[lbo-talk] Graeber's latest...

[Carrol Cox]

Joanna's and Graeber's point about non-capitalist relations is correct
(sleep is not a capitalist relation; a public school is not a capitalist
relation, etc) but it is also irrelevant as they state it. Doug is mostly
correct here. I've cited an article in a book edited by Postone, Jessup,
Albritton that suggests capitalism _is_ threatening to destroy three
relations that are non-capitalist but capitalism depends on: state,
education, family. And Graeber as Doug says has no notion at all of how debt
under capitalism differs fundamentally from debt under other social orders.

All of this stuff is ultimately important but does no affect current
political conditions.

This is off the top of my head & probably pretty sloppy.

Carrol

-----Original Message-----
From: lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org [mailto:lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org]
On Behalf Of Doug Henwood
Sent: Thursday, May 10, 2012 7:32 PM
To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Graeber's latest...

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
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