Celebrities Untuned
We’re now deep enough into the pandemic to do a bit of pop-cultural excavation. You may have the misfortune of recalling singer Madonna’s bizarre video dispatch from a bathtub strewn with rose petals, during first lockdown in March 2020. The dampened diva declared the coronavirus “the great equalizer” that “doesn’t care how rich you are.” By clicking here you consent to cringe.
At least she didn’t sing. A few days prior to Madonna’s bathtub manifesto, Wonder Woman star Gal Gadot petitioned a clutch of famous friends (see above) to perform John Lennon’s song “Imagine” with her online. By clicking here you consent to cringe.
The backlash was immediate. Many commentators zeroed in on the jaw-dropping irony of multimillionaires warbling “imagine no possessions” off-key from their mansions, while the toilet paper-hoarding masses were juggling responsibilities in smaller, less beautiful confines.
The song “Imagine,”primarily a laundry list of negations - no heaven, no countries, no religion, and no possessions - is a peculiar hymn for peace. Lennon himself described his biggest solo hit song as “virtually The Communist Manifesto, even though I am not particularly a communist and I do not belong to any movement…. But because it is sugarcoated, it is accepted.”
This makes Gadot’s musical misfire with “Imagine” doubly ironic. Rich celebrities, at no risk of having their bling nicked by the state, are free to sweetly sing of a world where things are different.
This two-piece article isn’t really about celebrity, however. It’s ultimately about who owns what, and the owners who don’t want any attention at all.
Finders Keepers
“Property is nine-tenths of the problem,” insisted Dr. Winston O’Boogie - one of John Lennon’s nom de plumes. And in the history of the west, the nature of property and its justification indeed remains something of a problem for philosophers, social policy wonks, legal scholars and political leaders alike.
Karl Marx was motivated in his early writings by the post-feudal horrors of early capitalism, and his writings remain relevant to the present day - perhaps because his central insight - that history can be understood as a struggle between capital and labour - still holds true even in age of AI and robotics. He coauthored The Communist Manifesto in 1848 with Friedrich Engels, the rich son of a British cotton mill owner, who later helped shift Marx’s angry rhetoric into the data-driven prose of Das Kapital.
But as theory became practice, things went downhill. The failure of the genocidal Soviet and Chinese experiments didn’t do much to make Marx’s variant of communism look as inevitable - or humane - as the economic historian insisted.
In any case, Marx, who wrote and looked like an angry Old Testament prophet, was absolute on the issue of ownership. “The theory of Communism may be summed up in one sentence: Abolish all private property,” he wrote.
In developing his ideas, Marx drew upon and then inverted the 17th century English philosopher John Locke, who argued in support of individual property rights as natural rights. The fruits of labour are the labourer’s own because he worked for it. And if the labourer is working a piece land, the labour he puts in makes it his own (excuse the gender-based language, I’m paraphrasing a dead pink patriarchal penis person).
“Property, any object or right that can be owned. Ownership involves, first and foremost, possession; in simple societies to possess something is to own it,” wrote Locke, rather tautologically. But what happens with the discovery of a new land occupied by a “simple society” that has made no previous claim of possession, legibly inscribed on something more permanent than a beaver pelt?
We all know the answer to that one. Locke’s intellectual dithering wasn’t required as legal ballast for the colonial claims of the British Empire, or any of the other empires - French, Dutch, German, Spanish or Portuguese. The conquerors simply waltzed in and took what they wanted by trickery or force. And in constructing their societies in new lands, the legalistic ideas of private property of the imperial powers were like antimatter to the semi-articulated matter of aboriginal societies, in which people are bound to the land and each other in pre-legal, mythological arrangements of reciprocal exchange.
The Gift Economy
The salmon are not subject to the will of the Indians; the imagination is not subject to the will of the artist. To accept the fruits of these things as gifts is to acknowledge that we are not their owners or masters, that we are, if anything, their servants, their ministers.
- Lewis Hyde, The Gift: The Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property
In many aboriginal cultures, the person deemed worthy of respect and adulation isn’t the one who accumulates the most possessions, but the one who gives them all away - as in the potlatch ceremonies still conducted today among West Coast aboriginals.
This widespread pattern of communal giving among “primitive people” was documented by early twentieth century anthropologists like Franz Boas and Bronislaw Malinowski. This sometimes involves the smallest of items. Among the Trobriand Islanders, it could take as long as 20 years for a necklace or armband to circulate around the islands and return to its original owner. Such objects were never intended as possessions to be hoarded, but rather as prizes to cherish for a time and then pass on.
In his 1983 book The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property, writer Lewis Hyde notes that gifts in aboriginal societies are a class of property whose value lies not only in their use, but “which literally cease to exist as gifts” if they are not understood as part of a communal network of reciprocal exchange. They are material expression of immaterial sympathy. They are invested with imagination.
Imagine that.
Even though gift cycles were never the sum total of aboriginal market relations, early explorers and settlers were confused by exchanges that generated no discernible profit. In the first colony of Massachusetts, the Puritan settlers were so puzzled by the natives’ unique concept of property that they gave it a name. “An Indian gift is the proverbial expression signifying a present for which an equivalent return in expected,” Thomas Hutchison wrote in his 1764 history of the colony.
“Indian giver” is an epithet today, but it echoes back to this archaic, tacit philosophy in which ownership is communal, rather than individual.
Hyde points out that the opposite of “Indian giver” would be something like “white man keeper” or “capitalist.” In other words, “a person whose instinct is to remove property from circulation, to put in a warehouse or museum (or, more to the point for capitalism, to lay it aside to be used for production.)”
Australian Aborigines commonly refer to their own clan as ‘my body,’ using a personal expression of enlarged identity – just as we do in a marriage ceremony when we speak of ‘one flesh.’ “When we are in the spirit of the gift, we love to feel the body open outward,” Hyde observes. In contrast, the assumptions of modern-day market exchange favour the growth of all number of boundaries, and tend to shrink the self inward.
Today, these boundaries are obvious in the enormous disparities between rich and poor nations, and within nations themselves. And there are other more subtle boundaries, such as the market-driven walls we create between one another, and within our own hearts and minds. Many of us compartmentalize to function properly, internalizing the values of commodification. And some of us live vicariously through the richly rewarded stars of the media-industrial complex.
In any case, the Internet is the closest thing we have today to aboriginal gift cycles. The open-source movement, in which anonymous programmers tinker with and improve publicly accessible software code, and the “CopyLeft” movement to introduce a “creative commons” for freely distributed artistic works, defy classical economists’ expectations of how people are supposed to behave in a market economy. Who voluntarily works for free, wanting only to contribute to a greater good? Millions, apparently. Of course, many if not most of them are working on an angle for monetizing their contributions, not that there’s anything wrong with that (Lord knows I am…or will).
But in any case, Homo economicus is expected to behave like a “self-maximizing utility producer,” not some gift-flogging primitive!
Part 2 to follow.
-It's laughable how many people participate in online forums pushing the line that people will only work if there is a material pay off involved. And yet they labor away for hours a day, without pay, arguing the point. Why? Because it turns them outwards, towards the commons, doing something they love, which is arguing against the concept of the commons. It's ironic.
There has to be a better way to live and your examples of how life could possibly be, may provide a template. Thank you.
Hey Geoff, fun fact: Gift mean poison in German. All poison, all the time...looking forward to the second part!