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Blog, Notes on 'Value and Worthlessness'

Don Nonini: How is Workers’ Labor Power “Inside” Yet “Beyond” Capital?

Image 1: Potato harvest, Clarketon Community Garden, Clarketon, Edgecombe County. Photo by Willie Jamaal Wright

Reading Don’s Value and Worthlessness (hereafter VAW)has been one of the peak experiences of my intellectual life. VAW promises to become one of the key texts in the Marxist anthropology of the 21st century. It displays Don’s rigorous Marxist theorizing, his study of the history of capitalism, and an ethnographic epistemology grounded in dialectical moves from the concreteness of lives laboring under capitalism “up” to the abstractions of theory, and then back “down” to the concrete to illuminate these lives. All this Don boisterously juxtaposes with a series of cogent yet cranky and highly enjoyable polemics against David Graeber, Marcel Mauss, moral anthropology, ontological anthropology, and other anthropological culturalisms.

Theoretically, in VAW Don has set out key conceptual contributions to any present and future Marxist anthropology: the law of value, the dialectic of use value and exchange value, double devaluations, critical junctions, hidden histories, uneven and combined development, insidious capital, and value regimes; and ethnographically: flexible familism (Eindhoven), post-socialist “worthless Poles” (Wroclaw), and the “politics of leftovers” (Cluj). VAW is quite clearly a book audaciously put together from decades of keen and incisive Marxist theorizing, historical analysis, and long-term ethnographic research – all of it infused with Don’s compassion for working people.

Above all, reading VAW made explicit to me the realization that I had long left unexamined about the history of postwar capitalism: As Don puts it (Kalb 2025:55), “What if there is no outside to capital? What if we have to start from the assumption that the whole of social life and the planet has now been usurped by the rough rule of capital…?” Don’s devastating critique in VAW (Kalb 2025:3-12, 18-19, 40-58) of prefigurative idealist anarchism and David Graeber’s work puts paid to the idea that today anyone in the world is “outside capitalism.” Everyone alive today finds themselves in some relationship to it – the vast majority of people for the worse, entangled in its deleterious effects. Uneven proletarianization of an increasing majority of the world’s human population as “broadly working-class” (Kalb 2025:187-188) is now universal, including among global Northern academics.

How is Marxist ethnography Illuminated by the history of capitalism — and of social movements?

I have read with great interest the FocaalBlogtexts by Stefan Voicu, Jaume Franquesa, Sharryn Kasmir, and Ida Susser on VAW, as well as Don’s rejoinder. Don’s commentators all offer important insights, but I want to focus on the heated debate between Ida and Don. Ida argues that commoning, and the presence of organic intellectuals articulating a counter hegemony are characteristic signs of the emergence of a leftist movement in the case of the Yellow Vests. Don’s rejoinder trenchantly takes exception to Ida’s argument by arguing that these phenomena were also present within the rightwing neonationalist movements of CEE workers he has studied, and are thus not diagnostic of the left.

This contention between Ida and Don is consequential. Here Don deals a doubly unfair hand to Ida. First, while Don has the advantage of the retrospective comparative histories of post-1980s CEE workers’ movements allowing him over time (1997-2007; Kalb 2025:73) to draw his brilliant inferences about how double devaluation is connected to the emergence of right wing movements; Ida in her very recent ethnography of the Yellow Vests (Susser 2026), whose history still remains largely “hidden,” has no such retrospective to draw on. Second, unlike the two decades post-socialist period that Don studied, Ida’s fieldwork on the Yellow Vests comes out of the recent accelerated political instabilities of the interregnum’s Polanyian counter movements on the left and right in the 2020s. Ida’s findings are necessarily provisional. That said, Ida argues cogently from her ethnography that the processes of Yellow Vests’ commoning and solidarity building combined with the efforts of its organic intellectuals show the attempt to build a leftist counter hegemony against the savage abuses of the French neoliberal state. Although the outcome is as yet unclear, Ida persuasively shows that what we see so far is that the Yellow Vests have turned to the left. Her assessment deserves our respectful attention.

