A People’s History of Surfing
From its Hawaiian origins to the postwar surf craze, surfing has been a defiant challenge to the Calvinist work ethic and the commercial pressures of capitalism. But those malign social forces may now finally succeed in extinguishing the spirit of surfing.
(Tyke Jones / Unsplash)
For over two centuries, Western industrial capitalism has been waging a war on the soul of surfing. From its origins as an indigenous Hawaiian pastime, through its counterculture heyday, surfing has weathered a series of attacks, but the technological advances of late capitalism and the brutal market logic of neoliberalism may spell the end of surfing as we have known it.
The marketing of surfing as a commodity has a much wider cultural resonance. In the words of Cornel West (a native Californian, but not a surfer as far as we know): “One of the ways in which capitalism reproduces itself is the commodification of everybody and everything.” The history of surfing is a case in point.
Riding Waves
It is next to impossible to explain surfing. Only a fool would try to put the experience into words. Writing about surfing requires a knowledge of geography, physics, and poetry.
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