Category Archives: Value

Don Kalb: Constituent Imagination versus the Law of Value: On David Graeber’s ‘Anthropological Theory of Value’

Cover image of David Graeber's book "Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value."
Image 1: Book Cover.

The last two decades in anthropology would have been dramatically less exciting without David Graeber. Given David’s prominent association with the Occupy rebellions and with the Western Left more generally, this is even true for the Western world at large. With the publication of his debt book (Graeber 2010) – also exactly a decade ago – as Keith Hart once said, David became the most famous anthropologist among the general public of our age, taking that long empty seat next to Margaret Mead (and Levi Strauss perhaps). With the launch of the ‘Society for Ethnographic Theory’, the HAU journal and the turn towards Open Access publishing, David, now world famous, once more stirred up anthropology as well as academia more broadly. It feels a bit weird to say this about an anthropologist of the gift, but David literally made history by attacking established centers and practices of power and wealth.

While some in this series of seminars knew him well as a direct colleague or friend, I only ran into David a couple of times. I felt it was not easy to get to know him. He seemed a bit solipsistic, drawn into conversation with himself, sometimes mumbling and laughing privately about the sudden insights he seemed to run into while doing so. If you had not been introduced to that intimate conversation before, it was not so easy to enter it, I felt. He and I never had the time to get to that point, for which I am sorry.

I remembered these few moments of mutual awkwardness while rereading Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value (Graeber 2001). Its style of writing reminded me of David’s internal conversations and his moments of private enjoyment. The narrative of this book meanders, feels sometimes elliptic (as it does in all his books). The flow of the argument regularly gets punctuated. Jolts of joyful energy seem to pull the author in multiple unexpected directions. The possible connections that emerge from the words that he happened to choose, seem to seduce him to leave the path and get into the bush around it. David, who celebrates creative freedom, is certainly the Zizek of anthropology. As with Zizek, things can become very detailed within a narrative that was already far from linear. As a reader you may feel you are being unduly slowed down, even taken advantage of. But David can also take you by the hand while making a reckless jump, allowing you for a moment to tower over a conceptual landscape where most people would normally be lost, and you are struck by the sudden clarity of perception. I now imagine that such apparently reckless jumps produced his moments of private enjoyment.

My discussion here of Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value must be short. I will leave the bush aside – the book has long chapters on gift giving societies in Melanesia, Madagascar and among Amerindians, some of it very interesting, some of it less compelling for non-specialists – and I will focus on the landscapes that emerge during those conceptual jumps. This book is not just representative of his writing style and his counterintuitive rhythm of discovery. It also partly lays out the tool kit of concepts, perspectives, and issues that was going to dominate his later work. In fact, it offers in embryo his full program of research. What is then David’s theory of value? How do Marx and Mauss cohabit in it? How do his very outspoken Chicago teachers, Marshall Sahlins and Terence Turner, figure? What are its possibilities and blind spots?

David developed his ‘anthropological theory of value’ against the intellectual and political background of what he calls ‘the bleak 1990s’. He is very explicit about it: neoliberal hegemony, globalized capitalism, economics as dominant social imaginary, post-structuralism, and the reduction of politics to ‘creative consumption’ and identity, both in anthropology and other social disciplines. While structure and history had gone out of fashion, he writes, action and agency had become cynically equated in social theory to mere individual market choices. Before 1989, Bourdieu had worked out ‘habitus’ as the connecting concept between structure and agency (and Giddens had been busy with similar issues). Graeber swiftly passes him by for the focus on dominance and power games that underlie Bourdieu’s project, in David’s eyes another symptom of the cynicism that he saw around him. For David, at this point in his career, it still seemed paradigmatic that anthropologists are dealing with people in relatively egalitarian societies and with people who desire (a core concept for him) to precisely escape such power games. David proposes ‘value’ as the point where structure and agency meet. After an interesting interlude on Roy Bashkar (and critical realism) and his thinking in terms of forces, tendencies, and processes rather than objects he emphasizes that his value does exactly that: setting open-ended dialectical processes in motion. What is this value and what are the anthropological traditions that help him shape it up?

The shortest way to answer that question is to bring in that concept that is all but foundational for David’s work: ‘constituent imagination’. While he borrows that term from Italian autonomous Marxism (Virno and Negri), he links it to a long anthropological pedigree that connects Klyde Kluckhohn, Marshall Sahlins, Terence Turner, Louis Dumont, and others, all of whom are discussed in interesting and original ways here. Value then emerges as what people tell themselves they find important in the realization of their lives, not very different from the common-sense meaning of value in various European languages. David’s value is emic, idealist, and dynamic. While his notion seems initially not very different from let’s say Talcott Parsons, David wouldn’t be Graeber if he didn’t loudly refuse the implied structural functionalism: David’s value emphatically doesn’t work to solidify stable social reproduction. On the contrary, it feeds the social imagination, both collectively and individually, and it is both agonistic and liberating. In the social processes that it sets in motion people die, strive, love, compete, believe, pray, moralize, estheticize, sacrifice, fetishize, and whatnot. Value is about making differences, and about ranking and proportioning them. De Saussure’s structuralism may be essential for how our language and imagination works, but David, following his teacher Terence Turner, adroitly embraces Vygotsky’s ‘generative structuralism’ and shifts the weight from langue to parole and towards ‘signifying material action’. Hence his interest in ethnohistory and the telling and remembering of histories. Stories become part of ‘constituent imagination’ in action, the practiced struggle for individual and collective autonomous becoming and in how these struggles are being remembered.