Also worthy of respect is Ida’s discussion of counterhegemonic ideology by organic intellectuals who can be instrumental in forming leftist social movements. Such an ideology when combined with workers’ material resources can limit the effects of double devaluations (Kalb 2025: 29) in generating a turn to the right. These resources include workers’ labor power outside the wage-labor relation; income streams such as pensions and state transfer payments (e.g. for food, health care); knowledges, skills, tools, machines, land, etc. for collective provisioning; and the aid and assistance of allies, including agencies of the liberal state. Counterhegemonic ideologies that draw on collective histories (e.g., “Black Lives Matter,” “resisting fascism”) can armor workers against the individualism and isolating humiliations crucial to their devaluation (e.g., “you’re not productive, you deserve to be fired,” “you’re worthless”). I present one such example below. What is now needed in my view is open-minded critical discussion about leftist social movements in formation – generously framed between comrades.

The Use Value of Workers’ Labor Power: For Whom?

Like any masterpiece, VAW invites the reader to ask questions which the author has pointed to but not followed up on. In any event, reading VAW has helped this reader refine them. Don’s work (Kalb and Mollona 2018:1-29; Kalb 2024) makes clear his deep commitment to the analysis and critical support of the “urban insurrections” of 2011, more recent ones, and ones on their way, and more broadly to understanding the conditions that make them possible. What are these conditions, from whence do they arise, and what are their implications for research? In this context, I’d like to look briefly at what my book (Nonini and Holland 2024) and others (e.g. Susser 2026) might have to say about one of his least developed, even neglected, topics.

This is the use value of labor power exerted by the broadly defined working classes, but not as Karl Marx in Capital v.1 and Don in VAW refer to it – the use value of the labor power of workers for the capitalist in the process of appropriating surplus value – but instead the use value of waged and unwaged workers’ labor power for themselves and for those on whom they depend and who depend in turn on them in what Don refers to as the “biographical” process of social reproduction. Lebowitz (2003: 145) points to workers’ “’absolutely necessary’” private labor “outside the sphere of capital,” i.e., outside the domain of the wage-labor relation and its appropriation of surplus value – so in this sense “beyond capital.”

Let’s put this in the context of the current conjuncture. In a recent article Don (Kalb 2024: 3) has pointed to “traces of reversal” in the 2020s of labor’s losses under globalization and suggests that “a new cycle of labor may be in the offing.” This began surprisingly in the US “where unions have declined more than anywhere else”, but where schoolteachers, academics, and Hollywood writers in 2021 went successfully on strike, and then in 2023 United Auto Workers went out on strike against the Big Three auto manufacturers in “a militant labor mobilization the like of which have not been seen since the 1970s.” US labor’s actions initiated against Tesla in the US led to solidarity strikes against Tesla by Swedish, Danish and Norwegian trade unionists (Kalb 2024:3-4).

Will these manifestations of recent labor “unrest” consolidate into the emergence of a Polanyian counter movement on the left? If the labor activism of the 2020s is like periods in the past when leftist social movements have risen, we would expect this would be manifestly evident in ferocious organizing within labor unions and in antiracist, women’s, housing and environmental movements, extending labor’s power through strikes, consumer boycotts, and street and legal battles, and eventual capitalist concessions — in line with the law of value. But this will occur only to the extent that these shifts can draw on the collective resources of the broadly defined working class itself. Strikers on picket lines need meals prepared for them; families with workers on strike require child and elder care, etc.

I submit that these collective resources are being brought together (in part) through a shift in how workers act in very material ways to show they “value” the use value of their own labor power not only by denying it to the capitalist in the sphere of production, but also by expanding its uses within the social reproduction of everyday life toward collective, militant and disruptive ends. Neither working people nor their labor power are mere “objects” of capital. As Marx (1976:283) pointed out, in the course of class struggle over time, the worker “acts upon external nature and changes it, and in this way he simultaneously changes his own nature.” In doing so workers develop new needs that capital produces but cannot satisfy (e.g., higher wages, healthy air, clean water, adequate housing, nutritional food) (Lebowitz 2003: 178-189).

