I missed it the first time around. Thanks for forwarding it.
I think Mike has contextualized Graeber's argument in Marx's work (and vice versa) but I'm still not convinced that there is a fundamental disagreement. As you say, there are obviously new things under the sun that haven't existed for the entire 5000 years of Graeber's macro-history. But as Michael says, "I think don't think we have to choose between Graeber's view and that of sophisticated leftist economics. I think they are supplementary."
I don't really understand chartalism as a concept, but it seems fro Mike's account that the main problem he has with Graeber is that the latter wants to say that the objects and mechanisms of social organization that dominate economic theory are basically something else - politics or ethics or culture. So money = the state and vice versa. Graeber's focus is on mainstream economists or the dominant understanding of political economy (though Mike says he overstates the role of barter even in the discourse of that sphere) and the problem is that, in his attempt to critique the assumptions behind these presumably ideological endeavors he is overlooking the hard facts of the economy. This rubs against the Marx he knows intimately since Mike sees a different kind of project emerging from the latter - one that makes a similar critique of those ideological assumptions, but which also asserts a different material base - some real economic activities - that creates a whole series of other consequences for the theorist trying to come to grips with political economy. In short, Graeber is throwing the material economic baby out with the neoclassical bathwater.
I think this is roughly Mike's position and it gels generally with his position in other writings (I'm thinking of the Zombie Marx piece in Jacobin http://jacobinmag.com/summer-2011/zombie-marx/ .) I have a lot of respect for this and learn a great deal from what Mike has to say on this front - though I admit that my first feeling is one of dispair. I've spent a good deal of time dabbling in my readings around economics. I keep up as well as I can with critical literature, reading many of the people he faults on this front. And certainly I don't want to sit in ignorance about how a theorist or scholar from an alternative tradition (someone like Harvey or Arrighi or in this case Graeber) is making a basic error in understanding how the material realities of an economy work. And I don't think those theorists would want to get it wrong, at least in principle.
On the other hand, I think there is a relative difference in the way Graeber gets this wrong and the way that Guy Debord or Jean Baudrillard gets the economy wrong. Maybe the latter are so far from the legitimate conversation about economics per se that it doesn't merit consecrating them with critique (though surely people have spent time doing just that.) This is even more true of people who make claims about economics or science in general being ideological bunk which, even when they present political and even historical arguments supporting this, the general tendency is that this is a convenient way to avoid engagement with the field in question at all.
Still, there is something to this move - the need to point out the culturally, socially, politically, and contextually based authority that gives economics or any other science an institutional command over all of us. Though people may fail to grasp the intricacies of the actual system in question, the problem is that there are few people - like Doug or Mike - who will be honest with non-experts about how that system works. I am by no means advocating a populism of knowledge or saying that this is reasonable, only that it is contextually legitimate and has been since at least Marx's time. It is essential to take the next step - to elaborate a fuller alternative theory - but I don't think it is completely counter productive to make some errors on the second task as you accomplish the first. Or at least I hope it isn't as I've likely made many of those errors in my own work.
I guess I'm arguing for a division of labor in a sense and I think both Graeber's work and Mike's helpful critique of the problems in it from a Marxist economist perspective are valuable to the overall project. Graeber may fudge a little and err on the side of some Keynesian fallacy (and it is important for all of us to know or at least argue about this) but that doesn't make his contribution any less significant in terms of what it is adding to both of these conversations. Moreover, from a disciplinary perspective, he presents a lot of detailed anthropological work he's referencing - which is valuable to both projects, even if it is just as raw material separated from the theoretical conclusions he's drawing from them. I think this is a critical argument against neoclassical economic theory - and especially neoliberalism's perversion of it. This may miss some large practical monetary concerns that he would be able to address were he trained as an economist, but it is invaluable as an account, from within the field, of what people who study people have found people doing in many times and places.
What is frustrating to me about responses to his work both here and on the Marxism list is that it misses this value to his work. From the outset, he admits there is a certain folly to attempting this kind of macro-history. But one purpose behind it is pretty sound, politically and academically: other disciplines (especially economics) rely indirectly on a form of macro-history and transhistorical anthropology. We now have a lot of material to draw from on this count - material, incidentally, that many economists who rely on these macro-histories of human nature haven't bothered to incorporate into their work as a disciplinary norm. What would happen, therefore, if we tried to evaluate some of the larger claims that sit as cultural norms within these disciplinary communities in light of the work that has been done in anthropology in the past century and a half? Having done that, Graeber doesn't seem bent on transplanting his understanding of debt or economics or power in place of something like Mike's more technical and essential understanding of economics as a full material practice. But just to provide a valuable supplement.
The connections he draws between military organizations and early corporate forms also seems important and I think the anecdotal interaction that starts him on this quest leads to a paradigmatic kind of investigation: trying to figure out why we take some debts to be morally unbreakable and others malleable and forgivable is a more social and cultural kind of question. It is crucial to understand how it relates to what we might call the material infrastructure, but the latter, as any good twentieth century Marxist will tell you, does not necessarily determine the former. And, as Graeber and others seem interested to discover and point out, there seem to be many cases when the determination can go the other way. As we look for alternatives to what appears to be a dying system, knowing how that system works at the nuts and bolts level is undoubtedly important - and I will continue to read what people like Mike and Doug have to say to find out more on this score. But knowing that it could and has worked in a variety of ways, that possibilities exist for the politically active populace, seems to me to be at least as important to the larger conversation about what is to be done. And here I think Graeber's book is a valuable contribution and am really pleased to see such a deep engagement with it on this list. I am sure I'll learn a lot about both of these interconnected projects and how stuff like /Debt/ is helpful (or not) to them.
Sean