In the end he concedes that his foundational notion of value is perhaps not that different from Dumont, a student of Levi Strauss and the ultimate theorist of hierarchy, except for its emphasis on process, action, and agency. And while the structure of our social imagination is certainly ‘a totality’ of the Saussurian kind and as such fully embedded in the existing structuration of our societies, as well as fundamental for how we teach our children and reproduce ourselves, it is clear to David that this is a totality ridden by ambivalence and contradiction. There are inevitably contradictions between desires and pragmatic realities. ‘Constituent imagination’ often seems more the property, desire, and practice of individuals or groups and moieties within societies than of societies as a whole.

Where is Marcel Mauss here, David’s most basic theoretical and political inspiration? Mauss appears at all levels of David’s approach. David spends some very interesting pages introducing him as the key thinker for a non-cynical anthropology and for a humanist Left, who famously rejected the Bolsheviks for their recourse to state terror, authoritarianism, and bureaucratic diktat. In the book, Mauss of course appears as the quintessential theorist of the gift and of egalitarian societies, which, as I said, are for David at this point still the self-evident object of anthropology. David may criticize him for his romanticism, but he fully embraces his notion of ‘everyday communism’ as the glue of human sociality. Then there is also the basic methodological notion of the ‘total prestation’ where the full quality, the core values, of a whole society are reflected in each and every of its parts, including the imaginations and actions of its members. David does not discuss it explicitly, but if I’m not mistaken, he does seem to think that Mauss’ approach may be too static for his purposes. The constituent values for which people once congregated as a distinct group or society, may become corrupted over time and people seek repair, interpretations will differ, agonistic and liberating conflict will ensue. Holism, for David, therefore, does not take away the dialectics. On the contrary, it feeds them and is fed by them.

In all this Graeber seems to follow Terence Turner closely. And indeed, in a much later preface to a collection of Turner’s essays (2017) David remarked that he wrote his value book to make the notoriously complex texts of Turner understandable for a wider public. The book was thus originally intended as a gift to Turner.

But Turner was strong on Marx, indeed perhaps the most outspoken Marxist in the anthropology of the 1990s. And Marx was strong on totality and dialectics too, but of a less idealistic kind. David in this book sets a Turnerian Marx into a dynamic conversation with Mauss. How does that work out? A Marxist will immediately wonder how the thoroughly idealist concept of value as constitutive imagination that Graeber is on to will relate to Marx’s similarly dialectical but certainly not idealist conceptions of (use, exchange, and surplus) value. Most importantly, how does it relate to Marx’s ‘law of value’, which is Marx’s short formula for talking about the social relations of capitalist accumulation. 

Graeber is sympathetic to the young Marx who wrote on behalf of the emancipation of humans from their self-constructed religious fetishes which he wanted them to begin to see as the mere products of their own powers of creative imagination rather than as the gods that they had to obey. This indeed corresponds perfectly to David’s own agenda as his long and interesting discussions of fetishism show. But the post 1848 Marx of capital and labor receives rather short shrift. David repeatedly complains about the ‘convoluted language’ of Marxists. He does not like the Marxian vocabularies and prefers for example to talk about ‘creative powers’ rather than about labor (a concept that hardly appears in this book on value). Marx for David is mainly interesting, he says, for his approach to money – and here we find an early announcement of the coming book on debt. So, not capital, not labor, but money. He emphasizes that for Marx value and money are not the same, but in the next pages Marx’s value disappears and David gets stuck with money and prices, which are of course a holistic system too. With Terence Turner, he embraces the idea that ‘socially necessary labor time’ – a core element of Marx’s ‘law of value’ – is also inevitably a cultural construct but the discussions about that centrally important concept for Marx are not referenced in this book as they are by Turner (2008). Nor does David seem aware that this concept helps Marx to discover a particular relational form of value under capitalism that consistently operates behind people’s back and is therefore ontologically something rather different than a self-conscious ‘constituent’ value choice. In Chicago David was apparently not exposed to Moishe Postone. He also does not seem aware of the important value debates among Marxist theorists of the 1970s (in particular Diane Elson 1979, whom Turner had read closely). Considering the number of pages dedicated to such discussions in this book, Marx’s value appears intellectually far less compelling then Kluckhohn’s, Parson’s or Dumont’s value. ‘Socially necessary labor time’ in David’s handling is then in the next moment reduced to a rather static cultural concept for determining, via prices, how important we find particular items of consumption as compared to other items of consumption (cars: 7% of yearly consumer expenditures in the US in the late nineties). David’s Marx, surprisingly, seems in the end not to be about capital and labor but primarily about consumption, not unlike the way David’s teacher Marshall Sahlins looked at capitalism in ‘Culture and Practical Reason’ (1976).

