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The Pentagon’s Potlatch

by John Feffer
Among the Kwakiutl and several other indigenous cultures of the Pacific Northwest, the potlatch was a ritual of hospitality. The host would invite guests to a big feast and then distribute gifts. The distribution was a way of demonstrating the host’s status: the more significant the gifts, the more important the host. Think: swag bags for the pre-celebrity era.
Although this sophisticated social ritual reflected the host’s generosity and connectedness to the community, the potlatch could sometimes lead to a destructive one-upmanship.
“At times these contests would escalate to the point where the distribution of property became inadequate for the expression of a chief’s disregard for wealth and property,” writes anthropologist Neal Keating. “The next step would be to actually destroy property, often by burning it up. He might burn up his canoes, or his house, or the entire village.”
The potlatch ceremony was not only about gift-giving. But the Canadian government, in instituting a ban on the activity in 1885 that lasted nearly 70 years, was particularly uncomfortable with the Native American approach to commodities. By existing outside the logic of capitalism, the potlatch served as a barrier to the assimilation of indigenous people into mainstream consumerism. God forbid that a community should so thoroughly ignore the getting and spending required by capitalism.
The global military-industrial complex similarly stands outside normal market economics. You can’t buy a nuke or even an F-35 on Amazon. The state intervenes in the economy in order to guarantee the production of these items and ensure that they are not available through normal market mechanisms. The state does so, moreover, not so much to make money from their sale — though this happens, too — but to reaffirm the country’s status.
This status is sometimes expressed a different way: deterrence. If we have enough big weapons and you know that we’re packing some serious heat, you’ll think twice about attacking us.http://lobelog.com/the-pentagons-potlatch/#more-33923