Tag Archives: marxian intimacy

Blog, Features, Notes on 'Value and Worthlessness'

Sharryn Kasmir: Marxian Intimacy

Image 1: (from left to right) Don Kalb, Marion Berghahn, Ida Susser, Sharryn Kasmir and Jaume Franquesa at the launch of Value and Worthlessness at the AAA annual meeting on November 21, 2025. Photo by Stefan Voicu

Don Kalb first sent me Value and Worthlessness: The Rise of the Populist Right and Other Disruptions in the Anthropology of Capitalism in manuscript form. I had read most of the chapters in their original publications and welcomed the chance to revisit familiar arguments and scenes. What I did not anticipate was the emotional force of the collection, particularly chapters two through four. I was struck by the intimacy of the life story of Polish worker-activist Krysztof Zadrozny, who suffered the defeat of his and his Solidarnosc comrades’ aspirations for shopfloor democracy in their white goods factory. I was also affected by the refrain of Maria van de Velde’s self-description— “I have always been dumb”—which poignantly punctuates her account of exploitation and abuse in industrial Eindhoven, Netherlands in the mid twentieth century. Don uses the evocative phrase “close to the skin” to describe his close accounts of people rendered “worthless” through relations of capital accumulation (Kalb 2025, p. 127) but I think something more significant is at stake in the kind of empathy on display. A more capacious concept may be in order, both to identify a consequential feature of his writing and to make a broader claim for Marxist anthropology. I suggest the notion of “Marxian intimacy” to name this intellectual terrain.

To advance the concept, I begin with an excerpt from Zadrozny’s conversation with Don and his colleagues in 1998. Zadrozny reflected on the closing of political horizons during Poland’s post-socialist transition and remembered,

People were willing. There was zest. We could have been building a new society. And I think that this is what the Poles expected to happen. […] There was this rebuilding atmosphere and people had the will to switch to another system and to other habits too. But I guess it didn’t work out too well. Wild capitalism emerged […] it was not the human relations that we craved (Kalb 2025, p. 90)

His sorrow is neither nostalgic nor self-pitying; it is a reckoning with the forces that cut off political possibility. Zadrozny understands the historical conditions under which the project of building a post-socialist society slipped beyond the reach of Polish workers, and worth was stripped from their labor, their communities, and their democratic aspirations. He remembers with painful acuity how worthlessness was produced through the violent reordering of value under emergent market relations. With “Marxian intimacy,” I seek to characterize a text that inhabits the emotional currents of a life lived amidst capitalist crises and that points to the causes of the upheavals. It lays bare the “hidden histories of devaluation, and the hidden injuries of dispossession” (Kalb 2025, p. 65) as deeply felt individual and common experiences. Beyond humanitarian feeling, or the empathy of ethnographic encounter with which our discipline of anthropology is replete, this form of intimacy gives us to know how a life course emerges through layered relations of value and class. Don recounts Zadrozny’s experience not to render legible the moral world of an illiberal cultural “other”—that would be merely an extension of the liberal anthropological cannon and its emic perspective—but as part of his comparative project whose purpose is to explain the rise of the populist right in Poland and elsewhere.

Don conducted his dissertation research in the manufacturing city of Eindhoven, under the shadow of the Philips conglomerate. There, Philips worker Maria van de Velde declared to him, “This is my own history, but it is worthless!” Her exclamation arose from the combination of gendered kinship relations, labor regimes, corporate paternalism, and the arc of patriarchal capitalism speaking through an individual biography. Read alongside the story of the Polish worker-activist, these become diagnostic accounts of worthlessness as a historically produced relation, shaped by deindustrialization, dispossession, financialization, and segmentation of labor markets. Attending to these biographies requires the methodological ambition to identify the mechanisms through which lives are devalued and to articulate those “hidden histories” (Kalb 2025, p. xii).

Don takes the phrase “articulating hidden histories” from the title of an edited volume on the intellectual legacy of anthropologist Eric Wolf (Schneider and Rapp 1995). He shares Wolf’s imperative for anthropology to become a discipline whose meta project is to grasp the totality of capitalist social relations, to apprehend capitalism as a more than 500-year, globe-spanning system within which its objects of study—i.e. cultures—are produced in fields of power. As a child among textile workers in central Europe in the 1930s, Wolf witnessed firsthand how capitalist crisis upended everyday life (Wolf 1982, p. 402.) That experience “formed the central question of his anthropology: how to account for the emergence and persistence of a system whose dynamically unfolding relations can catapult […] everyday life into an abyss of uncertainty as if by an act of nature like an earthquake” (Schneider 1995, p. 16; see Kasmir forthcoming.) Don’s informants lived through similar world-shaking events.