It is in this sphere of social reproduction that we can look for shifts in how workers labor to care for one another, organize collectively, make and sustain commons, find ways of defining and manifesting new needs and new kinds of collective consumption, and undertake the self- and collective-production and use of (petty) surplus. These can buttress a successful counterattack by the broad working-class on capital.

But many workers may not do some or any of these things. There are no guarantees. Their responses to declining capitalist hegemony in the US may be destructive, individualist, or racist, xenophobic, or even draw some to Trumpist neonationalism (Nonini 2026). As politically committed scholars, we need to understand what “works” and what doesn’t under these conditions.

Working people in the southern US have adapted their living labor outside the wage-labor relation to building their collective capacities and meeting their collective needs to resist capitalist attacks. In the US South, where anti-labor laws prevail, these collective actions of resistance have emerged from churches, antiracist and women’s organizations.

Commons, Needs, Consumption, and Petty Surplus in Rural Eastern North Carolina

Let me be more specific with a brief example from my recent book, Food Activism Today: Sustainability, Climate Change, and Social Justice (Nonini and Holland 2024). The book came out of a collaborative research project set in four different sites in North Carolina during 2009-2011. One of the sites was located in a three-county area within what is called the Black Belt of eastern coastal North Carolina.

In 2009, the few hundred residents of Clarketon, Edgecombe County, were African-Americans, descendants of slaves. Clarketon’s adults were dirt-poor, and owned little property if any other than a few acres of farmland. Other than undertaking very small-scale farming, they either labored in a nearby poultry processing plant or were otherwise unwaged/unemployed, retired or disabled. Within the three counties of the extended field site, they were surrounded by a hostile patchwork of large white-owned “commodity farms,” dotted by small towns each controlled by a very few white corporate managers, local business proprietors and landowners. These towns were situated on a landscape defaced by six prisons holding at least 2,000 prisoners, including a prison centered on a large 3,500 acre prison farm that grew and processed poultry and food crops, and another prison with two “Correction Enterprise” industrial plants producing optical products and printed documents. Both prisons’ industries depended on “convicts”’ expropriated labor power to produce commodities – and expropriated excess surplus value (Ibid., 260-263, 278).

Older adults of Clarketon still had memories of local whites violently attacking them as high schoolers in the 1960s that ended Jim Crow and school segregation. Above all, they said, they feared for “the youth,” their teenage and older children, who faced the dire prospect of being hirable only as low-end minimum-wage service workers in the fast food industry, of joining “gangs,” or being incarcerated in the same prisons that confined many siblings and elder relatives (Ibid.).

The center of residents’ social, religious and working lives outside of wage labor was the Clarketon Baptist Chapel Church and its Garden, both overseen by Reverend Richard Hemmings. The garden consisted of more than 11 acres of land donated by a parishioner of the church, and cultivated by its youth. “The Rev” (Hemmings) brought together a staff consisting of a garden manager, a beekeeper, a tractor mechanic and several retirees as volunteers to carry out a major objective of the church and its garden. This was to teach 15 to 20 Clarketon youth not only how to cultivate the garden and grow crops, but also how to distribute the produce they grew – to provide themselves with produce they could sell for income at a local farmers market to save money earned for their college costs – thus creating surplus for their own use – or keep as food which they could give to their own families to consume, or donate gratis to poorer disabled and retired residents, who were otherwise deficient in food. In doing so, the Rev was teaching youth (and garden staff) a key lesson: it was imperative that food production and distribution be done collectively and be based on solidarity with other Clarketon residents –other youth, elders, family members, and neighbors – through the making of a commons around farmland, collective labor and food production, while also shifting how they thought and acted with respect to their needs and consumption (Ibid., 262-277). As “the Rev” put it about consumption, “you gotta maximize your food, as you gotta cook your own food. You’re not gonna come out of poverty buying [fast food from your] spending money” (Ibid., 266).

Through these simultaneously social and material aspects of food provisioning the Rev taught the youth to develop their own their labor power to achieve the collective goal of contributing to the food security of Clarketon residents, while showing youth how to prepare and protect themselves as they grew older to engage an antagonistic white population who sought to harm them and deemed them worthless, disposable, criminal, and cut off from “society.”

