Genevieve Vaughan
Vaughan is a matriarchy researcher, she believes that capitalism and the focus on the market and market economy does not aim at fulfilling actual needs, but at winning and losing in an economic system of often artificially created scarcity (Schonpflug 2008: 209). She claims that this finally creates useless waste, poverty, and war, and harms the majority of people and benefits a small elite.
- Vaughan deduces this currently prevalent economic system from the establishment of a gendered world in a system of patriarchy: she claims that men must refuse to give gifts to others, like their mothers did for them when they were children, in order to establish their masculinity (by being unlike their mothers).
- “Exchange creates and requires scarcity. If everyone were giving to everyone else, there would be no need for exchange. The market needs scarcity to maintain the level of prices. In fact when there is an abundance of products, scarcity is often created on purpose… On a larger scale, scarcity is created:
- By the channeling of wealth into the hands of the few who then have power over the many;
- By spending on armaments and monuments which have no nurturing value but only serve for destruction and display of power; and
- By privatizing or depleting the environment so that the gifts of nature are unavailable to the many.
“The exchange paradigm is a belief system which validates this kind of behavior. Individuals who espouse it are functional to the economic system of which they are a part. Exchange is adversarial, each person tries to give less and get more, an attitude which creates antagonism and distance among the players. Gift giving creates and requires abundance. In fact, in scarcity gift giving is difficult and even self sacrificial, while in abundance it is satisfying and even delightful”