It is also as if David at once forgets about his discussion of Roy Bhaskar and his own declared embrace of forces, tendencies, and processes. ‘Socially necessary labor time’ in Marx is a dynamic dialectical relation between abstract capital and abstract labor that produces immanent tendencies and is indeed also a dynamic dialectical cultural construct. It is the basis for Marx’s ‘law of value’, which Marx knew well was not a law but a tendency. As labor does its daily work for capital, labor productivity would systematically be driven up because of the competition among capitals and of the class struggle with labor, via mechanization, automation, and the overall capitalization of life. Over time labor would lose any sovereignty over its own conditions of life and social reproduction. Apart from being disciplined in its wage claims and lifestyles, lest capital would move to cheaper and more hardworking places, labor would also be forced into (paying for) ever more education or face devaluation and degradation. And of course, it would have to face the inescapable uncertainties of life and status. The same would be true for cities, regions, and states that failed to compete within a globalizing capitalism and would therefore literally be up for grabs. All of this, including the geographically uneven and war-mongering repercussions, is a logical part of Marx’s ‘law of value’. David could have used Mauss and the gift to give a deeper anthropological and relational twist to Marx’s rather flat notion of use value. But Marx is never allowed in this book to play on his own unique strengths: in the end both capital and labor, the two elementary positions whose combination produces not just use values and exchange values but, crucially, surplus value, the very returns to capital that are the key driver of social change in a capitalist world, simply disappear. According to David Harvey (2018), Marx sees capital as ‘value on the move’. But in this book that sort of value is just moved out – only to be rediscovered big time and with ‘anarchist concreteness’ in David’s later work on debt and bullshit jobs.  

Constituent imagination is David’s core concept. It was a concept that came from Italian Marxist post-operaismo authors who were impressed by labor’s refusal to work for capital in the Italy of the seventies and eighties after they had lost a series of violent confrontations. Young workers now preferred to seek the creation of autonomous worlds of life and labor outside the wage nexus. This is shortly mentioned by Graeber, and he imagines, like James Scott, that his egalitarian kinship groups similarly refused to further engage with hierarchical power centers and simply moved out to constitute their own desired societies inspired by constituent egalitarian imagination. Clearly, this is a further radicalization of the original concept, which talks about evading the wage nexus but does not carry any hint at a mass exodus out of Egypt towards a promised land and a new separate society, to use an image. David even argues that all societies at some point were formed out of such mass rejection of earlier power centers and were therefore always founded on constituent imagination. This to me seems like an extravagant claim, largely untestable, and suspiciously supportive of David’s theoretical purposes. However, Italian Marxists such as Antonio Negri always kept the development of capital and the state in dynamic tension with the autonomous desires of his multitudes, which were indeed urban subjects rather than spread out kin-groups in marginal spaces. In Graeber’s Value book that dynamic tension disappears. David’s egalitarians are on their own, engaging in a similar constitutive mytho-praxis that has inspired Marshall Sahlins’s work (see also Jonathan Parry’s discussion of Lost People for a similar disappearance of the IMF and therefore of global capital in David’s analysis of recent Malagasy histories).

Tweet from @DavidGraeber reading "Arjun Appadurai's footnote about my Debt book in his latest work on financial derivatives. Apparently my work is irrelevant because I see 'no hope whatever for redemption in the new financial instruments.' Um, yeah. I'm anti-capitalist." A screenshot of the footnote in question is attached to the tweet.
Image 2: Screenshot of David Graeber’s tweet responding to Arjun Appadurai’s critique of his book on debt.

David in this book firmly dismisses Appadurai’s ‘regimes of value’ notion (1986) for his neoliberal fixation on consumption. Appadurai recently returned the compliment by claiming that David’s anthropology was an entirely traditional one. David did a fantastic job in giving 21st century anthropology a new pride in focusing on egalitarian desires and popular values of autonomy in rejection of the rule of capital. But Appadurai is unfortunately right in one way: the values David envisions are emic, singular, particular, idealist, and deeply place-based and return us to classic bounded fieldwork and a bounded notion of culture. The book has no references to Wolf, Wallerstein, or anyone else dealing with space and multiscalar dynamic analysis of the dialectical value processes associated with globalized capital and the ensuing popular counter politics and desires. Except for a journalistic type of political economy, there is in fact hardly any serious political economy at all here, not even an anthropological political economy – a school that traces itself back to leading scholars like Wolf, Mintz, and Leacock, always largely ignored by both Graeber and Sahlins. David later improved marvelously on that lack with the Debt book (but see for example Kalb 2014), which, importantly, also brought long run and deep global histories back into anthropology. But while that book appears to have been incubated during the writing of this text on value via David’s interest in Marx and money, it is not yet conceptually or methodologically anticipated, and I do wonder how David later looked back on this very traditional anthropological theory of value he develops here.