The Rev contrasted this “’Afrocentric economy’” of co-responsibility and mutual support with a “’Eurocentric mindset… of less than, greater than… The struggle [between] the wealthy and the middle class and the poor.… I want to live where there are no classes. There are human beings. When money is the driving factor, then there is a lot of people excluded from the table. The job [i.e. wage labor and exploitation]. That’s how we get poor people’” (Ibid. 272). The Rev’s rejection of a “Eurocentric mindset” in favor of an “Afrocentric economy” is the articulation of a counterhegemonic ideology against US racial capitalism. The Rev is acting as an organic intellectual who connects the youth of Clarketon to one another and to the making of a commons and of community solidarity. In so doing, Rev Hemmings exemplifies the “blues epistemology” that Clyde Woods (1998: 29-39) observed operating among enclaved African-Americans in the rural southern US: the knowledge of a world where the African-American community was assailed on all sides by a hostile white majority, and the imperative in the face of such outside hostility to sustain the integrity of the ‘social dynamics’ of the Black community that suffered racial abuse” (ibid., 278).

Thinking Critically about the Use Value of Workers’ Labor Power

I conclude by turning to Don’s discussion of use values within the biographical processes of social reproduction. Don writes about the place of use-values within social reproduction in an insightful and even moving way – but in my view, too abstractly, ungrounded, and in need of more incisive elaboration toward movement building on the left:

“What we need to develop is an idea of use value as those material and immaterial values embedded in the standards, activities, sites, and essential relationships of our daily as well as long-term social reproduction. You can call them relational use values. We should look at this type of use value dynamically and perceptually. Biographies, collective and individual, are to a considerable extent about the production, reproduction, and indeed accumulation of use values within a shared commons… Accumulation of such relational use values is often experienced as a form of belonging [and]… encapsulates something like social ‘personhood.’ Use value, so conceived, is much of what moves us and what makes us move as we try to produce a life worth living” (Kalb 2025:28).

In the interest of dialogue, based on reflections from the Clarketon Garden project, I offer three provocations about Don’s characterization of use values and social reproduction.

First, it is imperative to distinguish the labors of social reproduction that “function” for capitalism (Weiss 2022) from those that do not (or primarily do not) when workers exert their labor power for their own autonomous practices of commons-making, sharing and care for others outside their time working for capital. An all too common functionalism that assumes that processes of social reproduction “function” only on behalf of capital is vastly different from Marx’s dialectical approach that insists on the two-sided examination of mutual interactions and reciprocal effects between phenomena (Ollman 1993: 31-38, 134-137).

Second, Don writes, we should look at use values within workers’ social reproduction “dynamically and perceptually.” Thus we must consider the use value of their own autonomous labor power within the simultaneous temporal registers of their biographies and the history of capitalism as working people not only transform the material world, but also themselves, leading them to have new needs – needs they become aware of, but that the violence of capitalist exploitation and expropriation denies them from satisfying.

Lastly, a major objective of Marxist-informed ethnography should be to carefully identify how working people respond to capitalist outrages by forming new solidarities among themselves as they collectively discover their new shared needs, learn how to consume together, make commons, and seek to produce surplus outside capitalist control by drawing on their own living labor in long-term projects that build the social movements of the left.

Don Nonini is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. His research interests include class and state formation in colonial and postcolonial Malaysia, and class and racial politics in the Southern U.S. He is currently working on a book on racial capitalism and its ecopolitics.

References

Kalb, D. and M. Mollona (2018). Worldwide mobilizations : Class struggles and urban commoning. New York: Berghahn Books

Kalb, D. (2024). “Tilly reversed? Another cycle of labor and socialism is possible.” International Labor and Working-Class History: 1–9.

Kalb, D. (2025). Value and worthlessness: The rise of the Populist right and other disruptions in the anthropology of capitalism. New York, Berghahn.

