The alt fails and devolves into the same hierarchies they critique---potlatch only serves to reinforce existing power relations and is inaccessible to the lower classes.

Bataille understands sacrifice as gratuitous and nonutilitarian. Acts of sacrifice, he claims, have “no ends beyond themselves.” But this contention is misleading. Although Bataille is correct in describing such practices as unrelated to the production of wealth, they are very much oriented toward the reproduction of existing power relations. As practiced among the Aztecs, human sacrifice redounded to the credit of the ruling caste (priests and aristocracy), providing them with a quasi-divine power to preside over life and death. For these reasons, it is deceptive to claim, as Bataille repeatedly does, that sacrifice has no end beyond itself.

One could raise an analogous criticism of Bataille’s treatment of potlatch—the public, demonstrative destruction of wealth—as well as gift-giving. In truth, only those who possess great wealth can afford to destroy it. Consequently, the option to engage in potlatch does not exist for society’s lower classes.56 Like sacrifice, potlatch is implicated in the reproduction of social hierarchy. Such acts reinforce the status and prestige of those who destroy their wealth. In nearly every case, the practitioners of potlatch belong to the upper strata of society. Those who are forced to passively endure the potlatch are in effect humiliated. Through such acts, their lowly social rank is reaffirmed.

The same is true of gift-giving. Gifts are not freely bestowed, shorn of ulterior ends. Bataille seizes on the aspect of gift-giving that serves his purposes. Gift-giving is not an economic transaction; it is neither an act of barter, nor does it aim at the enhancement of social wealth. Instead, in the first instance with gift-giving, social relations among persons are at issue. As with both sacrifice and potlatch, what is at stake with the gift are relations of power. When given in accordance with social ritual, gifts always come with strings attached: unless the gift can be returned in kind, its social function is to intimidate the recipient. The object of gift-giving as a social ritual is to derogate and shame the recipient by virtue of his or her inability to return a gift of equal value. Gift-giving, too, then must be classified as a ritual practice that is in no sense gratuitous or free. Far from being an end in itself, as Bataille claims, it is fully implicated in the production and reproduction of social power.