David was a magnificent and creative utopian and moralist. He was uniquely in tune with the resistant Western mood of the times, from the alter-globalists to Occupy, including in his embrace of the ethos of the mass refusals and moral outcries that we have seen in the last twenty years, often driven by the desire for autonomy and the condemnation of the overall bleakness of things. But he did not at all anticipate the rise of the populist right, which is also very much about value and values, and indeed loudly proclaims a desire for the resurrection of (white, male, majoritarian etc.) hierarchy (see Kalb 2021 for further discussion). The rise of the right in many places after the failed rebellions of 2011 must be understood from within the failures of the ‘horizontalist’ mobilizations of which David and many of us were a part and which at that point seemed to have an elective affinity with the anthropology of egalitarianism. Nor does David’s book on value anticipate a situation where core central bankers and enlightened economists write books about the economics of the green transition with ‘value’ prominently in the title while making a claim to the heritage of the value-driven popular risings that David sees himself part of (Carney 2020; Mazzucato 2019). And finally, in the excitement of retrieving some pride for the traditions of the discipline, in David’s book on value we also seem to have forgotten some of the earlier advances in ‘the anthropology of complex societies’ and of ‘world society’, including some Marxist ones which are very precisely about value. 


Don Kalb is founding editor of Focaal and FocaalBlog and a professor of social anthropology at the University of Bergen, where he leads the ‘Frontlines of Value’ project.


This text was presented at David Graeber LSE Tribute Seminar on ‘Value’ .


References

Appadurai, Arjun. 1986. “Introduction: commodities and the politics of value” In  The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, edited by Arjun Appadurai, 3-36. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Carney, Marc. 2020. Value(s): Building a better world for all. William Collins: Dublin.

Elson, Diane. 2015 (1979). Value: The Representation of Labour in Capitalism. London: Verso

Graeber, David. 2001. Toward an anthropological theory of value: the false coin of our own dreams. New York: Palgrave.

Graeber, David. 2010. Debt: the first 5,000 years. Brooklyn, N.Y.: Melville House.

Harvey, David. 2018. Marx, Capital and the Madness of Economic Reason. London: Profile books

Kalb, Don. 2014. “Mavericks: Harvey, Graeber, and the reunification of anarchism and Marxism in world anthropology. Focaal 69: 113-134.

Kalb, Don. 2021. “The neo-nationalist ascendancy: further thoughts on class, value and the return of the repressed.” Social Anthropology 29 (2): 316-328.

Mazzucato, Mariana. 2019. The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy. London: Penguin.

Sahlins, Marshall. 1976. Culture and practical reason. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Terence Turner. 2008. “Marxian Value Theory: An Anthropological Perspective.” Anthropological Theory 8 (1): 43-56.

Turner, Terence. 2017. The Fire of the Jaguar. Chicago: HAU Books.


Cite as: Kalb, Don. 2021. “Constituent Imagination versus the Law of Value: On David Graeber’s ‘Anthropological Theory of Value’.” FocaalBlog, 13 December. https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/12/13/don-kalb-constituent-imagination-versus-the-law-of-value-on-david-graebers-anthropological-theory-of-value.

Chris Gregory: What is the false coin of our own dreams?

I confess that the first time I met David I was not impressed. It was in 2006 at a conference in Halle. David gave a 50-minute summary of what was to become his Debt book. He covered 5,000 years in 50 minutes, and this was in an era when the Grand Narrative was very much out of fashion. His presentation struck me as rambling and incoherent.

Over the past 15 years I have come to change my mind about him completely. I have just published an article (Gregory, 2021) where I have argued that Sahlins and Graeber should have been awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics. For many, this is high praise, but I can’t be sure that David would accept it. His approach to the theory of value stands opposed to everything the so-called ‘Nobel Prize’ for Economic Science symbolises.

My brief today is to discuss his book Towards and Anthropological Theory of Value (2001). I shall keep to that brief as best I can. I must say, however, it was only after reading his books on Anarchism (2004), Direct Action (2009), Debt (2011), and Bullshit Jobs (2019) that I began to get my head around the central arguments of his Value book, by far his most difficult book. What struck me about all these books was the extraordinary unity of theme and content. I see them as a five-volume study of the value question. I am not saying that this is the best way to interpret what he has done. There are many ways to approach his work. This is the one I find most useful.

In the acknowledgements to his Value book David thanks everyone at Palgrave except the editor who made him switch around his title. If we restore the order he wanted, the main title of his book becomes, The false coin of our own dream, and the subtitle, Toward an anthropological theory of value. This inversion gives us a different angle on his work. The word ‘toward’ suggests a movement, not yet completed, from an old theory to a new one. It also brings the expression ‘the false coin of our dreams’ to front and centre. The origin of this expression can be traced back to Mauss and Hubert in their General Theory of Magic (1902-03; 1972), but David gives the metaphor a 21st century twist. As I see it, the phrase false coin of our own dreams defines a paradox that is the central organizing metaphor of all five volumes of his books on value. But what does he mean by this paradox?