Lebowitz, M. (2003) Beyond Capital: Marx’s Political Economy of the Working Class. (2nd ed.). Houndmills, UK and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Marx, K. (1976). Capital : A critique of political economy (Volume 1), with an Introduction by Eugene Mandel, translated by Ben Fowkes. London and New York, Penguin Books.

Nonini, D. (2026). “The Trumpist movement: A class-based counterrevolution against those who would strand the assets of capital? In Backlash: The Global Rise of the Radical Right, D. Kalb and W. Bello, eds. London: Pluto Press, pp. 254-279.

Nonini, D. M. and D. Holland (2024). Food Activism Today: Sustainability, Climate Change, and Social Justice. New York: New York University Press.

Ollman, B. (1993). Dialectical Investigations. New York: Routledge.

Polanyi, K. The Great Transformation. Boston: Beacon Press.

Susser, I. (2026). The Yellow Vests and the Battle for Democracy Taking to the Streets of Paris in the 21st Century. New York: Routledge.

Weiss, H. (2022 ). “Social reproduction is the reproduction of capitalism.” Focaal—Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology 93: 105–111.

Woods, C. (1998). Development arrested: The blues and plantation power in the Mississippi Delta. London: Verso.

Cite as: Nonini, D. 2026. “How is Workers’ Labor Power “Inside” Yet “Beyond” Capital?” Focaalblog July 7. https://www.focaalblog.com/2026/07/07/don-nonini-how-is-workers-labor-power-inside-yet-beyond-capital/

Blog, Features, Notes on 'Value and Worthlessness'

Don Kalb: Anthropological Use Value for an Anticapitalist Left

Image 1: Don Kalb and Marion Berghahn at the launch of Value and Worthlessness at the AAA annual meeting on November 21, 2025. Photo by Stefan Voicu

What a joy to be hugged, celebrated, and criticized by stellar colleagues who intimately know the stakes of invoking Marx in more than a fleeting way in anthropology; stakes that may be higher here than in other social disciplines. Theoretically and methodologically, anthropology is deeply imbricated in liberal and less liberal idealisms, with a stark belief in cultural contingency, and rather wild about the idiography of cultural difference, alterity, and autonomy. If the discipline moves Left, it naturally inclines towards anarchism, mutualism, ethics, radical versions of rights and humanitarianisms or posthumanitarianisms beyond the regular liberal offer, rather than to Marxism and political economy with all their system thinking. The anthropological desire is definitely for a human self that is autonomously thriving on ‘the outside to capital’.

This is largely how the discipline has fared during the worldwide political contestations of the 2000s. Hence the importance of a public anthropologist like David Graeber, who had the genius to catch the Left spirit of the time in the 2000s, before that time itself was fully aware of it. The soon to be coming counter revolution, however, was less noticed by David, or by our discipline at large, though the right wing backlash was smoldering already during the Left wing years. Anthropology only caught up with it, in shock, when the radical Right was already comfortably seated on the plush of Western governmental power, increasingly determining not just ‘policy’ but a full-fledged program of defensive-aggressive Western civilizational supremacy. Unpleasantly surprised, and aware of their own vulnerability, anthropologists at once realized they had long preferred to study ‘people like us’ (nice Left-wanting people) and had ignored questions about labor, class, right wing political anger, and fascism. The inside to capital was blowing back as a boomerang. Ten years later, this still describes our deeply worrying situation.

Admittedly, those of us who were located in, and working on postsocialist Eastern Europe (CEE) were somewhat better prepared than the Western and Southern liberal mainstream. We had seen the counter revolution of the illiberal Right taking shape in the late 1990s and early 2000s already. CEE, it turned out, possibly to our own surprise, was not the liberal laggard of Western imagination, but an illiberal avantgarde that would soon be followed by the West and many places of the South.

