The Gift of Degrowth

My father would stand up and pretend he was going to the restroom. Everyone knew what was going on, but we pretended we didn't. When back, he would matter-of-factly announce: “The bill was taken care of.” An uproar of protests would ensue from his friends at the dining table. We children would giggle, knowing what’s coming next. Pantelis, my father’s best man, would jump in. “No, I am paying. No way you are paying this one.” He would pretend he was heading to the cashier with cash in his hand. My father would wrestle him away, the waiter looking at their show with understanding. Pantelis would grudgingly accept his defeat. “Next time, the bill is yours,” my father would console him. Next time, Pantelis would go first to the restroom, my father objecting and wrestling. Next time, Thymios. Then Vangelis. Then it was my father's turn again.  

I recently shared this memory while teaching Marcel Mauss's 1925 essay “The Gift.” A student laughed at how common this “paying-the-bill” theater was in her homeland, Lebanon. The class shared other examples of gifts: sumptuous weddings before the normalization of wedding registries; labor pooling, like hacenderas in Spain or allaksies in Greece; Calendas feasts, or the Guelaguetza potlatch in Oaxaca; mundane experiences like inviting a new friend home for dinner, spending time and money to cook nice food, then being invited back; Wikipedia, which provides free content, sustained by donations or volunteer editors; public libraries where you can borrow books for free, read them, and give them back for others to enjoy.1   

A common pattern unfolds here, which Mauss first noted in ethnographies of “archaic” [sic] Melanesian, Polynesian, and North American Pacific societies.2 The ritual starts with a giver giving a gift. The receiver accepts and returns the gift—sometimes immediately, as in a potlatch, other times later, as in the taverna—either to the giver or to someone else. As gifts change hands, friendships, alliances, and communities are forged. This circulation of gifts, Mauss argued, is the glue of societies. Gifts instill trust, connect people, and prevent humanity from falling into a state of war of all against all. If the newcomers to your shore do not accept your tribe’s gift, the spears come out. 

Gifts do not fit anywhere within the framework of market exchanges, where Homo economicus is supposed to maximize personal gain, or of charity, where uber-altruist givers give and give without taking anything back. The gift transcends this modern dichotomy of selfishness versus altruism. When you give a gift, you give it without the demand of return; doing so would defeat the purpose of it being a gift. But you do know that you should get something back. Or more precisely, you know that if you don’t, this will be the last dinner invitation to that person (a nightmare, I heard in class, for neurodivergent people who miss such cues). While it is therefore accurate to say that “there is no such thing as a free gift,” there is also no gift without the premise of it being free. This is the “conditional unconditionality” of the gift.3 

Friendship, indeed, begins where calculation stops. It would be the end of the taverna dance if my father checked whether Pantelis paid as much as he did in his round. This lack of calculation, premised upon a trust of reciprocation, is liberating. It is also a source of joy, the joy of being free from the chains of one’s own petit and petty self-interest. 

Gifts produce society. They produce friendship, they produce a parea (in Greek, the word for a lifelong group of friends). But gifts also produce mafia: accept the favor of the godfather and you must pay it back, and more. Gifts can reproduce patriarchy, as with male heads playing macho in the taverna, or egalitarianism, as in the labor-pooling potlatches of Oaxaca. They can be open, as with Wikipedia or public libraries, or exclusionary and discriminatory, if say class or race determine one’s ability to partake in the circuit. The choice is not between gifts and non-gifts; the choice is between different kinds of gifts.

Anthropologist David Graeber distinguishes between aristocratic gifts, such as when tribal chiefs or modern magnates conspicuously spend to assert their rank—a rank symbolized in their very ability to spend or give without caring—and communistic gifts, like labor pooling or Wikipedia, where the principle is “from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs.” Graeber argued, after Mauss, that a type of “individualistic communism” (within families, firms, or teams, where the group is externally individualistic but internally communistic) is ever present: not a remnant of older forms of organizing, but what sustains capitalism.4

The gift is therefore not utopian: it already exists everywhere. It is an alternative already here from which we can start. It may not signal a heroic revolution, but it revalues and brings to the forefront an omnipresent “everyday communism” upon which each and every society is built upon.5 The communism of the gift persists and resists as capitalism turns monsoon weddings into wedding gift lists, or cuts pensions and my poor father’s parea now has to split the bill, like the Northerners we once thought of as an awkward version of our species (at least my father and his friends split the bill equally).