My short answer to this question is that he is referring to the political battle over those big ideas that can change the world. For him the value question is, first and foremost, the battle over competing images of wealth. The false coins are the images of wealth produced by the dreamers of yesterday, the false coiners of an image that has become adulterated and debased through excessive use over time. David the dreamer wants to recoin these debased images of wealth to create a new image of what could be. His dream is not a fantasy. It is a real possibility grounded in economic history, cultural geography, and the political present. Graeber the dreamer, then, is a political activist who wants to appropriate the false coins of the ruling elite, melt them down, and forge something new in collaboration with those who have a hopeful image of the future. He wants to join them in the streets as they ‘shout, clamour and make joyful noises’ in the now obsolete sense of the word ‘dream’ (OED).

What is this new image of wealth?

David, we must never forget, was born in New York and raised in Chelsea, just four miles from Wall Street. He has a New York-centric view of the world he has never lost. This visual image captures the essence of his approach as I understand it. It shows the Charging Bull sculpture that artist Arturo Di Modica secretly installed near Wall Street in 1989 in the wake of the 1987 Black Monday stock market crash. In 2017 Kristen Visbal installed her sculpture of Fearless Girl facing down the Charging Bull, but following complaints, the Fearless Girl was relocated to a different part of Wall Street, totally transforming Fearless Girl’s symbolic power. She now represents, Google Maps tells us, the fight for female equality inside the boardrooms of Wall Street. The original juxtaposition of images admits of a very different interpretation, especially when we overlay with the lyrics of the ‘blah, blah, blah’ song the rebellious young sing.

Statue of young girl in a skirt, legs astride and hands on hips, faces down a statue of a charging bull opposite.
Image 1: Fearless girl statue by Kristen Visbal, New York City, Wall Street, by Anthony Quintano is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Greta’s ‘blah, blah, blah’ is a quote from a song very popular among the young. The other line of the song goes ‘Ja, Ja, Ja.’ The language of this song is not double Dutch, even though the elite might think so given that the composer, Armin van Buuren, was a Dutchman. A Dr Sev from Poland has mixed Greta’s speech and Armin’s song. It was premiered on YouTube 30 September 2021. The sonic image, created to excite the passions of the young, raises a serious question: What does ‘No more blah, blah, blah’ mean? What is the message the young are trying to convey to those in power with lyrics of this kind?

Enter David Graeber, the bilingual Wall Street ethnographer. Not only has he has learned the language of the bulls and the bears inside the offices of Wall Street, but he has also learned the language of the young protestors on the streets outside in New York, London and elsewhere. In May 2019 he attended the Extinction Rebellion in London. He duly recorded what they said and reported it (Graeber 2019). The following is my very brief gloss on how he might re-present their point of view.

‘No more blah, blah, blah’ is a polite way of saying: ‘tell us the truth about climate change. Stop lying. Stop talking bullshit. Don’t give us bullshit jobs to do. We, too, are capable of imagining different possibilities for life on earth. If you old folks in power don’t listen to our dreams, we are all finished (one imagines that the protestors may have used different F-words in this final sentence).

The distinction here between the liar and a bullshitter, which David (2018: Ch 1, fn 10) notes but does not develop, is very important one. The bullshitter, Frankfurt (1986) notes in his classic essay, is one who exaggerates or talks nonsense to bluff or impress. The liar, by contrast, deliberately sets out to mislead with falsehoods. In other words, it is one thing for an academic to talk nonsense unintentionally to impress, but quite another for a politician like Trump who knows the truth to deliberately propagate falsehoods. Bulls can also produce manure, which is to say that the academic bullshitter can produce something very useful.

We are dealing here with two quite distinct values. The ambiguous quality of academic bullshit requires that it be handled with the greatest of care and respect. David does precisely this in his writings. However, his unique meandering rhetorical style takes some getting used to. I can now see some virtues in it, but it is not one that I would urge my students to imitate!

Let me now move to David’s analysis of the language of those on the other side of the barricade. The bulls and the bears of Wall Street who excite the emotions and imagination of academics and well as sculptors, singers, and other creative artists. On the one side we have academics from the schools of business and economics who crunch the numbers and give advice, for a price, to the politicians and shareholders who run the show. On the other side, we have academics like David who occupy the streets and call for radical change, often at some cost to their careers.

Academics, then, can be divided into three categories: those who work for Wall Street, those who work against it, and those interested in other questions. It is a quaint feature of the English language that those who work for Wall Street are called ‘policy advisors’ whilst those who work against it are called ‘political activists.’ Henceforth I shall refer to both as political activists. It is obvious, then, that the schools of business and economics and law are full of political activists whilst anthropology has very few. This raises the uncomfortable question for us non-activists of the political implications of our inaction.

Activists in the schools of Economics and Business come in many different stripes and political persuasions defined by their approach to the theory of value: Neo-Smithian, Neo-Ricardian, Neo-Marxist, Neo-Keynesian and Neo-classical among many others. Most belong to the mainstream neo-classical school epitomised by the work done by the economists of the Chicago School of Economics, a school that has produced ten Nobel Prize winners, two short of Harvard, the top school.