Wolf also sought to explain the rise of extreme ideologies, including National Socialism in Germany, and the intersections of power and the differentiation and deployment of social labor that breathed life into them (Wolf 1999.) Don’s orientation is likewise toward the political “other” rather than anthropology’s well-trod cultural “other” (Kalb 2025, p. xii.) Illiberal mobilizations and right-wing populism, he argues, take shape among populations who are undergoing devaluation, both in their material lives and in discursive fields that mark them as unworthy. His ethnographic sights are set on the dialectic between everyday life and global political economy and between meaning-making and the see-saw of capital expansion and abandonment. Marxian intimacy reconstructs those intersections, exposing their effects, including the resentment and racism that are “part of a cauldron of vindictive feelings about hierarchy, value, and worthlessness, […] amid austerity and a drive for national competitiveness” (Kalb 2025, p. 165). For Zadrozny, a decisive moment was the betrayal of Solidarnosc worker-activists by technocratic elites and the installation of a neoliberal value regime that thwarted the “human relations that we craved,” yet a longer trajectory of dispossession, rather than any single event, had set the course.

Maria van de Velde’s devaluation was produced by exploitation at work and mistreatment within her family. Don recounts her daily routine in detail to draw us close to the drudgery it imposed,

She got up at 5.30 in the morning. Set the table for everyone. Took a bus at 6.30. Started work at 7.30. Worked well above the norm and arrived home again at 5.30 p.m. Tidied up the house, which was often a mess, and started peeling potatoes for dinner. She cleaned up the dishes afterward and went to bed totally exhausted (Kalb 2025, p. 101)

Maria repeatedly reaches for an explanation for her misery. And she turns from the knowable causes of her mistreatment at the hands of her employers and those of her sister, mother and father, and she offers instead that she was “dumb.” This pivot is abrupt, and it interrupts her search for answers:

But I have always been really dumb[…] They used to say I was just dumb. […] My father was often drunk and aggressive. Nellie, my second-oldest sister, was in fact running the household. […] I had to do everything (Kalb 2025, p. 101)

It was work, work, and work again. Maybe it is true that I have always been dumb, like they used to say (Kalb 2025, p. 103)

She lists the record of neglect and mistreatment and then wipes it away with self-deprecation, “I have always been dumb.” Reconstructing the social relations that produced her suffering therefore requires concerted attention. Don parses her individual biography and the structural causes that shape it. “Maria’s subjection was more multiple and her relationships with her parents more difficult than was probably the case with most other working-class girls. It made her feel she was ‘dumb.’” (Kalb 2025, p. 105)

In a dense narration of common events and circumstances of proletarian life in the region, Maria’s story is deeply moving above all for the intense tension it evokes between hostility and intimacy, fear and respect, trust and distrust, which all social relations seem to have been imbued with (Kalb 2025, p. 103)

Maria’s story is deeply moving because it conveys the experience of female proletarian life in the region, formed by class and gender, and because it is embedded in the structural pain that accompanies those collective conditions.

Intimacy is not a word we often hear associated with Marxist theory, yet the ethnographic chapters in this volume show that a deep emotional register may be one of its unremarked strengths. Don writes against culturalist empathy because it emphasizes morals and emic perspectives, while failing to explain the dynamics of value and devaluation. We feel profoundly for Maria and Zadrozny. The urgency that confronts us as we read their life stories goes beyond personal compassion to give rise to the imperative to remake the conditions that determine value and worth.

Sharryn Kasmir is Professor of Anthropology at Hofstra University. She has done fieldwork in the Basque region of Spain and in the southern United States. Her research and writing focuses on capitalism and working class lives and politics.

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.

Kasmir, Sharryn. Forthcoming 2026. “The New Laborers: Revisiting the Last Chapter of Europe and the People Without History Fifty Years Hence” In Don Kalb and Luisa Steur, Eds. In the Tracks of Marxist Anthropology: Fifty years of Eric Wolf’s ”Europe and the People Without History”. New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books.

Schneider, Jane. 1995. “Introduction: The Analytical Strategies of Eric Wolf”, In Jane Schneider and Rayna Rapp, Eds. Articulating Hidden Histories: Exploring the Influence of Eric Wolf. Berkeley: University of California Press, 3-31.

Jane Schneider and Rayna Rapp, Eds. 1995. Articulating Hidden Histories: Exploring the Influence of Eric Wolf. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Wolf, Eric, 1982. Europe and the People without History. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Wolf, Eric. 1999. Envisioning Power: Ideologies of Dominance and Crisis. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Cite as: Kasmir, S. 2026. “Marxian Intimacy” Focaalblog, April 22.

