Of course, he is quite wrong that history must confuse: it is just that we need the right kind of history, which seeks to explain the evolution of a material system. Stringing together 5,000 years of anecdotes is not enough."
[WS:] This is an excellent point. I had a similar impression of Graeber's book when I compared it to a NY cab driver taking his fare for a ride around Brooklyn and environs then dropping him in Chinatown and telling him that he can walk to the financial district from there.
So Beggs' critique seems fair to me.
Having said this, however, I see the value of Graeber's book not in its explanation of problems tackled by modern economics, but in providing counter- evidence (by citing anthropological research, mostly) to the neoliberal trope that there is no alternative to neoliberal capitalism. So its a debate not with economics per se, but rather with the bourgeois political economics of the latter days that, btw has not changed much since Marx, whose standard modus operandi is to take some tropes from economics and weave them into a morality play legitimizing bourgeois property relations. Marx's response to it was taking the same tropes and weaving them into a different morality play, one that assailed bourgeois property relations, to show the bogus nature of bourgeois political economy. Graeber takes an altogether different approach - he uses an altogether different fabric - that provided by anthropology rather than economics - to make a similar claim.
In the end, Marx's approach seems more convincing as a critique in the times when no alternatives to the bourgeois order actually existed, at least in modern society. Marx's was an internal critique that first "deconstructed" bourgeois political economy that portrayed bourgeois order as "natural law" and then provided a promise of an alternative. But that approach lost any appeal today because the attempts to implement the Marxist alternative turned out to be a fiasco - or at least they are so perceived. From that pov, Graeber's strategy to deconstruct bourgeois political economy by claiming that it does not take into account historically existing alternatives seems more promising - especially that Graeber seems to be a much better writer than Marx, who is virtually unreadable either because of jargon or because his polemical targets are obscure to today's reader.
I think that the main weak spot of Graeber's book is his knee-jerk anti-statism and anarchism that make him go on a limb and losing the argument. It was Graber's book that inspired my line "An anarchist is a neoliberal without money." I'm not sure, however, whether this is a case of an ideology - induced blindness or merely pandering to the tastes of the audience.
-- Wojtek
"An anarchist is a neoliberal without money."