I look back at a trip to Burning Man to discuss whether you should—or even can—strive to escape the capitalist system.
With the one-day economic boycott in the bag, it’s too early for me to assess the outcome of it (if any).
But it got me thinking about what it’s like to try and stop your spending. I think most would say that it’s impractical to go totally money-free (though people do) and I’m not recommending this, but what happens if you try to escape the capitalist go-around for even a little bit?
And it made me think back to more than 20 years ago, when I attended Burning Man.
It was, I realized, an attempt to go money-free: to in effect, spend a week without spend.
It was an interesting week.
Table of Contents
What is Burning Man?
Burning Man is, for those who don’t know, an art and community festival out in the Nevada desert. It happens every year, more or less, in late August or early September, which is definitely the time that everyone would want to be spending a lot of time out in the desert.
Burning Man is a little like cilantro; some people can’t get enough, while others feel like their mouths have been washed out with soap. It’s very much not for everyone.
I had the opportunity to attend a little over 20 years ago. I say “opportunity”, because at this point in my life I was living on the east coast, about as far away from Nevada as you can get in the U.S. But I had a friend who was living near San Francisco, and he offered not only a base of operations for me and our friends, but also offered to pay for a good chunk of the expenses to get us there.
So I and six other people convened in the Bay Area to plan our excursion. We were going to Burn.
A commerce-free event
Music festivals are expensive. I came of age going to the Philadelphia Folk Festival, and the only way I was ever able to go as a 16 year old was because I volunteered there. The cost of a ticket, $130 if memory serves, might as well have been a moon launch to me at the time.
And it’s not just the entrance fee. Music festivals can be expensive once you’re inside. Food, drink, merch, camping, chair rental, the costs add up.
Which is what made Burning Man so intriguing for twenty-years-ago-me. While there was an entrance fee to get in, once you were inside, nothing (well, almost nothing) was for sale. Everything was supposed to be bartered for. This was a commerce-free event.
(The only things they sold back then were ice and coffee. I don’t quite know why they decided on those things, but I’m sure they were appreciated by all.)
Burning Man is devoted to acts of gift giving. The value of a gift is unconditional. Gifting does not contemplate a return or an exchange for something of equal value.
More to the point, there wasn’t any sponsorship or advertising at this event either:
In order to preserve the spirit of gifting, our community seeks to create social environments that are unmediated by commercial sponsorships, transactions, or advertising.
This was very appealing to me, though not for any smash-the-state, communist impulse. I was just curious to see how it would work. How would it be to spend an entire week outside of a money-based economic system? Would it be possible? Would it be enjoyable?
Preparations
With seven people going to this event, we needed some supplies.
First off, we needed water, because the event didn’t supply any: two gallons per person per day is what was recommended for drinking, cooking, and washing. That meant about 100 gallons of water, or twenty of those water cooler jugs. Out of the two vehicles we brought there, the water filled up most of one of them.
But then there was everything else. We wanted to create shelter (Nevada in August can be rather toasty), so we built a structure out of PVC pipe and a large tarp, which was kind of like a geodesic dome, except way sloppier.
And then there was food, a sun shower apparatus, and much else.
This meant lots of trips to Home Depot, and Walmart, and then back to Home Depot, and then back to Walmart.
I don’t recall the exact numbers, but by the time we were done with our admittedly DIY setup, we had easily crested $1,000 and had kept going. (And remember, this was 20 years ago and I was much younger.)
All of this definitely was in line with Burning Man’s principles of Radical Self-reliance, I think. Or maybe not.
The burning irony
The troublesome aspect of this Burning Man experience for me was a simple irony. For all of this festival’s promotion of a commerce-free experience, I couldn’t help but think of the sheer mass of commerce that was required to get us there.
That year’s Burning Man in question had an attendance of 25,000. Now imagine the sheer scale of how much money went into getting those 25,000 burners there and back again. And that’s not including the art.
And while this was mostly before the days of luxury camps being paid for and erected for wealthy people, even a DIY camp could cost a lot of money.
From this I realized that short-term attempts to escape capitalism merely shift the consumption elsewhere.
That isn’t to say that the experiment wasn’t interesting or worthwhile, just that it’s a little presumptuous to go there and assume that you’ve somehow opted out of capitalism. You really just moved it around.
How to escape completely
All of this begs the question: how would one escape capitalism more completely?
To which I ask, what problem are you trying to solve? Because I wonder if the problem isn’t capitalism but your experience and relationship to it.
There are ways to escape everything having a dollar sign on it in every day life. Friendship doesn’t require money. Love doesn’t require money. A walk in a park doesn’t require money. Sure, money helps in all of these situations, but they aren’t required.
You can turn on an ad blocker on your computer and never see ads again. Shopping need not be a hobby that takes up too much of your time. Your participation in the capitalist system is basically mandatory, but that doesn’t mean that you need to be in it all of the time.
I say that the best way to lessen the sting of the ills of our economic society is not to try to escape it, but to build your own financial resilience. Worry and anxiety make things take up large parts of your mind. Easing worry and anxiety will help those things escape your thoughts more easily.
So, perhaps ironically, I think one of the potential best ways to escape the ills of money is to succeed in it.
Postscript
I had fun that week, but I never did return to Burning Man. I didn’t love it, but neither did I hate it. I was moderately fascinated by the community that built it, but I felt like a looky-loo the whole time, marveling at others, which is, if you didn’t know, antithetical to the whole enterprise. Participation is another principle of Burning Man:
Our community is committed to a radically participatory ethic. We believe that transformative change, whether in the individual or in society, can occur only through the medium of deeply personal participation.
And that, more than anything, made me feel like this wasn’t the right place for me. Because when it came down to it, I didn’t want to participate. I just wanted to watch.
Plus I wouldn’t mind never having that much dust on me ever again.
