> I read a few chapters into Graeber and then got sidetracked to books that
> were due back to the library, whereas I purchased Graeber. I had to laugh
> when we visited the Smithsonian in DC. There was an exhibit on the history
> of money and, precisely!, you could read the exhibit as a struggle with the
> desire to tell the story of money as one we move from barter to increasing
> levels of abstraction but with an historical record that makes
> representation of that linear narrative impossible. The exhibit compromises
> by refuses to plot a linear timeline but then positions items in a way that
> allows the viewer to read his as a movement from barter to greater levels
> of abstraction.
>
I am a little flummoxed by (what I think is) Michael's assertion that Marx argued that there was a real material time when all exchange was exclusively based on barter and that at some point this universal system's contradictions generated the need for money as a means of getting around those problems. It may be that I was taught to read Marx differently than Michael but his first point a) suggests otherwise.
It seems to me that the application of point a) to the passage referred to in b) could undermine the point made in b), which folks assert is Graeber's (I've got but have not even cracked the book) superior point.
Along with Harvey's reading of the first few chapters of Capital, the way O'Connor taught us to read the Grundrisse was to see Marx's material abstractions as abstractions from a far more complex material reality that Marx was pretty well aware of - anyone who takes seriously the caveats at the start of Capital must do this it seems to me. The simple argument made by both Weber and Marx - much less a whole raft of Marxist anthropologists and geographers counter to b) is that there were many forms of use-value exchange in most all societies and that the the forms and dynamics were differentiated - to oversimplify - by the class/status of the participants and the distance across which use values moved (and this is NOT to say that only intra class trade happened such that low status exchanges were always local barter relations and high status exchanges were predominantly long distance and "monetary".) The problem it seems I have with Graeber is the same problem I had with Appadurai - just 'cuz there are markets does not mean that there is capital/ism.
Furthermore, while it is true that analytic and research processes to abstract similarities across periods with very different dynamic relationships is one alternative and analytic and research processes which focus on the ways seemingly similar relationships are in fact qualitatively recomposed and recomprised under different conditions is another, it has always struck me that the search for continuities tends to resonate more with - however much such work often inverts - the kinds of transcendental and reifying approaches of the mainstream than do the dialectical approaches Michael calls idiosyncratic and I see as a qualitatively different variety of consciousness.
This certainly comes out in the difference between Weber's depressing account of the ineluctable rise of meaningless rationalization as a counter to Victorian era accounts of the ineluctable force of scientific progress and in Bookchin's inversion of Liberalism's foundational competitive individualism imposed on everything from evolutionary biology to cultural anthropology as he stressed the "actual" truth of the foundation of evolution and society in cooperative mutualism. Graeber may not be doing this but accounts of his stuff here don't show that he isn't.
> Noticing this, I started explaining all this and an audience from Denmark
> gathered 'round and asked questions. I couldn't answer a whole lot, only to
> point them at Graeber's book.
Should this remind me of the possibility that you and the Danish audience got the same kind of sexualized and authoritarian erotic charge (however limited by your deference to Graeber's) that you attributed to DDR, Jeff and I when we enjoy particular elements of our teaching given the ways your exchange happened within the walls of an institution that explicitly separates its information exchanges from everyday life? (In a less snarky tone, I am still unsure what your intervention in that exchange meant to contribute and acknowledge that I may have been needlessly irked. It seemed predicated on an assumption that DDR, Jeff and I were unaware of the things you were reminded of and a parallel assumption that, being unaware of them, our pedagogy and interpersonal relationships with students were uninformed by that material.)
>
> At 08:02 PM 1/14/2012, Michael Pollak wrote:
>
> On Sat, 14 Jan 2012, nathan tankus wrote:
>>
>> is this element what people (eg Doug and Julio) think is missing from
>>> Graeber's work and analysis?
>>>
>>
>> It's great stuff, and a hugely important idea. And it is a difference
>> that is invisible in Graeber because he's looking at something else.
>>
>> But to be fair to Graeber:
>>
>> a) Graeber's way of using the word "credit" to simply refer to all debts
>> is the normal way of using the word. It's Marx's use that's idiosyncratic.
>> Marx is creating a new word use, and using it for precisely the opposite
>> purpose, namely to focus on what is different between capitalism and all
>> preceding systems rather than to focus on what is same. It's not that one
>> POV is right and one is wrong. They are simply looking at different things.
>>
>> b) This passage also shows in passing where Marx (and just about every
>> other economist) is wrong and Graeber is right:
>>
>> (Money itself is a form for suspending the unevenness of the times
>>> required in different branches of production, to the extent that this
>>> obstructs exchange.)
>>>
>>
>> I read that as a parenthetical refer by Marx to an age of barter that
>> precedes the use of money. Which, as Graeber shows definitely, never
>> existed.
>>
>> Michael
>>
>