At 12:30 PM 1/15/2012, Alan Rudy wrote:
>On Sun, Jan 15, 2012 at 8:24 AM, shag carpet bomb <shag at cleandraws.com>wrote:
>
> > 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
> >>
> >
>___________________________________
>http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
-- http://cleandraws.com Wear Clean Draws ('coz there's 5 million ways to kill a CEO)