The image of wealth that informs the thought of these people, I assert, is the false coin of David’s dream, the anti-thesis that defines his thesis. Let me be clear. When it comes to an image of wealth, there is a sense in which David is opposed to the whole history of European economic thought from Adam Smith in 1776 to the Nobel Prize winners of 2021. Everyone. Smith, Ricardo, Marx, Jevon, Keynes, Friedman. It is a different matter when it comes to concepts of value and specific theories of value and, especially those of Marx. Some fine conceptual distinctions between images, concepts and theories are at stake here. I will come back to this trichotomy below. In the meantime, it suffices to note that when a theory of value uses concepts to make an argument it presupposes an image of wealth as a moral precept.

What does this ‘false coin’ of European economic thought look like? What image of wealth does it excite in the mind of its beholders?

In 1895 Alfred Nobel established the Nobel Prize to be awarded to those who ‘have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind.’ Five prizes are given each year: Physics, Chemistry, Medicine, Literature and Peace. In 1968 the Swedish Central Bank donated money for a prize in memory of Alfred Nobel. This award, which is administered by the Nobel Foundation, it not a Nobel Prize. However, by the operation of the Law of Contagious Magic, it is falsely called the Nobel prize in Economics when in fact its real name is the Swedish Reserve Bank [Sveriges Riksban] Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. Nobel’s descendants are very unhappy about this situation. ‘Nobel despised people who cared more about profits than society’s well-being,’ said Peter Nobel, a great grandnephew. In 2001 they demanded, without success, that the Nobel name be dropped from the Swedish Reserve Bank award because, they said, Alfred Nobel was highly sceptical of economics and as such the existence of this award was an insult to his legacy.

David Graeber and Alfred Nobel obviously shared certain assumptions about the ability of economic science to confer wealth and happiness upon humankind. I feel, therefore, that while he would reject the Swedish Bank Prize for Economic Science, he would happily accept the Nobel Prize for Peace. As Don Kalb (2014: 115) has correctly noted, David is a political activist in the Gandhian tradition rather than the Marxist-Leninist revolutionary tradition. Music, dance, and discussion are his preferred weapons, not guns.

David has a very interesting discussion of ‘dream tokens’ in his Value book, but I fault him for not including a discussion of the Swedish Bank Prize for Economic Science as a token of value. This is the true coin of the economic scientist’s dream, but the false coin of David’s dream. For David, the token is a ‘false coin’ because it epitomises an impoverished and debased Eurocentric image of wealth, one whose use-by date has long passed.

David’s life’s work has been the search of a better image. For inspiration he raided the cabinet of ethnographic curiosities, the historical archives, and of course spoke to the young. He has no new answers to old questions. His concern is to identify the constraints that economic history and cultural geography impose on our capacity to imagine new possibilities for life on earth. This enables him to pose new questions and to change the terms of debate. He has no manifesto, no commandments, just difficult questions that get to the root of the matter. He is primarily concerned to excite creative debate about issues of pressing importance for the human condition. If you are looking for simple answers to these questions you will not find them in David’s work. He is no messiah. He teaches us how to think, not what to think. He takes a few steps toward an anthropological theory of value. He has not arrived at the final destination.

The theory of value is the most hotly disputed subject in economics. If you ask ten economists to define money, for example, they will give you ten different answers. However, when it comes to the question of an image of wealth, there is remarkable agreement. This can be found in the image they have selected for themselves to distinguish their discipline. I refer to the image of the horn of plenty, the symbol of abundance and nourishment found in European mythology that appears on the Swedish Bank Prize for Economic Science but not the real Nobel Prizes. All 89 Economic Science laureates have all proudly accepted this token as a symbol of the true coin of their dreams.

Two gold coins with male profiles side by side. One is labeled "The Nobel Prize 1896," the other "The Swedish Reserve Bank Prize for Economic Sciences in memory of Alfred Nobel 1968." Header text says "Spot the difference."
Image 2: Nobel Prize vs. The Swedish Reserve Bank Prize

David correctly notes that modern European economic thought has its origins in the secularisation of European economic theology. This image of the horn of plenty, which has its origins in a Greek myth, could not be a better illustration of his thesis.

For the economic scientist the horn of plenty conjures up images of Adam Smith, their revered founding ancestor, whose book, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776) serves as the creation myth of their science. The very first line of his classic text introduces the image of wealth that his concepts and theories presuppose.

“The annual labour of every nation is the fund which originally supplies it with all the necessaries and conveniences of life which it annually consumes, and which consist always either in the immediate produce of that labour, or in what is purchased with that produce from other nations.” (Smith, 1776: 1)

What students in Economics 101 don’t learn is that Adam Smith had a labour theory of value, one that excited the thoughts of Karl Marx. Marx’s revised version of Smith’s labour theory of value was published in 1867. Like Smith, the very first line of Marx’s classic work introduces the image of wealth that his concepts and theories presuppose.

