> If Graeber actually denies that then I agree he's wrong. But there's
> nothing wrong with him emphasizing similarities that have generally been
> missed, is here? Or with suggesting that because all economists have gotten
> a particular stage of history (the emergence of money) entirely wrong, it
> has a crucial bearing on their abstractions? Marx made the exact same
> argument in re the transition from feudalism -- that if you just made up a
> Robinson Crusoe story, you left out important things that a study of real
> history would teach you are essential. And that's exactly what all
> economists (including Marx) have done with the emergence of money --
> accepted a just so story.
There is surely some out-of-date anthropology in Marx, but I think he's innocent on this count. He didn't believe there was a pre-capitalist barter stage. In fact he criticises others about this, e.g.:
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/ch01.htm
"Economists usually reason that the emergence of money is due to external difficulties which the expansion of barter encounters, but they forget that these difficulties arise from the evolution of exchange-value and hence from that of social labour as universal labour. For example commodities as use-values are not divisible at will, a property which as exchange-values they should possess. Or it may happen that the commodity belonging to A may be use-value required by B; whereas B’s commodity may not have any use-value for A. Or the commodity-owners may need each other’s commodities but these cannot be divided and their relative exchange-values are different. In other words, on the plea of examining simple barter, these economists display certain aspects of the contradiction inherent in the commodity as being the direct unity of use-value and exchange-value. On the other hand, they then persistently regard barter as a form well adapted to commodity exchange, suffering merely from certain technical inconveniences, to overcome which money has been cunningly devised. Proceeding from this quite superficial point of view, an ingenious British economist has rightly maintained that money is merely a material instrument, like a ship or a steam engine, and not an expression of a social relation of production, and hence is not an economic category. It is therefore simply a malpractice to deal with this subject in political economy, which in fact has nothing in common with technology."
For Marx, money is a pre-condition of generalised commodity exchange, it didn't historically evolve out of it. But once commodity exchange is generalised, it tends to reproduce money and change its form and function.
Mike