There is a way out of capitalism, and it feels great.

“Even after all this time, the sun never says to the earth, ‘You owe me.’
Look what happens with a love like that
it lights the whole sky.”
The poet Hafiz

Image: The Packer

Last Sunday, I had a brief taste of an economy based on gift, and it felt great. That night, I had a dream that gifting was rising like a river, while the capitalist economy dried up. Office buildings were turning into dance halls. People were giving each other what they needed, and there was peace.

The day had started like my usual Sunday, with a trip to the Heart of the City farmers’ market in SF’s Civic Center. I always have a great time there. The farmers don’t usually give food away, but the prices are very low, and if someone in need asks nicely for free food, they usually get it. Along with my vegetables, I bought a lot of berries, which are in season now and delicious.

As I left the market, I realized I had way more strawberries than I could use, so I started offering them to people working at Civic Center. One guy was in a booth lending out games for people to play, for free. Another woman was running the elevator that my scooter takes to get down to the platform. I just had them open my carrier and take as many as they wanted. Everyone took two or three.

Then I went to Sunday Streets in the Mission District. Sunday Streets is a movable block party the city holds five times a year in different neighborhoods. This one was ten blocks long, with tables on the streets from city agencies, civic groups, and vendors; along with a skateboard block, art activities, DJs, dance performers, and sales people giving out free samples.

One whole block was devoted to Native American tables. There was food and music, but mostly they were people selling homemade jewelry. I stopped by one woman selling beautiful beaded bracelets and necklaces made with turquoise. I was just looking, not thinking of buying anything, when I thought to offer her some berries. She looked in the bag and happily took a handful. She said, “Would you like to do a trade?”

I hadn’t thought of that; I was just passing out berries, but I said, “Sure. That would be great.” She picked out a bracelet and fastened it around my wrist. Then we both smiled, gave a brief hand clasp, and I moved on, feeling happier than I had all week.

Since then, I’ve been noticing all the ways people gift each other. When you add all the gifts and caregiving up, it might come to a large chunk of all the human economy, but such unpaid activity never gets counted.

Like in our high rise apartment building, there is a shelf in the lobby where people leave food for others to take. I sometimes take a cabbage or leave some fruit I overbought at the farmers’ market. People always take them.

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Lobby shelf on a slow day

Sunday Streets itself is a massive gift from hundreds of volunteers. They publicize; they set up the tables and take them down, guide people to where they want to go. They sign up the people who want to present. They collaborate with the police department to close off cross streets and station crossing guards on intersections that aren’t blocked off. It’s a huge collective effort organized by a group called Livable City. This group solicits grants to pay a few staff and pay for printing posters and flyers, but mostly they volunteer.

It feels good to give. I have friends who take in foster dogs and others who clean up neighborhood streets. One neighbor planted lovely flowers all around our building for free, enriching the day for anyone who takes time to look.

These are all small gifts, but they show that gifting is a normal human practice. If you look at a long term picture of human history, you see that in most places and times, societies and economies were largely held together by gift. Gifting by definition does not make any money, which is why the capitalist West has worked for centuries to suppress it. Now, gift is coming back, and we desperately need it.

History of gift economies

In the beginning was the gift. The natural world operates entirely on gift. The sun gives limitless energy away for free, without which nothing on Earth would happen. Plants grow fruits to feed animals, and animals poop to feed plants. Flowers entice insects with their beauty, and insects pollinate the flowers so they can reproduce. The bees take the plants’ nectar and make honey, used to feed the next generation of bees and keep the cycle going.

None of the plants or insects charge money for their services, but humans get to see the beauty and taste the honey. The natural world is a circle of gift, which our money economy does its best to break up. Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book The Serviceberry: The Economics of Abundance details how gift works in nature.

Among people, traditional human economies were based almost entirely on gift. We are taught that before people invented money, they traded things through barter. ‘I give you potatoes; you give me a knife,’ or some trade like that. But anthropologist David Graeber, author of Debt: The first 5000 years, says there is absolutely no evidence for this claim. Tribes sometimes bartered with distant peoples to exchange for things they didn’t have locally, but daily economic life was entirely based on gift. It was just expected that those who had, shared. There was no reason to hoard more than you needed, and hoarding could get you ostracized.