“The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevail presents itself as an immense accumulation of commodities.” (Marx, 1867:1)

What separates these two images of wealth was, of course, the industrial revolution. This revolution not only excited the thinking of radicals like Marx, but it also excited the thinking of more conservative thinkers such as William Stanley Jevons and two others who were independently working on a new theory of value that turned Smith’s objective labour theory of value upside down. This was a subjective marginal utility theory of the value based on the mathematical calculus of the pleasure and pain derived from the differential consumption of goods. It provided different answers to questions about wages, prices, and profit. Instead of a class-based historically grounded theory of profit as exploitation, Jevon’s theory was based on the figure of the abstract, ahistorical individual making free choices in the marketplace. In came Smith’s doctrine of laissez faire, out went his labour theory of value. This new theory of value was informed by a radically new paradoxical image of the horn of plenty. As Robbins (1932:47) put it, “wealth is not wealth because of its substantial qualities. It is wealth because it is scarce.” Thus, wealth for the conservative economist is not the material abundance produced by industrial wage labour, but the subjective scarcity as perceived by the universal consumer of consumption goods.

Marx’s political economy inspired the dreams of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and others; Jevon’s economic science the dreams of the heretic Keynes, the true-believer Friedman, and others. At one extreme a very negative Smithian-inspired image of wealth as historically specific surplus value, at the other extreme a very positive Smithian-inspired image of wealth as universal scarcity value. The rest, as they say, was the history of the 20th century.

David concern is the quest for a 21st century image of wealth that enables us to put this Eurocentric image in its place and to imagine something that goes beyond it. David’s thinking was inspired by the comparative ethnographic literature which revealed to him the common ground of both sides of the debate between economists. Like Sahlins, he rejects the idea of universal scarcity and strives to extend Marx by looking at the ethnographic evidence on non-capitalist and pre-capitalist images in the quest for a 21st century post-capitalist image.

“Political economy”, David (2007: 47) notes, “tends to see work in capitalist societies as divided between two spheres: wage labor, for which the paradigm is always factories, and domestic labor – housework, childcare – relegated mainly to women.” Political economy gives primacy to abstract labour time on the factory floor. David wants to turn this upside down and give primacy to the creative thoughts and actions of people engaged in the process of reproducing their society and their children in a culture of their own making.

As a contribution to thinking about the value question in general, David’s work in not original. He is careful to acknowledge his debt to the many anthropologists who have inspired him, especially his teachers at Chicago: Terry Turner and Nancy Munn. He also acknowledges the work of many others whose work he has critiqued such as Marilyn Strathern and me. Since he published his book, many other anthropologists, such as Hart and Hann, have developed important new approaches to economic analysis that put human beings at the centre.

What distinguishes David’s contribution, it seems to me, is that his five-volume study of value is the most radical and the most ambitious. David’s life work—which now amounts to some fifteen books by my count—is nothing less than a whole socio-economic history and cultural geography of the human condition.

A defining characteristic of David’s approach is his interest in the economic theology as well as the political economy of wealth. He finds much economic theology in European political economy, and much political economy in non-European economic theology. He is concerned with what our image of wealth has become and with signs of hope of what it can become.

One of David’s projects, for example, was the deep cultural history of the secularisation of European economic theology, and the extent to which the secularisation was unfinished business. European political economy from Petty in 1662 to Marx in 1867, for example, is full of talk about Father Labour and Mother Earth as the creators of Wealth, but no mention of God the Son in the form of a wheat-God named baby Jesus or baby Zeus suckling their mother’s milk. This partial secularisation of the horn of plenty myth not only devalues women as mothers, but it also devalues males as sons as the supreme form of wealth. This is a truly great revolution in human thought, one whose English history the OED lexicographers have documented in painstaking detail. I know of no male-centric economic theology of wealth from the non-European world that goes this far. In 21st century India, for example, the quest for wealth in the Smithian laissez faire sense reigns supreme, but so too does the ideology of the son as a supreme form of wealth. As the census data on the sex ratio shows, this ideology is strongest in those areas of Northwest India where capitalism is the most advanced. Where I work in east-central India, by contrast, the economic theology of wealth assumes the ritual form of a rice goddess named Lakshmi, the daughter of Mother Water, not Mother Earth. The 31,000-line sacred poem priestesses sing celebrates Lakshmi as fearless daughter rather than dutiful wife. Indeed, her wedding to a wife-bashing husband leads to her demise. The story has a happy ending when wife-beating husband, and jealous co-wives realise the error of their ways. As political economy this theology is womb-centric, daughter-centric, rice-centric, and water-centric. But as David notes, comparisons like this enable us to perceive the phallo-centric, wheat-centric European images of wealth of Political Economy for what they are.

Concluding remarks

Theories of value present themselves as descriptive accounts of the world that use a limited set of concepts—such as ‘use-value’ ‘exchange-value,’ ‘reciprocity,’ and the like—to develop general theories about what is. The flip side of these descriptive accounts is a prescription of what should be. The difference between a description and the prescription are the policy conclusions needed to bring about the changes necessary to close the gap. When it comes to Political Economy and Economic Science, the prescription is a very simple image of wealth, one that has its origins in Adam Smith’s version of the Greek myth of plenty. On the one side, an historically specific image of the abundance of commodities, on the other side a universal image of scarce goods.