The political sociologist David Ost and myself were among the first to notice the deep class dynamics behind the process, dynamics that I later sought to succinctly capture with the concept of ‘double devaluation’, for which Jaume Franquesa salutes me. I love Jaume’s sudden observation that actually none of the concepts that are central to ‘Value and Worthlessness’ (Kalb 2025) are new, that the book is just an unapologetic argument for anthropological Marxism consistently worked out: class, labor, capital, dispossession, social reproduction…imperialism. These days I lay more emphasis than I used to on devaluation and on value, value regimes, and an anthropologically informed dialectical take on the law of value, what Voicu rightly calls my ‘huffing and puffing’. These concepts were less common in the anthropological structural marxisms of the 1970s (though I owe Jonathan Friedman, a survivor of structural Marxism 1970s style, for having pushed me along this path without him being much aware of it, I guess), but Jaume is so right: nothing new, really, just an update of an existing Marxist toolkit and a modest anthropological rethinking under new circumstances and with new problems at hand, within and against a drastically transformed capitalist totality of social relations as compared to the one that produced the 1970s Marxist upsurge. My categories and approach are tuned into that new reality and coined in order to help explain the radical right wing political backlash in CEE and anywhere, in anthropological ways, that is.

I want to emphasize that I have never felt much for the overt structuralisms of those days. At every turn I try to dip my approach to value (“value and values, value regimes”) in what I call relational realism: relations that can be studied, ‘life in and as action’ on worldwide, as well as regional, national, and intimate levels; levels that are dialectically imbued with each other as in multi-scalar relationships; relations with others on which we depend and that shape who we are and who we can and want to be. Hence the ‘structured totality’. Hence also Trotsky, not just for his combined and uneven development, which, as Stefan Voicu rightly notes, is essential, but also his early gesture towards multiscalar analysis as expressed in the distinctions he made between ‘algebraic, arithmetic, and molecular’ scales of analysis, a vision Eric Wolf would later set to work in his ‘faces of power’ (without ever citing Trotsky). There is a big and urgent anthropological project in bringing this multiscalar dialectical edifice of value, including the ‘systemic production of worthlessness’, to work ‘close on the skin’ in the biographies, actions and experiences of our key fieldwork interlocutors; helping to bring their hidden histories into view in ways that under normal circumstances are not usually revealed to them.

‘Intimate Marxism’, Sharryn Kasmir calls the result and she likes it; a profound observation plus a seductive name. Thank you, Sharryn. ‘Intimate Marxism’, almost an oxymoron given popular and anthropological prejudices against a Marxism believed to be preternaturally given to obscurantist or even violent abstractions. Marxist anthropology might want to embrace ‘Marxist intimacy’ as a key element of our mission as compared to other Marxisms, but also, and perhaps more importantly, in relation to liberal anthropologies, as Sharryn suggests. We are seeing avowedly ‘liberal’ anthropological approaches to fascism these days that thrive on and all but seem to fetishize what I am tempted to characterize as mere ‘spoken words’, utterances derived from interviews and social media content, without much of an effort to create a compelling understanding of the speaker’s whole, lived, emplaced social life as it unfolds in time and space, with all its contradictions, desires, fears, angers, disappointments, suffering, private victories. Intimate Marxism searches for the full human claim to a worthy and meaningful life beyond inevitably rather random moments of utterance, life with others, and within and against the ‘inside to capital’. This is an ambition that comes with a strong recommendation here, and with a sense of both urgency and patience, to get behind and beyond the facile fascist (etc.) surface. Words are so easily spoken and scribbled up these days, a massive social media – that is, digital capitalist – driven overproduction; a flow of half-digested fuzzy signifiers for people to just show they keep up with the socially necessary speed of circulation (and with their neighbors). But what the hell do they really mean when spoken?