Some North American tribes have had the tradition of potlatch, a regular community gathering where people give each other gifts and work out issues that have arisen since the previous potlatch. Wikipedia calls this practice a system of governance for the tribe. People prepare for the potlatch by creating or finding gifts to give each other. Giving a lot raised one’s status in the tribe.

Potlatch worked so well for centuries that the Canadian government banned it from 1885 to 1951. In a society based on gift like the potlatch tribes, people will buy less, help each other more, and be less isolated, all of which is bad for capitalist business. After they were banned, many tribes took potlatch underground, risking jail time to hold them.

Economists and capitalists want every human interaction to be a money transaction, but if that happened, society would collapse. You can see the result of all exchange being monetized when you look at homeless people suffering on the streets, while millions of housing units sit empty because people can’t afford them.

Even in an all-out consumer capitalist society like the USA, gift is still a big thing. Billionaire (in today’s money) Andrew Carnegie built 2,509 libraries worldwide between 1883 and 1929, on the condition that the libraries would be free to all, and cities would continue to fund their operation. His libraries gave poor people access to books for the first time.

Later this summer, I plan to attend Hardly Strictl y Bluegrass, a three day music festival in Golden Gate Park. It’s free, a gift to the city from Warren Hellman, a fabulously rich investor who liked American roots music and wanted to spread it. Now his children run the festival with a paid staff and a lot of volunteers who make it happen.

When rich people give, it’s called philanthropy (meaning “love of people.”) Rich donors get their names on concert halls, their reputations laundered, and tax breaks for giving. So are they really gifts? Probably not always, but in Hellman and Carnegie’s cases, I would say yes, they really wanted to help.

But aren’t people naturally greedy?

We are often taught that socialism can’t work, because people are too greedy to work together or to share without some outside driving force. In that world view, a gift economy would be a ridiculous idea. But is it true that people are primarily driven by self-interest? We have enough research and history now to know the answer is Yes and No.

Yes, people are driven by self-interest, to a degree. Communist societies like the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) called for a “New Man,” selfless and dedicated to his community and state. Leaders had realized that the Old Man wouldn’t work very hard without personal reward, even for the collective good. Some New Men showed up, but not enough, so the state became increasingly repressive to maintain production.

But No, this is not an absolute rule. When the USSR faced invasion and destruction from Nazi Germany, ordinary people under a socialist government poured out and produced huge quantities of weapons and equipment. In modern life, we all read about or know people who give generously of themselves. The reality is that people have a generous side and an acquisitive side. The society and culture in which people live shape which side dominates.

A society like ours that teaches individualism, competition, and greed fosters the greedy side and devolves into the structures of extreme wealth and poverty we see today. An indigenous society that teaches sharing and group solidarity will not let people starve or sleep in the street.

Indigenous cultures knew the spirit of greed was powerful, and they guarded against it. Dr. Kimmerer writes chapters in her master work Braiding Sweetgrass, about Windigo, the greedy evil spirit that sometimes possesses people in her tribes around the Great Lakes region of North America. Windigo has a bottomless hunger. He’ll eat anything that lives, and the more he eats, the hungrier he gets. He threatens the whole tribe’s survival. Children are taught early how to recognize Windigo characteristics in others, and in themselves, and how to move in a better direction

While Kimmerer’s people recognize the danger of Windigo and guard against it any way they can, capitalism celebrates human Windigos and elevates them as leaders in business and government. Like Windigo, corporations get hungrier the more they eat. Otherwise, their rate of profit declines and their share price drops.

In our society, children learn that unlimited greed is how adults behave. As Gordon Gekko, protagonist in the movie Wall Street famously said “Greed is good.” More is better. In a culture like that, gift may not disappear, but it gets pushed to the fringe of economic life.

Where did gift economies go?