Blog, Features, Notes on 'Value and Worthlessness'

Stefan Voicu: Huffing and Puffing with a Marxist Anthropologist

mage 1: Value and Worthlessness cover and review blurbs from Sian Lazar and Michael Burawoy
Image 1: Value and Worthlessness cover and review blurbs from Sian Lazar and Michael Burawoy

This text is not about the huffing and puffing you would expect. Although Don Kalb is Dutch, his new book, Value and Worthlessness: The Rise of the Populist Right and Other Disruptions in the Anthropology of Capitalism is about a different kind of huffing and puffing. Kalb borrows this expression from E.P. Thompson to foreground the messy realities on which the hegemony of the capitalist law of value rests. Let me quote him at length on this:

Rather than being the assured outcome of successive market equilibria, this immanent historical tendency [the law of value] was always also the contingent outcome of ongoing class struggles at all levels in the system, and throughout all its various, evolving and interlocking institutional domains; and this against a turbulent background of recurrent economic crisis and violent ruptures (Kalb 2025, p. 54)

In Value and Worthlessness, Kalb has set out to do something that nobody has attempted to do since the 1970s. He develops a programmatic line of Marxist research in anthropology and outlines a conceptual toolbox that binds together political economy, social history, and ethnography. Kalb began his career in the late 1980s, during the last flickers of a once popular Marxist anthropology, but remained unapologetically Marxist, centering his work on an expanded notion of class to understand the globalization of capital at a time when the discipline was rapidly spiraling out of control into the language-games of culture. Now, bringing together his fieldwork with workers from the Philips factory in the company town of Eindhoven, with post-socialist Solidarność workers from the Polar factory in Wroclaw, and, accompanied by Oana Mateescu, with cognitive workers from Cluj’s booming IT industry, he develops an anthropological theory of capitalism and the methodological guidelines to pursue it.

Kalb does a lot of huffing and puffing himself in the book, describing social processes that unfold in and across capitalist times and spaces. I invited Jaume Franquesa, Sharryn Kasmir and Ida Susser, three leading US-based Marxist anthropologists, to write down the reflections on the book they shared during the launch of Value and Worthlessness at the 2025 AAA annual meeting. In the texts gathered in this feature, each of them celebrates the book while extending it in a distinct direction. Kasmir theorizes Kalb’s ethnographic method as “Marxian intimacy,” Susser presses him to take counter-hegemonic culture and processes of commoning more seriously, and Franquesa salutes the book as a courageous manifesto that equips Marxist anthropologists with vocabulary and purpose.

Image 2: (from left to right) Marion Berghahn, Don Kalb, Ida Susser and Sharryn Kasmir at the launch of Value and Worthlessness at the AAA annual meeting on November 21, 2025. Photo by author
Image 2: (from left to right) Marion Berghahn, Don Kalb, Ida Susser and Sharryn Kasmir at the launch of Value and Worthlessness at the AAA annual meeting on November 21, 2025. Photo by author

On top of their brilliant interventions, I want to outline three other important contributions this book makes.

First, Kalb proposes to view capitalism as an unevenly structured totality, a system that produces internal differences on which it feeds. Those readers of the book knowledgeable in post-Marxist theory, as well as the “less marxists” anthropologists Kalb takes aim at, will likely huff and puff at this idea. For half a century, Marxist theory has been constructed around the idea that capitalism is incomplete, that there is something external to it and the thrust of capitalism’s law of value is sucking in these outside spaces brimming with counter-hegemonic possibilities. Kalb instead starts from the common sense observation that contemporary capitalism has commodified everything. Directly or indirectly, the majority of the world’s population is now exploited by a minority that accumulates capital. Capital is insidious, as Kalb (2024) argues in the introduction to the edited volume that could be read as a companion to Value and Worthlessness, and the new frontiers of value are manufactured mainly through spectacular accumulations followed by violent processes of devaluation. There is no way out of capitalism except through it. Marx’s argument that the bourgeoisie produces its own gravediggers never rang more true than today and between the lines of Kalb’s book one can read a repositioning of the redefined working class at the center of the struggle for a better world.