This Eurocentric dream, which has enabled millions of people the world over to escape from the material poverty of their forebears, has become the nightmare of us all. It has led to obscene wealth here, dire poverty there, and environmental destruction everywhere. David rightly identifies the image of wealth that informs Political Economy and Economic Science as the false coins of our dreams today. The anthropologically and historically informed concepts and theories that he develops in all his books are all concerned to reveal the debased and worn-out nature of this false coin. He wants to encourage collective thought about how to forge a new image of wealth. The concepts and theories in his Value book, his Debt book and his Bullshit Jobs book present us with alternative images of wealth from non-European, non-capitalist economies, pre-capitalist economies, and 21st century capitalist economies respectively.

The image of wealth that informs David’s dreams, like all images of wealth, is very simple and possible to achieve. He wants to move the focus of attention from the production of commodities, and the consumption of goods, to the reproduction of people, one where the children of today have a say in the world of tomorrow. The task of re-imagining a world where people can reproduce themselves has become a very urgent one. His writings reveal the huge gap between what is and what could be. His non-violent political actions, and his optimism, remind us that scholarly work is a necessary but not a sufficient means to achieve this end. Political activists in the schools of Business, Law, and Economics who give ‘policy advice’ to governments and the captains of industry have long recognised this fact. The Fearless Girl who used to oppose the Charging Bull on Wall Street reminds us that anthropology for David is not just about taking a point of view, it is also about taking action. Anthropologists, he might say echoing Marx, have only interpreted the world; the problem, however, is to change it.


Chris Gregory is an Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at the Australian National University. He specialises in the political and economic anthropology of Asia and the Pacific.


This text was presented at David Graeber LSE Tribute Seminar on ‘Value’.


References

Barnes, J. A. (1994). A Pack of Lies: Towards a Sociology of Lying. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Frankfurt, H. (2005). On Bullshit. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Graeber, D. (2001). Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of our Dreams. New York: Palgrave.

Graeber, D. (2004). Fragments of an anarchist anthropology. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.

Graeber, D. (2007). Possibilities: Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion, and Desire. Edinburgh.

Graeber, D. (2009). Direct Action: An Ethnography. Edinburgh: AK Press.

Graeber, D. (2011). Debt: The First 5000 years. New York: Melville House Publishing.

Graeber, D. (2018). Bullshit Jobs: A Theory. London: Simon & Schuster.

Graeber, D. (2019). If Politicians Can’t Face Climate Change, Extinction Rebellion Will: A new movement is demanding solutions. They may just be in time to save the planet. New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/01/opinion/extinction-rebellion-climate-change.html

Gregory, C. (2021). On the Spirit of the Gift that is Stone Age Economics. Annals of the Fondazione Luigi Einaudi, LV (1), 11-34. doi: DOI: 10.26331/1131

Hubert, H., & Mauss, M. (1902-1903). Esquisse d’une théorie générale de la magie. L’Année sociologique, 7, 1-146.

Kalb, D. (2014). Mavericks: Harvey, Graeber, and the reunification of anarchism and Marxism in world anthropology. Focaal: Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology (69), 113-134. doi:https://doi.org/10.3167/fcl.2014.690108

Marx, K. (1867). Capital. Vol. I: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production: Moscow: Progress.

Mauss, M. (1972). A General Theory of Magic, with a foreword by D. F. Pocock (R. Brain, Trans.). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Robbins, L. (1932). An Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science. London: Macmillan.

Smith, A. (1776). An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. London: Everyman’s Library, 1970.


Cite as: Gregory, Chris. 2021. “What is the false coin of our own dreams?” FocaalBlog, 9 December. https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/12/09/chris-gregory-what-is-the-false-coin-of-our-own-dreams.

David Graeber LSE Tribute Seminar: Value

Chair: Alpa Shah

Discussants: Chris Gregory & Don Kalb

‘Value’ is the one central theme that runs throughout and conjoins all of David Graeber’s writings. This week focuses on his first book, whose original title, eventually flipped around by the editor, was The False Coin of our own Dreams: Towards an anthropological theory of value. While Chris Gregory delves into the core of what David meant by ‘false coin of our own dreams’, Don Kalb casts a critical lens of his conception of ‘value’ and the constituent imagination. As the first considers David’s work in relation to the economists and their images of wealth, the second looks at its place among the Marxists, drawing a combined picture that situates David’s most challenging book in a refined comparative perspective.


These conversations first took place at the LSE Research Seminar on Anthropological Theory, and are published as a FocaalBlog feature in tribute to the life and work of David Graeber.



Alpa Shah is Professor of Anthropology at LSE, convenes a research theme at the LSE International Inequalities Institute and is author of the award-winning Nightmarch: Among India’s Revolutionary Guerrillas.

Chris Gregory is an Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at the University of NSW. He specialises in the political and economic anthropology of Asia and the Pacific.

Don Kalb is founding editor of Focaal and Focaalblog and a professor of social anthropology at the University of Bergen, where he leads the ‘Frontlines of Value’ project.