(Conference Speech) The Maternal Economy and Patriarchal Capitalism by Genevieve Vaughan

[Author’s Note: A few months ago I met several Kurdish women in Rome who were traveling around Europe telling people about the situation in their area, which lies  between Syria, Turkey and Iraq and informing us about the women’s movement there and the women’s village they had created. I was invited to speak on Patriarchy and Capitalism at an international  conference held  by the Kurds last weekend and just the day after the conference was over the news came that the Turks were attacking the area. We do not know if the village will still exist tomorrow.
This paper is the text of my speech. I am asking the RTM editor to include the statement of the women of the village, called ‘Jinwar’ (‘Jin’ in Kurdish means women and ‘war’ means place).]

Dear friends of JINWAR,

we, the women and children from the free women’s village JINWAR in Northern Syria, write this letter to you, who were in contact with us or had the oportunity visit us. During your time here you could get to know us, our village, and our daily life. You could see what we have built up: the houses made of clay, in which we live together, the school, the healing center for natural medicine which is supposed to be opened soon, our bakery, the garden, the fields, all the trees, which grow bigger and bigger and all of all our common life, far away from oppression and violence, based upon our will to live together as free women and children.

All this is now under direct threat by the Turkish State, which openly launches attacks against Northern Syria. Erdogan’s plan is to extinguish the Kurdish people and to occupy our region. We can see the results of this politics in Afrîn, which has been occupied by Turkey, DAIŞ and other Jihadist groups. The situation in Afrîn turned out really bad for the people, especially for the women, whose rights are taken away, who suffer from violence and rape, who are sold and treated as slaves. The attacks and another occupation by the Turkish state in other parts of Northern Syria could mean the same brutal exploitation for women here.

JINWAR is a place where women are able to live in a communal way and autonomously raise and educate their children freely and without huge daily influence of the dominant male mentality. Many brave women and men fought and gave their lives, in order to liberate this territory and make the possibility to build a new democratic system inspired by the concept of Democratic Confederalism. This system is based on ideas of Abdullah Ocalan concerning women’s freedom and self-administration of different ethnic and social groups, which are living here side by side together. Our village JINWAR is a part and in the same time a result of this revolutionary process. Furthermore, it is also practical example, how we, as women, can create alternatives in fields as communal living, ecology and economy. During this process many things have been built here in Rojava: Women are organizing autonomously in every city. Examples for this are “Kongreya Star” and “Mala Jin”(Women’s houses), where women are gathering and developing solutions for problems of the whole society. In the “Mala Jin” women are supporting each other in solving conflicts in families and the whole society. Women’s leadership and participation in decision making processes is also a key component of the direct democracy model being enacted in Rojava. Through that women could gain a new position in society and in politics. This achievements can be an example for all the women in the world.

In the moment we are writing this letter different villages and places around have been bombed and many people have already been killed. Our village, our society, our lives and the life and future of all people here, especially women and children, is under urgent threat.

We, as women and children from JINWAR call you to raise up your voices and take action against this war. Use all the possibilities you have to spread information and raise awareness about the Turkish occupation politics! Don’t stay silent! Lets stand up together for free life and for our common future!

The Maternal Economy and Patriarchal Capitalism by Genevieve Vaughan

“Woman and economy are interwoven components. Because she generates economy according to fundamental needs only, a woman-driven economy never experiences depression; it never causes environmental pollution; and it never poses a threat to the climate. When we cease to produce for profit, we will have achieved the liberation of the world. This in turn will be the liberation of humanity and life itself.”  Abdullah Ocalan

I was born in the USA in 1939 and have been working on the idea of a gift economy as the basic human and humanizing economy since the 1960’s,first  as a young woman using the discipline of semiotics and later as a feminist devoted to social change. It is astounding to me that a Kurdish leader, a man who has been in solitary confinement for 20 years could have come up with such important ideas about women and the gift economy, some of them quite similar to mine and it confirms to me that though coming from very different directions we are travellers on the same path, trying to see the truth behind the false front of patriarchal capitalism, the system that is now destroying humanity and Mother Earth. It is not the true calling of feminism to integrate more women into the market but to provide a viable alternative to matricidal patriarchal capitalism.

