Let me first say that I have been waiting for Don Kalb’s new book for a long time! Kalb has been a leading theorist of the growth of the Right in Eastern Europe and elsewhere for many years. Many of us have heard him speak with an overarching and comprehensive vision of the conjunctures and historical dynamics which have led to the current era. He has several key articles which outline the shifting politics of Europe over the past decades and connect them to the interactions of financial capitalism with state and global processes. Here, finally, Kalb has brought these interventions together in a vibrant synthesis.
Through the concepts of value and worthlessness, Kalb illuminates the theoretical links between his early work in the Philips factory under the regime of industrial capitalism in the Netherlands with his ethnographic perspective on post-socialist Poland and his latest work on the rise of the right in relation to the regime of financial capital. Discarded by capital as they are no longer needed, or forced to work in dismal and demeaning circumstances, people come to perceive themselves as worthless while capital extracts its own value.
I cannot possibly summarize the arguments and insights contained in every chapter of this book. I am only grateful that Don has brought these together for us to think about as an assembly of exciting ideas. Here I will focus on a few central themes he addresses and the ways in which his approaches reshape anthropology.
Class
Kalb’s early work in the Philips factory generates a holistic view of class which is fundamental to political economy. My own work (Susser [1982] 2012), based on a similar stress on family, work and social reproduction focused on the key importance of women’s contributions to community and class struggle in neighborhood movements. I remember well how difficult it was, within the social sciences, including anthropology, to find ways to talk about the gendered division of labor, class and agency. Theorists such as Eric Wolf and others maintained an analysis of class, relying on the point of production. Marxist feminists from the 1970s demanded that we conceptualize class in terms of the family in interaction with gendered inequality in spheres beyond the point of production, such as the home and urban space, and also began to stress race and intersectionality as elaborated by abolitionists.
Kalb’s analysis of Philips combines these underlying themes into a classic extended case analysis of social reproduction at a particular conjuncture of capital. He convincingly makes the case for what he calls “flexible familism” which shows the way in which patriarchy was directly implicated in the strategies corporations enforced to extract surplus labor from working class daughters. Through an in-depth analysis of an emotionally wrenching interview, he discusses the controlling and sometimes abusive relations between fathers and daughters. He complicates Gramsci’s discussion of Fordism based on the reinforcement of the patriarchal nuclear family by showing the ways in which industry may invoke different family relations under specific conditions. In the light of this research, he calls for an “expanded” view of class which comprehends the significance of domestic divisions within a broader vision of the processes of capital.
The rise of the Right
In his work on the changing hegemony of the world order, Kalb not only offers an exhilarating analysis of the rise of the global financial regime but he translates its consequences for working class members of Solidarity in post-socialist Poland. Through the analysis of a detailed series of interviews outlining the life history of Krysztof Zadrozny, once a leading activist in Solidarity, Kalb shows how Zadrozny and other activists found themselves “worthless” in post-socialist Poland in the face of corporate investment and the degradation of the nation-state to competitive states within global capital. He explains “the losers of socialism” in much more penetrating terms than simply the fall of the Soviet Union and the imposition of neoliberalism by the West. National unions and workers no longer wielded much power as millions of workers worldwide were sucked into industrial capital at fractions of the wages of earlier workers in the centers of capital. As a consequence, Zadrozny, failed by communism and as he sees it, betrayed by the social democrats, turns to the right.
I agree strongly with Kalb that the turn to the right in Eastern Europe and elsewhere has little to do with immigration or the hatred of the Roma. Such themes may be the content of the right wing populist agenda and the “whispers” of populist autocrats from the Right, they draw their influence from the rage generated in structural processes of class and capital. Nevertheless, I would explain the turn to the right, not only in terms of the repressive history of the Soviet Union and the selling out by the socialists, but as much by the loss of community among the leading activists and the working population. Kalb’s situational analysis of enlightening interviews in both The Netherlands and Poland captures the life and perspectives of the individual within a hidden network of class and worker mobilizations. I argue that to explain whether workers in a particular historical situation move to the left or the right, one might investigate further the neighborhood and community scale: the rituals, social gatherings, party networks and human interactions which give meaning to collective solidarity
My book,The Yellow Vests and the Battle for Democracy (Susser 2026), follows an enigmatic and massive uprising in France in 2018, when hundreds of thousands of people who had never mobilized before, rushed into the streets of Paris initially protesting a new gas tax. I show that this movement could have gone to the Left or the Right. It was the social environment and in fact, the intense engagement of activists and local organizations at the grassroots level that inspired a unified humanistic and inclusive vision which helped to counteract the overwhelming individualistic pressures of neoliberalism.
Following Kalb’s research on the disappointments which contributed to the growth of the Right, we need further analysis of the processes which lead to counter-hegemonic movements along along with a strategic focus on the formation of organic intellectuals as a collective endeavor. The aim of my book on the Yellow Vests was to follow the possible generation of an historic bloc inspired by organic intellectuals as a foundation for a war of position.
Wars of position
In his overall analysis, Kalb takes no prisoners. He is clearly critical of the theorists who banish political economy from the anthropological terrain and insist on the purely symbolic cultural perspective, but he also wants to clarify his objections to ideas of the commons and the formation of common institutions within capitalism. This concern derives from his evaluation of the deceit and betrayals evident in the formation of workers cooperatives in post-socialism. The cooperatives in which workers expressed such hope were sold out by some of their own previous leaders who adopted the neoliberal phantasm of shock, later repudiated even by its initial promoter Jeffrey Sachs, as the means to a successful transition.