Gift circulation is very different from money circulation. If you buy an item from the grocery store, you will not return the next day to give the grocer something of yours back. You pay money and you are gone. Money is the glue of the capitalist society-cum-economy. Unlike the gift, however, money does not carry anything of the personality of the worker who produced it: it is just an equivalent form representing the share of society’s pool of salaried labor that went into the thing you bought.6 Money homogenizes the varied labors that it represents, turning them into a single arithmetic, disguising exploitation under seemingly equal exchange. Money, for those who have more than what they can buy, is useless. It must be put to seek more money; more money invested to make even more money in an ever-expanding spiral. This is the kernel of limitless growth, the signature feature of capitalist civilization and the source of our planet’s current perils. 

Unlike money, the gift is personal and concrete. It carries something of the soul of the giver or of the spirit of the community that gives it. For lack of ethnographic experience, let me indulge in one more personal illustration. 

The island of Andros, July 1981. My mother, father, sister, and I found ourselves off the beaten track after the end of the asphalted road, in the mountainous village of Katakalei. Leonidas saw the four of us lost Athenians from his mule and invited us to his home. His wife Marika quickly improvised a huge banquet, with all the delicacies harvested from their farm. They asked us to sleep at their place and the next day they gave us a two-hour mule ride and picnic to Achla, one of the most beautiful, then secluded beaches of the Aegean. When we returned, my mother, a dermatologist, looked at each of the children and elders of the village in Leonidas’s house one by one, prescribing treatments for their skin troubles. She and my father became Leonidas’s and Marika’s family doctors in Athens, hosting them in our house, treating them for free and referring them to colleagues as friends, which back then meant free treatment too. Our Andriot friends would bring us cheese, tomatoes, or a chicken from the village, and their house was open to us every summer.  

The point here is not that Marika, Leonidas, and my parents were altruists or politically-inclined to share (Andriots, in fact, are known for their ultra-conservative politics). They were simply behaving according to norms well established in Greece at the time. With each round of gift, each giving something of themselves, a friendship was forged, a friendship of particulars, between specific people, involving specific, memorable acts of giving and receiving—goods, favors, hospitalities. Their relationship was incommensurable and by its constitution could not be scaled or grow. It could not be capitalized and invested. It was circular. If the logic of the market is gain, and its result is growth, the logic of the gift is justice, and the result a circular steady-state. Justice not in the sense of giving equally, but giving in equivalence to one’s abilities (as a doctor, as a farmer), in relation to each one’s needs (to be hosted, to get treated).  

Gift circulation is often not endless; it sometimes comes to an end through a sacrifice or a spectacular squander. Gift exchanges channel and dramatize what Georges Bataille theorized as cosmic excess, the surplus solar energy whose expenditure curses human societies, since it is through this expenditure that societies search for and construct meaning.7 Surplus takes the form of shells, valuables, or free time to give, which get circulated as gifts, passing like a hot potato from hand to hand, back and forth, demanding return until, in many rituals, they are ceremoniously sacrificed, returned to nature from where they came as what economists call “free gifts.”8 If capital hoards the free surplus of nature, gifts give it back; if capital grows by holding, the gift lives by letting go.

In the drama of potlaches, carnivals, or feasts, we have the opposite of the logic that drives growth, where surplus is productively invested into making the means of production more productive, further expanding surplus to infinity. Non-capitalist societies stopped, we might say, the genie of growth in its infancy, spending the surplus in works of glory like cathedrals and pyramids, or returned it to nature through sacrifices and ritualized squandering. Instead of thinking of these societies as failing to grow, we could revisit them as societies that chose not to follow this path. Not only does squandering stop growth in its tracks, but expending surplus in common is the core source of collective joy, a joy that feminist scholar Lynne Segal locates today in protests and carnivals, dinner parties and feasts.9  

It sounds paradoxical, but times of ecological crisis and global poverty, when we feel overwhelmed by a sense of scarcity, are precisely when we need less calculation, less restraint, and more mindless giving and useless squandering.10 That’s difficult for environmentalists and global justice activists to stomach. How can we have a surplus to squander if we must stop using fossil fuels, or if we must pay back colonial debts? Some may protest that my claim comes from a point of geographical or class privilege, a refusal to come to terms with the legacy of colonialism, or take up ecological duties. Leaving aside the fact that Greeks, Lebanese, and other Southerners—in Souths and Souths within Norths—have little colonial or ecological debts to feel guilty for, but know well how to squander and find joy amidst the worst of disasters or poverty, my claim here is different. 