Second, Kalb wants to extricate Graeber’s radical anthropology from Mauss’ influence. He argues that because of this influence Graeber’s work on value is unable to account for class struggle and the multi-scalar structure of capitalism, misleading him into a somewhat voluntaristic political position. Kalb argues radical anthropologists should replace Mauss with Trotsky. According to Kalb, not only is the latter’s History of the Russian Revolution more ethnographic than anything Mauss wrote, but Trotsky, as opposed to the academically embedded ‘nepo baby’ Mauss, is probably a better model of politically engaged thinker. Moreover, neither Mauss in the 1920s-1930s, nor Graeber in the 2010s-2020s anticipated the rise of the fascist right. Both Trotsky and Kalb sounded the alarm on these worrisome developments early on (see Kalb 2009, Kalb and Halmai 2011, Trotsky 1971). Not coincidentally the structured unevenness defining Kalb’s capitalist totality is drawn from Trotsky’s theory of uneven and combined development and it is sharply opposed to Mauss’ expressive totality. However, it’s undeniable that Graeber was a model of a politically engaged anthropologist, highly influential, and quite the opposite of a ‘nepo baby’. The anarcho-socialist politics he promoted, coupled with the enduring, although questionable, image Trotsky carries as responsible for crushing Kronstadt, will probably require more huffing and puffing to replace Mauss and the kind of activist politics anthropologists are willing to engage in.

Third, in his engagement with Graeber and his theory of value, Kalb brings David Harvey’s political economy down into the muddled realities of “emplaced anthropological huffing and puffing” (Kalb 2025, p. 54) and proposes a new anthropological theory of capitalist value. Graeber’s value theory aimed to collapse the distinction between value, as in economic value, and values, as in social and cultural values. In his Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value (Graeber 2001) he develops the theoretical framework for this project, but only in Debt (Graeber 2011) he fully explores the implications of the argument. Debt, Graeber shows, is not only an economic value, but permeates and frames all social relations. Graeber shows how one can find debt defining the relation between God and humans in the oldest religious text, as well as between friends in everyday life. Kalb rejects both the value/values distinction, as well as the reduction of both to one single value that Graeber advances. Instead, he proposes to look at value and values as being in a “dynamic relational totality” he calls “value regime” or “dialectical value regime”. Analysing the vernacular narratives of worth and worthlessness in The Netherlands and Poland, Kalb shows how workers’ values emerge alongside or in opposition to the accumulation imperatives of a specific industry, in a specific time and space, and always in conjunction with the abstract forces of capitalism’s law of value. Through this engagement with intimate experiences of capitalism, “Marxian intimacy” as Kasmir beautifully puts it, Kalb builds a theoretical foundation for the understanding of the rise of the populist Right in Europe and develops the concept of double devaluations, of both value and values, whose importance Franquesa highlights in his text.

Whether readers will huff and puff or nod in agreement while reading Kalb’s take on totality, Trotsky versus Mauss, regimes of value, or the critical junctions that led to the rise of the populist Right, matters less than the importance this book should have in any attempt to research contemporary capitalism. Like all great books, this is one critical anthropologists must reckon with, debate, criticize and use to advance our understanding of the current conjuncture.

The photos I took at the book launch got a bit damaged when I developed the film I shot them on. Coincidence? Maybe…They look a bit haunted, which kind of fits the 2025 AAA annual meeting theme of Ghosts. In these photos Don Kalb, Jaume Franquesa, Sharryn Kasmir, and Ida Susser seem to be those specters of marxism haunting a conference where sessions on Marxism and communism, conjured nowadays by right-wing leaders as if it was still the Cold War, were strangely missing.

Stefan Voicu is a social anthropologist researching transformations of property and class relations under financialized capitalism. He is one of the FocaalBlog editors.

References

Graeber, David. 2001. Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams. Palgrave.

Graeber, David. 2011. Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Melville House.

Kalb, Don. 2009. ‘Conversations with a Polish populist: Tracing hidden histories of globalization, class, and dispossession in postsocialism (and beyond).’ American Ethnologist 36(2), 207-223.

Kalb, Don. 2024. Insidious Capital. Frontlines of Value at the End of a Global Cycle. Berghahn Books.

Kalb, Don. 2025. Value and Worthlessness: The Rise of the Populist Right and Other Disruptions in the Anthropology of Capitalism. Berghahn Books.

Kalb, Don and Gábor Halmai. Eds. 2011. Headlines of Nation, Subtexts of Class. Working Class Populism and the Return of the Repressed in Neoliberal Europe. Berghahn Books.

Trotsky, Leon. 1971. The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany. Pathfinder Books.

Cite as: Voicu, S. 2026. “Huffing and Puffing with a Marxist Anthropologist” Focaalblog April 20. https://www.focaalblog.com/2026/04/20/stefan-voicu-huffing-and-puffing-with-a-marxist-anthropologist/