In spite of the experiences outlined by Kalb which clearly generated despair, my research suggests that, in his rejection of the commons, he may be throwing the baby out with the bathwater. The Yellow Vests participated in street protests and occupations as a consequence of a deep sense of desperation similar to the “losers of socialism” and also of rage. Nevertheless, many experienced fundamental changes in their sense of hope and collective possibilities as they fought for a commons or took part in commoning, living in common, sharing in common and generating visions of the common for the transformation of civil society. Although the immediate collective excitement was temporary, I argue that many people changed in their subjective understandings of identity and collective engagement and participated in a cascade of later movements led by different fragments of subaltern groups and leaning towards social justice. Without such processes I see no way for transformation to occur from capitalism towards a more socially just and democratic state or system.
Kalb offers few mechanisms for such a transition in this book, although he has always been concerned with social movements as captured in the introduction to the prescient volume Worldwide Mobilizations he co-edited with Massimiliano Mollona (Kalb and Mollona 2018). He attributes change to class struggle, but how people are mobilized collectively and how that class struggle comes about, or then continues, is not discussed in the latest book. Certainly, no violent class struggle in highly industrialized capitalist societies, even less industrialized countries such as Iran, assures any form of democratic transition. For example, in South Africa, where I conducted fieldwork intermittently over a period of twenty years (Susser 2009), although the ANC and the Communist Party engaged in armed struggle for nearly thirty years, the turning points for the end of apartheid and liberation, are worth recalling: a massive series of strikes in the mines, a church opposed to apartheid, and even children in protest against a watered down curriculum, running out of their classrooms to be fired at by cannons in the streets, combined with international sanctions on both the South African government, corporations which traded with South Africa and participation in international events such as the Olympics . We shouldn’t underestimate the costs of the armed struggle, not only in regard to the number of deaths, but also of the young men who lost years of education and faced a grueling route back into civil society. Throughout southern Africa, veterans of the wars of Independence faltered at the margins of society and many failed to achieve stable jobs and a future in the newly created nations.
During those thirty years, perhaps inspired by the armed struggle, the institutions of civil society generated a counter-hegemonic discourse powerful enough to unseat the white supremacist government. Let us not forget the majority of social scientists, Marxists such as Harold Wolpe and Michael Burawoy included, who understood capitalist profits in South Africa to be dependent upon an apartheid regime, and specifically the migrant workers who were consigned to segregated homelands and formed the fundamental cheap workforce for the gold, platinum and other mines. Liberation in South Africa did not fully confront global or even national capitalist investment, and the gap between rich and poor has been enforced in other ways. However, it destroyed the fascist rule of apartheid, upending the racist policy of “homelands” and the colonial control of mineworkers, which had included chain gangs.
Thus, I would strongly argue that Gramsci’s point about a war of position and the creation of a counter-hegemonic discourse and practice are key to any transformation of capitalism. This realization puts questions of culture back front and center within any analysis of capitalism and the conjuncture of political economy with the historical moment. For these reasons, I would argue that Kalb’s clairvoyance and sharply focused analysis would benefit from further incorporation of the cultural and historical interplay of ideas with political economy which he clearly acknowledges.
Prefigurative politics
Taking the idea of prefigurative experiences and the emergence of a unified vision, or concrete utopia for Gramsci, fully into account in any broad analysis is difficult. Kalb has long criticized the anarchism and lack of political economy in the writing of David Graeber, who based his book on Debt firmly in the writing of Marcel Mauss. In this major work, Graeber makes the argument, based on Mauss’s ideas of the gift and reciprocity, that we need to reformulate the idea of debt to recognize that it is a cultural tool of power that can be redefined through political change. Graeber’s claims rely largely on people changing their minds and seeing things differently, no matter the historical moment or the political structures.
In the final chapters of the book Kalb goes straight to the horse’s mouth with his critique of Mauss. He questions his reputation as an ethnographer, as Mauss never in fact did ethnography, or as a theorist. Kalb is eminently convincing that Mauss can in no way be presented as a progressive or informed analyst of his era, and certainly not of the context in which the Russian Revolution took place. Kalb shows that by attempting to reframe Mauss as a source for a radical anthropological theory, Graeber’s work fails to account for the complexities of global capitalism. However, I would suggest that Kalb also needs to recognize more explicitly the power of cultural hegemony and the continuing importance of Graeber’s work in generating a counter-hegemonic vision within a prefigurative community context.
Value and worthlessness
I have only scratched the surface of the multiple challenging and exciting theoretical contributions and original formulations represented by this book. Overall, Kalb addresses culture through his rethinking of value within capitalism and the links he makes between his concepts of value and worthlessness. Through his insightful analyses of his informants’ experiences, he delineates a nuanced and convincing interpretation of the interplay of culture and political economy in their views of the world. There is no question this book is an absolute requirement for understanding the world today – and it shows brilliantly what anthropology combined with political economy and a comprehensive grasp of the global, the state and the local can provide for us all.
Ida Susser is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She has published on popular mobilizations, social movements, and the urban commons in the United States, Europe, and Southern Africa.
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.
Kalb, Don, and Massimiliano Mollona, eds. 2018. Worldwide Mobilizations: Class Struggles and Urban Commoning. New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books.
Susser, Ida. 2009. AIDS, Sex, and Culture: Global Politics and Survival in Southern Africa. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Susser, Ida. 2026. The Yellow Vests and the Battle for Democracy. Taking to the Streets of Paris in the 21st Century. New York: Routledge.
Susser, Ida. [1982] 2012. Norman Street. Poverty and Politics in an Urban Neighbourhood. Oxford University Press.
Cite as: Susser, I. 2026. “The Value of a Left Culture in Combating Worthlessness” Focaalblog, April 23.