This seemingly irresponsible posture to get wasted is the only radical posture. Only this way can we bury for good the Western, colonial/capitalist mindset that has its roots in a Protestant ethic of frugal duty and which fuels endless accumulation—an accumulation legitimated now even with noble injunctions “to develop,” “to repay,” “to redistribute and give justice.”11 What if instead, at long last, we stopped saving and developing and gave up, and in? Squandering, because what we have is not ours to keep; it is not anyone’s. And giving, not because we are guilty of our sins and debts, but because we are finally humble enough to accept gifts back, and at long last, connect to others as equals. 

If money is the glue of “the economy,” gifts are the glue of society, and it is from there that we can start thinking what a different society—one that is not molded and ruled by the dictates of the economy—could look like. A society of “degrowth,” where people live well with little, where everyone has access to what they need for a decent life, where pleasure and joy are collective and abundant.12  

The seeds of degrowth are already here, wherever people give without counting and receive without asking. The gift opens the tantalizing prospect of a total social system of interlinked gift institutions, exchanges, festivities, arts, aesthetics: a social system where the economic exchange of goods is the side effect, and not the purpose. From this perspective, degrowth is about reorganizing circulation from accumulation through money to circulation through gifts, producing a sociality of uncalculated reciprocity, unproductive expenditure, and collective joy.

But how is this to be done? Much of the current degrowth debate remains trapped in the calculative language of economics: carbon budgets, shrinking footprints, income schemes, formulas for taxes and money creation. As necessary as these are, they remain internal to the logic they seek to overcome—a logic of benefits and measurable outcomes. A gift logic instead welcomes institutions that invite people to give, to receive, and to return. Seen from this angle, many familiar proposals take on a different meaning, and new ones emerge.

What if we approached universal income, for example, as a collective gift: an unconditional provision that enables people to take care of themselves and their kin, trusting that they will give back in ways that cannot be predefined or measured? What if public healthcare, education, or free transport were seen as ongoing cycles of mutual care, where today’s receiver is tomorrow’s giver? What if schemes of job guarantees were reimagined as institutions of organized friendship? Sure, these policies offer social protection, provide human wellbeing, help plan and reallocate resources or redistribute wealth. But what other vistas and political imaginations may open, and what support may such institutional changes amass, if we were to advocate for them within a consistent framework that puts community, bonding, and friendship first?

Further, and to paraphrase Bataille, the construction of a public library, the funding of arts and humanities, or a street carnival are just as important elements of a new economy as is the production of renewable energy and public transport infrastructures. Spaces and rituals like these acculturate people to the logic of the communal gift and channel human energies around it.    

Several real existing infrastructures of everyday life embody gifts: shared meals, repair collectives, festivals, commons, spaces where time and effort are given without equivalence and returned without calculation. Hacenderas, disaster kitchens and solidarity clinics, village feasts, student sit-ins for Palestine: these are all circuits of gift circulation, where people pool and give their time in acts of generosity. Like Polynesian gifts imbued with the soul of the giver, what circulates is not just aid or conflict, but attachment, connection, grief, and joy. It is precisely this affective dimension that any politics of degrowth must take seriously.

The obstacle to degrowth is not only the material dependence on growth, but also the libidinal attachment to its logics that we have all internalized. I am thinking here of the impulse for “personal growth,” to have “an impact,” to “transform” and leave our imprint in this world.13 This might read harsh, but the quest to have an impact is as much the impulse of the businessman as it is of the activist. We are all much more growthists than we are willing to concede. And we will remain so, unless we follow the gift to where it takes us. The gift takes us beyond the moral injunction to do more good deeds and less bad stuff. It opens a different way of searching for meaning: meaning through the pleasure of uncalculated giving, by participating in something that exceeds oneself, by letting go of our own inflated self-importance and the vain illusion that we will be the ones who change the world, all the way to the liberation of being simply “common people” who will work, squander, suffer, love, and die like anyone else. 

I am not sure what politics will lead us to new circuits of giving. I suspect it will vary from place to place. But something in my belly tells me that a political project articulated around the feeling emanating from stories like the ones shared here is more likely to appeal to the hearts of common people. It will certainly appeal more than the fears of climate disaster or the calculated benefits of a better social system. Politics stems from passion—passion like that of a parea uselessly debating and joking for hours over a dinner table; passion like that of a crazy feast; of the unforgettable hospitality one receives on a new island from a stranger; of a newfound friendship or unexpected romantic encounter; of dancing till sunrise to the music of your favorite band; of being lost with new friends in the streets during a carnival; of singing while hugged with others in a protest; of celebrating a goal in a football match; of meditating or praying peacefully with like-minded others. This is a passion that moves mountains, and mountains we must move if we want to move towards anything remotely akin to degrowth.