On May 10, 2012, at 8:16 PM, 123hop at comcast.net wrote:
> I think this is both a true and useful way of looking at things. I think it is absolutely the case that capital rules over and depends upon many types of relations that it would not recognize as valid, but which it sentimentalizes or demonizes as needed to assert a capitalist totality it would never actually survive. This is a good thing to know and to point out to others.
>
> Anyway, I have no problem with it. Why are you concerned?
I don't think that Graeber has any sense of what capitalism is. The world of production barely appears in what I've read of his work. It all gets projected onto "debt," which he understands in a very transhistorical way. There's no sense of how debt functions under capitalism - or under the name "credit," serves to expand the system beyond the bounds of current income (which is not what it does in precapitalist formations). Sure capitalism depends on noncapitalist relations, but the tendency is to bring more and more of those under market relations - not least domestic relations. Ursula Huws has a nice argument about how capitalism has derived a lot of kick out of marketizing what was once done in the home - e.g., food.
He seems to think that all the "communist" things we do in daily life - which really underestimates how much monetary relations and thought pervade daily life - can be expanded to defeat the thing somehow. So instead of public schools, as he once suggested to me, we could have parents and teachers take them over and run them as cooperatives. Which the state wouldn't tolerate, and which many parents would want no part of since they're otherwise kind of busy. This all comes back to the lack of a theory of how capitalism really works, other than to deploy the word on occasion, and a reluctance to embrace any non-spontaneous forms of organization. I mean, really, how is this supposed to loosen the grip of ExxonMobil? It's just sentimental wishes.
And the second paragraph I quoted makes no sense. E.g. this:
> There are those who’ve argued that only 30–40% of what we do is subsumed under the logic of capitalism.
Really? Could we have some references on that?
> Communism already exists in our intimate relations with each other on a million different levels, so it’s a question of gradually expanding that and ultimately destroying the power of capital, rather than this idea of absolute negation that plunges us into some great unknown.
How do you destroy the power of capital without in some sense negating it?
Doug