Image 2: Don Kalb and Marion Berghahn at the launch of Value and Worthlessness at the AAA annual meeting on November 21, 2025. Photo by Stefan Voicu

This brings me to the point where I must engage with Ida Susser’s critique that in Value and Worthlessness I am weak on Gramsci, commoning, counter hegemony, ‘Left wing culture’. First, I am puzzled that I have apparently failed to show that my key informant Zadrozny – a person around whom a much broader story is told in my work on Poland – was precisely that type of an outspoken and important organic intellectual that she wants me to look for and that she strangely thinks is missing in my approach. As far as I know that problematic is right there in the middle; it’s what the whole story is about. Zadrozny was a lifelong key actor and organizer within a broad and powerful commoning movement for worker self-management, comprising at various points tens to hundreds of thousands of people, first against the ‘really existing socialist’ state, then against the neoliberal state, both of which would dispossess local workers of their self-managed factory commons (which included much more than those factories: credit, family benefits, kindergartens, health clinics, holiday camps, media!!). All of this is described though perhaps not really studied, it is more a starting point for another type of study, one that helps explain the puzzle of why this all lands on the radical Right side of the political spectrum. I am puzzled that Ida thinks I am neglecting Gramsci, hegemony, counter hegemony, commoning, and organic intellectuals. Maybe it is this: Many of my Western and in particular American friends have always found it hard to understand that the East European illiberal right was not an authoritarian imposition by the state or capital but an actual mass organic counter movement Polanyi style, as well as a counter hegemonic movement Gramsci style, against respectively authoritarian socialist and neoliberal state impositions. It is true that I do not study Left wing culture in Poland in the 2000s, that is because Right wing culture was the big issue and for us Western as well as Eastern analysts the big puzzle.

In Poland worker-led Solidarnosc ended up on the radical Right, just like the mass protests against the privatizations of health and pensions in Hungary in the early 2000s ended up with Orban’s Civic Circles and, in the Northeast of the country, now with a racist twist, with Jobbik. Western Gramscians often find it difficult to understand that there is no automatic affinity between commoning and the Left. The Left is a possibility, not more than that. But what if a self-nominated so called Left in power is your enemy? Regional histories, national public legacies, and relations of power produce crucial differentiations here. In France, the Yellow Vests could have moved rightwards too but in the end, partly as a consequence of street-commoning, as Ida’s (2026) new book shows, they ended up in a Left coalition. That Left coalition may not be strong enough though to keep the radical Right out of power in France: kindred processes of double devaluation as the ones I have observed in CEE are playing themselves out in that nation too, as elsewhere. Populist Lefts and Rights and their organic intellectuals and commoning practices are trying to capture and articulate that popular experience of double devaluation, both attacking the liberal center. As in CEE, in France the Right often dominates in the provinces and the rural areas, in particular those that have long stagnated and have seen big out-migrations. In CEE whole states as such have seen massive outmigrations and have indeed generated dominant, even hegemonic, right wing illiberal regimes in power. In France, the Left can compete in the big cities and sometimes in the provincial centers, such as in the recent electoral victory in Roubaix. More broadly, we should not ignore the fact that Gramsci is entirely embraced by the illiberal international nationalist Right and alt-right.

Being located in and working on CEE, I had to confront the objective of explaining the rise of the radical Right from the deeper popular experiences from which it was assembled. That included the commoning practices, but my curiosity went beyond the overt political organizing, which was established long before I arrived in the late 1990s: what happened to these well-organized manufacturing workers who went from Trotskyism against ‘neoliberal-Stalinism’ in the early 80s to radical illiberal nationalism against neoliberalism in fifteen years’ time? What was the popular experience, the hidden history, that helped to explain this political journey? That is what my approach in the ethnographic chapters helps do. Though I firmly believe that political outcomes are in the end somewhat contingent, they do happen by definition in regionally inflected and embedded ways – as part of the regional insertion into global capital accumulation and class formation; that is, they happen in relation to identifiable and describable value regimes. In the CEE postsocialist peripheries, where a neoliberal Left was hegemonic in the 1990s and 2000s, it meant that they overwhelmingly ended up on the radical right, as part of a counter hegemonic illiberal nationalist alternative. In France, in the core of the EU, with one of the most extensive welfare states in the region, the Yellow Vests in the end moved Left, but whole working class areas in the North and the East of the country moved right too, as they have been doing elsewhere in Europe and much of the world. CEE turned out to be an illiberal avant-garde. But we now also know, with the recent developments in Hungary, that such illiberal regimes too can succumb under their own contradictions, as seems to be happening with Trump and MAGA already.