I believe that a general theory of mothering and the gift economy are necessary for the healing of our planet and our species. As the subtitle of one of our network’s anthologies says “A radically different world view is possible” and it is necessary now. The absence of this worldview from our cultural consciousness is one of the main causes of the present crisis of climate and civilization. By revealing and naming the gift economy that already exists in maternal practice we can highlight and finally see the gift-plundering aspects of the market in patriarchal capitalism, which otherwise may seem neutral or even creative and benign.

In fact we have to change the parameters of our discourse as well as the so called ‘narrative’. I will start from one of the conclusions I intend to draw: we are not basically homo sapiens but homo donans and recipiens, the giving and receiving being. In fact we have to give and receive before we can know. Against all appearances to the contrary, we are a deeply maternal species, and it is the contradiction of this through male dominance and the market economy, that has brought us to this end of the world scenario.

Mothering is work, a job that is mostly done by birth mothers but can be done by anyone, male or female, siblings or other relatives, friends or even whole villages. It is required by the long period in which the human infant is completely dependent on others’ care for her or his survival. The care has to be unilateral and free because the child does not understand quid pro quo exchange and cannot give back an equivalent of what she has been given. Nevertheless, maternal gift giving can also be done by caregivers who are paid to do the job. For the child who does not understand exchange the care is free. The model of the unilaterally giving motherer is present, evident and meaningful to all children throughout their early years because they require unilateral gifting care for  survival.To begin to understand the importance of the gift economy let me reference Marx’s thought that “ The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men, the language of real life. Conceiving, thinking, the mental intercourse of men, appear at this stage as the direct efflux of their material behavior.”

This is the Marxist idea of the basis of consciousness in adults’ material intercourse – that is the way they procure their livelihood.

So I ask, how do children procure their livelihood? By being nurtured, and consequently if Marx is right, their consciousness comes as the direct efflux of their material behavior, their reception of free maternal nurturing. Seen in this way, materialism has a grounding in an other oriented interchange prior to the market, a human interaction that is not ‘materialistic’.

Recent scientific research on infancy gives us an idea of the importance of maternal gifting: Allan Schore (1994, 2001) explains how the attachment between mothers and children influences the development of neuron connections in the first year.

He, Daniel Siegel and others have developed the discipline of interpersonal neurobiology, an approach breaking from previous research, which studied children as isolated individuals. Says Siegel:

“Given that interpersonal relationships guide how we focus our attention and therefore how our neural firing patterns emerge, our social experiences can directly shape our neural architecture. Put simply our relational connections shape our neural connections.”. (2012:15) For young children these interpersonal relationships take place on the basis of a free gift economy, but later they have to adjust to the market logic and its relations of quid pro quo, which instrumentalize and contradict the gift relations that originally shaped their neural architecture.

 Satisfying another’s needs unilaterally gives value to the other by implication : if the child were not valuable to the  mother she would not satisfy her needs. This implication registers in the child as self esteem and the accomplishment of nurturing can give satisfaction also to the motherer, creating an ongoing relation of mutuality and trust between them.  I call this implication of the value of the receiver ‘gift value’ and I believe ignoring it has created an important lacuna in economic theory. In fact, maternal gifting takes place when mind and body have not yet been divided by later developments of patriarchy and exchange.

When a product that might have been a gift becomes a commodity its value splits into a relational and a non-relational side. Exchange value is the relation between the product and all the other commodities on the market for the exchangers as expressed in money, while use value is only the utility of the object, a relation (if any) between the user and the object, not a relation among people. Gift value is cancelled during the exchange except when it reappears through forced or manipulated gifts.

The concentration on utility and/or price, places the object outside any relation among people making it appear to be only a relation between objects and money, while satisfying his or her needs seems to be only the individual’s own responsibility. No implication of value is given to the people themselves through the transaction but value is attributed only to the objects exchanged.

