Having the opportunity to say a few words about the work of an esteemed colleague and an intellectual reference like Don Kalb is a rare privilege. Value and worthlessness: The rise of the populist right and other disruptions in the anthropology of capitalism is a fantastic book, worthy of discussion and celebration. It compiles some of the greatest hits that this public intellectual committed to his time has written in the last two decades or so (and the best of his work is just very, very good!) and ultimately stands as an energizing, unapologetic, and much-needed call and manifesto for an anthropology of capitalism.
I would like to say a bit more about what is meant by that (“an anthropology of capitalism”), but first I should describe the main contents of the book, which give a good sense of the author’s range of interests and the systematic character of his intellectual pursuits. The articles in the book could, in my mind, be divided into three groups. First, the ethnographic pieces, which masterfully disclose the interweaving of intimate and distant processes in the lives lived within the society of capital in Europe: from the uncovering of the hidden histories of flexible familism in the Eindhoven of the Phillips corporation to those underpinning the shift to the right of the Polish industrial proletariat, subsequently integrated in a comparative analysis of the “world-systemic production of worthlessness” in what is one my favorite chapters of the book; and from there to the ethnographic examination (with Oana Mateescu) of the webs of life of the urban youth at the center of the IT boom in Central and Eastern Europe, exploring the postsocialist dispossession, neoliberal policies and urban class inequality that loom behind that boom.
Next to those, we have a series of chapters that theorize the epochal transformations of capitalism in the twenty-first century. We can find in this group, inter alia, a salutary dissection and tearing apart of the concept of “global middle class”, a must-read discussion on the value theory of labor and an insightful piece where Kalb proposes the concept of double devaluations – which identifies the combination of economic and social-political-discursive devaluation of particular places, activities and peoples – to understand the rise of the populist right.
The third and final group is composed by a series of polemical, utterly enjoyable diatribes, where Kalb reminds us that the kind of materialist anthropology that this book and journals like Focaal cultivate and cherish occupies a subaltern position within the discipline and that it needs to be defended – and that one must do so with “no apologies”. These chapters are high-caliber critical engagements with and against generally well-chosen enemies, ranging from those with whom we need have no business – from the culture concept and its webs of meaning to the hyperpoliticization of identities, and from ontological theory to the anthropology of morality – to those we need to dialogue with because of their intellectual stature and a certain affinity of purpose (I especially recommend the pages where Kalb discusses the work of Marcel Mauss and David Graeber) in seeking anti-systemic alternatives to capitalism.
This array of greatest hits is framed by a preface and two masterful chapters where Kalb gives us all the necessary tools for the practice of a careful but uninhibited Marxist anthropology. In speaking about his seminal historical ethnographic work in the Netherlands, he describes the motivation to find the hidden history of Eindhoven thus: “That was precisely the attraction. Finding out things that people somehow know or sense, but cannot easily talk about for lack of a public vocabulary. That lack was in turn caused by the failure of an organic intelligentsia to notice local silences and give meaning to them” (Kalb 2025, p. xvii). Like them, the materialist anthropologists to whom this book is addressed all too often tend to lack a vocabulary. Kalb knows that, and this book goes a long way in furnishing it. “Class”, “labor” and “capital” pepper the text, as they should, but the list of terms goes deeper: “hidden histories”, “webs of life”, “structured contingency”, etc., as well as the many insightful concepts that come out of his sustained discussion of value, such as “double devaluations”, “worthlessness” and “dialectical value regimes”. Some will perhaps argue that many of these terms are not new. To that, I would answer that this may actually be the point. For this book shows to us that we already have the terms, that they come from a robust and deep tradition of Marxist and Marxist-inspired anthropology and broader social thought. All that is needed is to use that treasure chest imaginatively and to systematically deploy our terms to “reveal the hidden connections among different aspects of life” (Kalb 2025, p. 15) under capitalism to ultimately contribute to its transformation. Kalb calls it “an interdisciplinary Marxist anthropology of the present” (Kalb 2025, p. 3). Indeed.
In fact, this book’s contribution to this “anthropology of the present” is not limited to the furnishing of vocabulary, far from it. In the introduction, it offers a history of anthropology in the twenty-first century, connecting it to the key moments in the capitalist transformations of the last quarter century that should be compulsory reading in any course of anthropological theory. Among the many merits of this historical-theoretical tour de force, my favorite one is Kalb’s dispelling of the worn, nefarious myth that Marxist anthropologists are economic reductionists. As he argues, it’s rather the opposite. Take the example of “class”: yes, class is key to understand webs of life under capitalism, of course, but only on the condition that it is not reduced to a “singularly economic category” and is instead approached as a “complex social relationship”: “Class … refers to the relational … fields of force that put pressure on, and set limits to, the forms and practices by which we reproduce our lives” (Kalb 2025, p. 23). This approach to class is linked to an understanding of capitalism as a totality: “a set of social relations, a social form, and a type of society. This is a society that is organized, legally, institutionally, and relationally, to feed and sustain a capitalist economy that is fetishistically imagined as separate from it” (Kalb 2025, p. 17). Those that reduce capitalism to “an economy” contribute to that fetishization. To do an anthropology of the present, thus, one must necessarily be ready to do an anthropology of capitalism, for it is not possible to understand the common lives in which we are interested without having a grasp of the immanent tendencies of that totality that we call capitalism. In short, an anthropology of the (historical) present is an anthropology of capitalism, and vice versa.
Throughout this book, Don Kalb gives us vocabulary, theory and a clear sense of purpose together with precious examples of how to put them at the service of the analysis of the concrete. Yet, I would say that this book does something even more important than all that. Ida Susser’s dedication in the book’s back cover puts it eloquently: “Value and Worthelessness”, she writes, “synthesizes the original, courageous, and exhilarating work of Don Kalb. A vital Marxist anthropology for the present”. Indeed, vital and courageous are the right words. For I would say that vitalistic courage is the main gift that we get from this book. It gives us courage against the tendency to be risk-averse and the temptation to come up with a few fancy derivative terms that may garner us citations but do little else. It gives us courage to call ourselves Marxist anthropologists and to speak about and for the present. With no apologies. For this, we salute you, comrade Kalb.
Jaume Franquesa is Professor of Anthropology at University at Buffalo, SUNY. His research focuses on political economy, energy, and environmental transformations. He studies how renewable energy developments and infrastructure expansion reshape landscapes, livelihoods, and power relations, particularly in Southern Europe.
References
Kalb, Don. 2025. Value and Worthlessness: The Rise of the Populist Right and Other Disruptions in the Anthropology of Capitalism. New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books.
Cite as: Franquesa, J. 2026. “For an anthropology of capitalism” Focaalblog April 21.