personal use. Hierarchy, at any level, requires this excess, abstract ownership—it represents the symbolic capital that forms the foundation of all stratification. In the simplest terms, in order to destroy the engine of hierarchy, we must destroy the mechanism of ownership. Proposing to destroy ownership may seem impractical, but societies have achieved similar feats before—such as the !Kung tribe’s aversion to status. If a society accepts that hierarchy fails the needs of human ontogeny, then one can argue that ownership—the engine of hierarchy—acts detrimentally to human needs.¹²

Of course, civilizations emerge out of tribes, and we should not expect any civilization to be totally devoid of surviving tribalistic systems. The gift economy is the only form that’s ever proven entirely independent; no market economy has ever occurred that was not propped up by a gift economy. In our own system, one of the most obvious examples—and one Hyde discusses at length—is science.

The task of science is to describe and explain the physical world, or more generally, to develop an integrated body of theory that can account for the facts, and predict them. Even such a brief prospectus points toward several reasons why ideas might be treated as gifts, the first being that the task of assembling a mass of disparate facts into a coherent whole clearly lies beyond the powers of a single mind or even a single generation. All such broad intellectual undertakings call for a community of scholars, one in which each individual thinker can be awash in the ideas of his comrades so that a sort of ‘group mind’ develops, one that is capable of cognitive tasks beyond the powers of any single person. The commerce of ideas—donated, accepted (or rejected), integrated—constitutes the thinking of such a mind.’ … ideas in physics are discussed, presented at meetings, tried out and known to the inner circle of physicists working in the great centers long before they are published in papers and books. …’ A scientist may conduct his research in solitude, but he cannot do it in isolation. The ends of science require coordination. Each individual’s work must ‘fit,’ and the synthetic nature of gift exchange makes it an appropriate medium for this integration; it is not just people that must be brought together but the ideas themselves. (Hyde, 1983)

We have recently seen an intense flowering of the gift economy, permitted by the peculiar nature of the internet. The first open source projects emerged out of the scientific community, and shared the scientific community’s appreciation for the gift economy (Moody, 2002). More recently, blogging and wiki software have not only used free software, but extended that gift economy approach to other areas of endeavor, creating a similar “hive mind” to the scientific community, that has similarly outpaced hierarchical methods.¹³

However, at the same time, these systems—the market economy and the gift economy—are fundamentally opposed, and though the market economy is dependent on input from gift economies, it is nonetheless compelled to erode them. Because the market economy destroys its own foundation in this manner, it is fundamentally unsustainable, even when divorced from all its material inputs.

In science, as elsewhere, the circulation of gifts produces and maintains community, whilst the conversion of gifts to commodities fragments or destroys that same community. However, we are now witnessing the commodification of ideas within the scientific community. Universities and industrial laboratories, which used to produce basic research that was released into ‘the public domain’ now patent and otherwise protect their research. Discoveries emerge not as contributions but as proprietary ideas for which users must pay a fee, a usury.¹⁴

Market economic entities try to shut down the gift economy on all sides; music and movie producers try to shut down peer-to-peer file sharing services, government regulations constantly threaten to strangle the blogosphere,¹⁵ etc.

Let’s not kid ourselves: This is war. File-sharing is just the tip of the iceberg in the battle between advocates of the Gift Economy and the Market Economy. Believers in the Market Economy see everything as property, and the use of any property without payment as theft. They are using absurdly anti-innovative patent law, armies of lawyers and their control of major political parties to try to crush every aspect of the Gift Economy. Even philanthropy is viewed through a Market lens—they expect a generous tax deduction, and will spend more on self-aggrandizing commercials (for which they also get a tax write-off) telling ‘consumers’ about their ‘generosity’ (for which they expect consumers to give them a lot of additional full-price business in gratitude) than they spend on the philanthropic contribution itself. They don’t like the Internet, which they see as anarchic and uncontrolled, and once planned to set up an Alternate Internet which would be run as a commercial operation.¹⁶

Why is this so? Why is the market economy compelled to wage war on the very gift economy on which it depends for the very scientific and artistic input it requires to remain viable? At its simplest, the two systems create opposite ends.

Our society puts a value on human activities only when they can be monetized—when a transaction involving an exchange of money occurs. We tend to equate our time with money: If the ‘market value’ of an hour of our time exceeds the cost of hiring someone else to mow our lawn or make a present for a loved one or look after our children or our home, we conclude that it makes sense to buy those services and to work longer hours to pay for them.

This false economy leads us to buy what we don’t need, which requires us to work harder to pay for those unnecessary goods and services, leaving us even less time to look after ourselves and our own needs and forcing us, in a vicious cycle (cycle 1 in red on the chart above) to ‘outsource’ even more of the things we might be doing for ourselves. All this phony economic activity is added to the GDP and employment data. Do-it-yourself and other ‘unpaid’ work, and things we make for ourselves, are not considered ‘economic’ activities and hence not included in the statistics that drive our society’s political and economic decisions. No surprise then that the government encourages us to buy what we don’t need and what we could provide for ourselves.

By contrast, the Gift Economy does not value monetized activity more highly than un-monetized activity. It suggests, on the contrary, that our time is invaluable and that therefore we should ’spend’ it, as much as possible, doing things we love and things that are our personal responsibility, and only buy goods and services we cannot possibly provide for ourselves. In doing these things ourselves, we learn to do them better, more efficiently, more effectively and more economically, saving the cost of outsourcing them to a third party.

Thanks to this cost saving, we then need to work less, which gives us more time to do the things we love, creating a virtuous cycle (cycle 2 in green on the chart above) instead of a vicious one.

The economists don’t like us doing this, since this DIY work doesn’t involve the exchange of money or the employment of others to do our own work, and so is not included in GDP or employment data. This is why published trends in GDP and unemployment are meaningless, and why these data provide no useful measure of a society’s well-being.¹⁷

Marshall Sahlins wrote of hunter-gatherers as the “original affluent society,” and this systems approach to the gift economy clearly reveals why. The market economy is most fundamentally a market of scarcity, because scarcity is what the market economy produces. This is seen as a universal, but as any anthropologist knows, this is not the case whatsoever. Gift economies produce abundance.

These cycles are, of course, subversive. They threaten to undermine and starve the ‘market’ economy by freeing us, the end-customers of that economy, from the need to pay money into it. They also threaten to undermine and render irrelevant political structures and institutions that exist to defend economic rights and powers, to wage wars and to mete out scarce economic resources – the Gift Economy voluntarily gives us these rights and powers, has no need of wars to defend them, and operates under a principle of generosity and abundance, not competitiveness and scarcity.¹⁸

We should recognize this for what it truly is: nothing short of war between the market economy and the gift economy, between a system that takes away everything that makes us human in a self-reinforcing cycle of isolation and dehumanization, and a system that grounds us in a firm social network, that ennobles us and makes us human, that brings good tidings of great joy to all humanity. It’s the system Jesus tried to teach us.¹⁹ What would it be like if we really did make Christmas last the whole year long? It would be a gift economy—it would be a tribe. It’s no empty holiday slogan: it’s our birthright. We deserve nothing less, and settling for less is killing us. If we don’t demand more, if we don’t demand what we deserve, and if we don’t do it right now, then we have ceded our right to survive. It’s time we actually did make Christmas last all year—nothing less will do.

Works Cited

Hyde, L. 1983. The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property. New York: Vintage.

Moody, G. 2002. Rebel Code: Linux and the Open Source Revolution. New York: Perseus Books Group.