Focussing on the maternal gift economy allows us to contrast it with the market and to use it as an interpretative key to understand exploitation as the taking of gifts. In fact market exchange perverts and denies gifting while channeling some of its implications of value  ‘upwards’ along with the free aspects of commodities. Surplus labor, the part of the workers’ labor that is not covered by the salary is forced or leveraged from the worker but is given free to the capitalist. Similarly, the free gifts of nurturing and housework that are given by women pass into the surplus labor of the family members (and their own) and from there pass through to the capitalist. The gifts that are taken from nature through privatization and commodification of previously free resources like water, seeds and fertilizer also flow gratis to the capitalist. I suspect that this flow of gifts also maintains an implication of the value of the capitalist and is one reason why he or she continues to want more of them, so as to seem to deserve the power over others his or her wealth provides. Since the gift economy is mostly invisible and is misnamed and misunderstood, those who practice it do not realize that the market system is actually parasitic on their free gifts. In fact, profit itself, the motivator of the whole system is made of these free gifts. If people do not succeed in making profit (capturing gifts), they do not receive the implication of value and may believe they are worthless. Since many women do gifting in the home but do not receive gifts from others, their value is not implied and their self-esteem is not confirmed. They give gifts and services to men, implying their value while they receive few gifts from anyone (perhaps if they are lucky they receive part of the husband’s salary, the money to buy the means of their unilateral giving)

The market is said to be necessary to distribute goods in scarcity but actually it creates the scarcity which is useful for its own dominion. If abundance were allowed to accumulate no one would work in the market in order to survive. People would simply nurture one another. Therefore, the market creates the scarcity that is necessary for its maintenance of control. It does this through wars that spend (waste!) trillions on armaments and destroy infrastructure that has to be replaced while immediately killing  millions of precious human beings who are the weavers of the web of life and destroying many gifts of nature and culture that can never be replaced.

Because of the patriarchal gender binary and the market, we have divided the gift economy from the exchange economy, putting the gift economy in a ‘domestic sphere’, making the exchange the main social nexus and the market, the main social venue for everyone, while free giving is considered an ‘externality’. We must take up the power of naming and call maternal gifting ‘economic’ at the same level as exchange. This causes the market economy to lose its hegemony at least over the semantic field of economics. ‘Free’ is a mode of distribution on a par with exchange and in fact the free maternal satisfaction of needs is more efficient than the market, since the giver delves into the need of the other in order to provide an appropriate good or service. The motherers’ attention to the needs and to their appropriate detailed satisfaction educate the child’s needs and tastes, and these become part of the child’s identity. The market only satisfies the other’s needs through the mechanism of ‘effective demand’ and educates them to want the most expensive products, that is, to satisfy the seller’s need for profit. In fact ‘supply and demand’ are a kind of translation of ‘gift’ and ‘need’ into market lingo. There are so many things I could say about the gift economy  in contrast to patriarchal capitalism but I do not have time to do it here.

I think what we have missed is the importance of the maternal model for society at large, a model that is presented to everyone in early childhood and that forms the basis of our common humanity. Later other models prevail. The masculinist power-over model and the model of commodity exchange are variations on the simpler model of giving to satisfy needs and receiving what is given.. These variations are ego oriented and self-confirming and they overtake and supplant the maternal model of the gift both in reality and at a meta level of abstract understanding.

The present environmental crisis is actually the result of Patriarchal Capitalism’s matricidal attack on gift gifting Mother Earth and it is pushing us to radically change our ways.. Now is the time to finally recognize that we are a maternal species, to give up both Patriarchy and Capitalism and even the market economy as such in order to embrace the maternal model of the unilateral gift.

Let me return to Ocalan’s words about women’s economy that I quoted in the beginning.

When we cease to produce for profit, we will have achieved the liberation of the world. This in turn will be the liberation of humanity and life itself.

(Meet Mago Contributor) Genevieve Vaughan.