What is a Potlatch?

We love our junk. It doesn’t matter if its deep fried, chrome-plated, fun sized, customized, one-of-a-kind or adult oriented, whatever they’re selling we’re buying. While 37 million Americans live below the poverty line and go hungry, 13 million of which are children, self-storage has grown into a thriving industry. We have more rubbish than space to house it.

We’ve become a nation of pack rats, sleeping on shifting heaps of designer footwear and widgets from Ron Popeil. We’ve been programmed to only experience fun when it includes a money back guarantee. Our culture has been reduced to squirreling away anything that’s not consumed.

But there are other options. Take the Native American festival known as the Potlatch. Celebrated by Indians on the Pacific Northwest, each member of the community would hunt and farm throughout the summer, gathering what they could from the earth. To redistribute this wealth voluntarily tribes met, exchanged gifts, sang, recited poetry and praised the spirits for their blessings. Multi-colored costumes and masks, and energetic dances added to the gala. Those who gave most were held in the highest esteem. The needy received goods and care despite their social status.

We don’t have a cultural equivalent of a potlatch. Nothing quite envelopes the charitable, educational, communal, celebratory and spiritual components of such an event. And maybe that’s intentional. Canada, a country whose history isn’t as innocuous as most believe, outlawed potlatches. One missionary said potlatches were “by far the most formidable of all obstacles in the way of Indians becoming Christians, or even civilized." (source) Anyone found at a potlatch could be jailed for two to six months. A hefty penalty for attending a party.

The functions served by potlatches can best explain why they are so frightening to elites. First, and most obvious, would be economic redistribution. If the needs of every individual in a community are met then crime rates decrease, upholding the security of that neighborhood. Second, it transmits cultural memory. The songs, stories, traditions, dances, beliefs and so forth that compose each community’s idiosyncratic character is passed down from the older to the younger generations. Third, the act of giving reinforces the concept of usufruct. For those who are unfamiliar with the term usufruct refers to owning property for just as long as it’s useful to you. After completing a job or outgrowing an item, pass it along instead of locking it away so it’s no longer productive to anyone. This simple gesture helps improve a community. Lastly, potlatches cultivate bonds of solidarity between community members. Think of how good you feel when somebody gives you a gift. Imagine if your neighbors always pooled their resources to keep your garden growing or gave you the tools to fix your car. Wouldn’t that urge you to reciprocate?

For me, this is what any successful revolution needs: a strong identity, unbendable human relationships and a sensible dispersal of wealth. There might be a future for this type of experience through the internet, but it is up to us to carry this out of the realm of thought into the realm of action.

Consumerism and Its Discontents

"The marketplace of ideas, like any marketplace, is fit only for looting.

"Our rebellion is a rebellion against the commodity, against the world of the commodity in which worker-consumers are hierarchically subordinated to commodity standards. We take modern capitalist propaganda, its publicity of abundance, literally. We want to possess immediately all the objects shown and abstractly accessible, because we want to use them. Through theft and gift we rediscover a use that immediately refutes the oppressive rationality of the commodity, revealing its relations and even its production to be arbitrary and unnecessary. Looting is the most direct realization of the distorted principle: "To each according to their needs" - needs determined and produced by the economic system which the very act of looting rejects.

"Once the vaunted abundance is taken at face value and directly seized, instead of being eternally pursued in the rat-race of alienated labor and increasingly unmet social needs, real desires begin to be expressed in festive celebration, in playful self-assertion, in the potlatch of destruction. People who destroy commodities show their human superiority over commodities. They stop submitting to the arbitrary forms that distortedly reflect their real needs. Once it is no longer bought, the commodity lies open to criticism and alteration, whatever particular form it may take. Only when it is paid for with money is it respected as an admirable fetish, as a symbol of status within the world of survival.

"Looting is a natural response to the unnatural and inhuman society of commodity abundance. It instantly undermines the commodity as such, and it also exposes what the commodity ultimately implies: the military, the police and the other specialized detachments of the state’s monopoly of armed violence.

"What is a policeman? He is the active servant of the commodity, the man in complete submission to the commodity, whose job it is to ensure that a given product of human labor remains a commodity, with the magical property of having to be paid for, instead of becoming a mere refrigerator or rifle - a passive, inanimate object, subject to anyone who comes along to make use of it.

"In a world where everything already belongs to someone else, where we are expected to sell away our lives at work in order to get the money to pay for the minimum we need to survive, where we are surrounded by forces beyond our control or comprehension that obviously are not concerned about our needs or welfare, shoplifting is a way to carve out a little piece of the world for ourselves - to act back upon a world that acts so much upon us.

"It is an entirely different sensation than the one we feel when we buy something. When we pay for something, we’re making a trade; we’re offering the money that we bought with our labor, our time, and our creativity for a product or service that the corporation wouldn’t share with us under any other circumstances. In a sense, we have a relationship based on violence: we negotiate an exchange not according to our respect or concern for each other, but according to the forces that we can bring to bear on each other.

"Shoplifting is a refusal of the exchange economy. It is a denial that people deserve to eat, live, and die based on how effectively they are able to exchange their labor and capital with others. It is a denial that a monetary value can be ascribed to everything, that having a piece of delicious chocolate in your mouth is worth exactly fifty cents or that an hour of one person’s life can really be worth ten dollars more than that of another person. It is a refusal to accept the capitalist system, in which workers have to buy back the products of their own labor at a profit to the owners of capital.

"We must rediscover the pleasure of giving: giving because we have so much. What beautiful and priceless potlatches the affluent society will see - whether it likes it or not! - when the exuberance of the younger generation discovers the pure gift. The growing passion for stealing books, clothes, food, software, music and movies simply for the pleasure of giving them away gives us a glimpse of what the Will to Live has in store for consumer society."