Local commoning and its outcomes are not determined locally. Nor are what Ida Susser calls ‘political cultures’. Capitalism is a fast moving multiscalar edifice, no outside to that, even though any location has its fundamental specificities as part of its spatiotemporal insertion in the whole, which includes the socio-political histories and ‘political cultures’ of that insertion. That was also true for the South African anti-apartheid fight that Ida invokes; an invocation that is much to the point here. Would Southern Africa have seen the end of the Apartheid state in 1994 without the Polish 1989? Without the Soviet Union having gone bust? With the Apartheid regime still being seen among the Western ruling class as the last bulwark against a violently spreading African communism supported by the Soviet Union (Angola, Mozambique…South Africa)? We cannot be sure but quite possibly not. With communism and the Soviet Union all but gone, de Klerk was encouraged by domestic and international capital and the West at large to negotiate with the ANC. And Poland had delivered the example of the Roundtable. Thus, Poland and South Africa were again linked at the hip as two of the most ideologically and geopolitically significant ‘peaceful democratic transitions’ within an ever more neoliberal US led globalizing capitalism; both of them officially declared successes, but both also failing as inclusive democratic capitalisms for the many; both, as a consequence, ultimately giving rise to strong illiberal populist counter formations, in South Africa the Zuma faction within the ANC, in Poland, populist Solidarnosc against its former dissident anti-communist intellectuals, now the political elite. That new neoliberal Polish state elite and its wider hegemonic public culture and civil society was hellbent on telling the working class that they were just ‘worthless Poles’ who deserved the whip of capital pure and simple. These workers didn’t willingly agree and the Law and Justice regime was the biting result; an illiberal nationalist Right that was very unfriendly against leading liberals but that did reduce poverty and did push up the whole national economy by setting up a natalist/familialist welfare state against the loud protestations of the so called Left that this could only be economic suicide.

The fight, here and there, preferably combined, continues. But for now, the Left, too liberal, too neoliberal, too bienpensant, and in its more radical versions too much tempted towards the outside of capital, has lost. Is this overdetermined, I hear my friend Ida Susser ask? I hesitate and would love to say no. I actually whisper it, but then I see myself jump up and hear me exclaim loudly that there are no voluntarist escapes. Just pulling ourselves up on our belts and start organizing and commoning? No. My hope for counter hegemony does not start by confirming the importance of existing Left wing cultures because that is, as far as it goes, self-evident. It starts with listening very carefully to our ‘lost’ interlocutors in the field and with getting to grips with why ‘we’ ended up beaten by a popular force that ‘we’ used to associate with outright darkness and that we had imagined to have died out well before this 21st century had even started. And here we are. And this while capital and empire are going completely off the leash. Our deeply troubled predicament requires us to move the new global populist Left well beyond the limits of the liberal, limits that are so powerfully inscribed into the system and that will certainly not be overthrown by the illiberals, that is the power of property as capital, a power that is beyond the reach of any constitutional national democracy, and at the same time reject the utopian escape towards the outside to capital. That is why we need a full out rethinking of capitalism and its liberal and illiberal guardians, preferably in anthropologically informed ways. The well-trodden paths of the Left are exhausted. Call what we need revolution please. Some of that is tried in my book. Much more is needed.

Don Kalb is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen, founding editor of Focaal and Focaalblog. His latest books are Value and Worthlessness: The Rise of the Populist Right and Other Disruptions in the Anthropology of Capitalism (Berghahn Books, 2025), and, co-edited with Walden Bello, Backlash: The Global Rise of the Radical Right (Pluto Press, 2026).

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.

Susser, Ida. 2026. The Yellow Vests and the Battle for Democracy. Taking to the Streets of Paris in the 21st Century. New York: Routledge.

Cite as: Kalb, D. 2026. “Anthropological Use Value for an Anticapitalist Left” Focaalblog May 5. https://www.focaalblog.com/2026/05/05/don-kalb-anthropological-use-value-for-an-anticapitalist-left/

Blog, Features, Notes on 'Value and Worthlessness'

Ida Susser: The Value of a Left Culture in Combating Worthlessness

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

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.