If traditional people lived by the gift, how did that stop? Dr. Graeber’s book on Debt recounts a very long process, involving private ownership of land, the invention of money, interest-bearing loans, the Industrial Revolution, capitalism, and the whole phony science of economics.

Economists teach as their starting points that we live in a world of scarcity, and all people are driven by material self-interest. This video teaches children that “We all have limited resources but unlimited wants.” It doesn’t back up either of those claims.

The video teaches that economics studies how people react to scarcity. They treat self-interest as an absolute, ignoring motivators like family, religion, country, cooperation, culture, and values. Without those axioms, the whole structure falls apart. After ten or twelve generations of leaders growing up in a world shaped by scarcity and self-interest, you get the belief that Greed is Good. Gift is for losers.

Indigenous gift economies were physically wiped out by the armed force of the greed economy, as Canada tried to do with the potlatch. Then they were overwhelmed by the productivity of industrial capitalism, with its technology, advertising, and political power. This story has been enacted hundreds of times around the world, until gifts have become something you only buy from corporations to give on special occasions.

Can gift economies return?

I don’t think everything can be gift, but I believe gift could be way more normal than it is now, and the results would be wonderful. Most of the examples I gave at the beginning are small things people do for each other, but they reflect a spirit that is growing daily. More and people, especially young people reject the world-destroying, soulless capitalist economy. How far could this transformation go?

● Gift economies only work if people know each other. Dr. Kimmerer points out that a gift creates a relationship between giver and recipient. You get closer to each other and called to reciprocate the gift. In contrast, the relationships formed in a market economy only last until you hand over the money.

In today’s world where goods move all over the globe, often involving several stages of production in different countries, and are often sold online, buyers and sellers rarely know each other. You never meet the teenager who dug up the rare earth mineral that powers your smart phone, or the dozens of other people involved in getting it to you. So, can a gift economy work at a global scale?

Realistically, we’re not going back to a society based on potlatch. But what if we started small and built up? There are things we could do.

● Teach gift to children. Make things for them and teach them to make things for others instead of buying everything. Model behaviors of sharing, volunteering, donating. Closets full of unused stuff and bank accounts filled with unused money aren’t helping anybody.

● Co-ops — Co-op businesses aren’t exactly gift, but their spirit is. They seek to make society and lives better, not to maximize profit. Most co-ops I know are stores like Rainbow Grocery in San Francisco or Mandela Grocery in Oakland, but some cooperatives like Mondragon in Catalonia are much larger, and they thrive. There is also co-op housing, functioning like apartments owned and run by the people who live there.

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Mandela grocery, an afrocentric co-op

● Gift can indeed go international if done well. China’s Belt and Road Initiative and associated low-interest loans are how they choose to raise their standing in the world. They’re still self-interested. They know that this practice will bring them friends and wealth in the long run, but the point is not to maximize wealth. They have that; they want to maintain stability and peace by spreading prosperity.. Other systems like Kerala State in India also run largely on gift.

Compare that with the attitudes of the billionaire class in the Empire. People like Musk and Trump, companies like Goldman Sachs and Lockheed Martin put growing their own wealth ahead of every other consideration. This is why they are increasingly hated around the world.

Ways to start giving at the individual level

To build the movement toward a gift economy, there are things you can do in your own life.

● Join an on line gifting community like Shareable or Buy nothing. Members give what they can and take what they need.

● Identify the gifts you like to shareand start doing more of them. I like to give away food, but mostly I give time and attention. I listen. I should probably give more money, but I’m giving what I’m comfortable with for now.

● Reframe your attitude toward scarcity. The ultimate driver of greed is the belief in scarcity we are carefully taught. If you can adopt the attitude that there will always be enough, you will not have to work so hard or buy so much.

● You also have to take — In our society, millions of people live in need, but few are willing to take what they need. Taking can range from just saying ‘Yes’ when the world offers you something, to homeless people squatting in vacant residences. It’s all abundance that needs to be shared.

● Shop at co-ops when you can. Join a co-op or create one As I said, they’re not exactly gifts, but they have an important place in a gift economy.

A growing gift economy loosens the shackles capitalism has fastened on our souls. Let’s make it grow.

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