Method and value in human history
Karl Marx and Marcel Mauss in David Graeber's anthropology.
Welcome to the first edition of the Pandemic Capitalism newsletter. I’ve been meaning to get this going for a while, as a way to organise my own thoughts around what I suspect is the early stages of an epochal shift in how the economy functions – and it’s easier and better to do that as part of a conversation with others, which I hope this newsletter can be a part of - comments and criticism welcomed. The not-very-subtle aim is to also try and feed this in to writing book on precisely that major economic shift – pencilled in for publication next year, assuming I can finish some time soon.
So I’m going to aim, on a weekly basis, to include a bit of commentary or extended arguments, covering topics outside of the usual, more immediate and responsive pieces I tend to get published, as well as links to other things I’ve found interesting during the week. It may well end up being slightly scattergun in the topic selection but I’ll at least aim to publish consistently on Sundays, and if my semi-public notes on economics and history sound interesting, do subscribe. I’ll include a few bits and pieces I’ve been reading, or listening to, or watching that week at the end, too, along with some of my own writing elsewhere.
David Graeber, method, and value in human history
The anniversary of anthropologist David Graeber’s death has just passed, with Novara Media – to which David always offered his support – publishing a superb series of five articles on different elements of his thought. I liked the grouping of these, ranging from his arguments about democracy in the Occupy movement (now a decade ago!), to his reinterpretation of anarchism as “practice-based”, shaped by the processes it engaged people in more than the goals it sought, his writings on debt and sex work, and to his contribution to anthropological research. The set of essays bring home the “unity of theory in practice” (to coin a phrase) in David’s thought and work. As I wrote for Salvage in a (rather long) essay on David’s work last year,
It comes back to a recurring theme in David’s own work: that the forms of social life we have are, in the absence of coercion or hierarchy, basically pretty egalitarian and based on the principles of reciprocity and gift-giving. David even called this “communism” in Debt, referencing the idea of an egalitarian community rather than (obviously) the bureaucratic states that used to call themselves “actually existing socialism”. It’s the basis for his anarchist politics – that we are capable of building societies based on mutual trust and care, since that is, broadly speaking, how we actually tend to live our lives in relating to our friends, and family, and wider social circle.[1]
His most recent writings took up this theme, and drew on emerging archaeological research to underline it. There were two obvious objections: first, that however humans appeared to live in the distant past – the world of hunter-gatherer societies, often seen as an Edenic time of primitive egalitarianism – the rise of writing, culture, and the state, developing from and around the Agricultural Revolution and the growth of cities, means we can never return to this “state of nature”. In the usual argument, this loss of Eden is the price of civilisation, including the inequality and oppression civilisation seemingly gives rise to. Big picture histories like Jared Diamond’s best-selling Guns, Germs and Steel argue this case, as does - in a more derivative form - Yuval Hariri’s Sapiens, but the image of pre-civilisation time of equality and harmony between people has been an influence on political thinking in the West since at least Rousseau’s writing of the late eighteenth century.
Rousseau himself (as The Social Contract makes clear) didn’t intend for his own picture of the “state of nature” to be a representation of the historical truth, as such; it was intended more as an ideal type, or a way to aid thinking about how states (and the “social contract”) developed. But the development of archaeology as a discipline – its expansion and systematisation from the nineteenth century onwards, as fieldwork techniques grew alongside explanatory methods – had seemed to provide actual historical evidence for something like this. Friedrich Engels’ The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State, published shortly after Karl Marx’s death in 1885, builds on the best available anthropological research at the time to extend a recognisably materialist account of history back into the distant past. In Engels’ telling, this produces a stage-by-stage account of human development, in which primitive communism is replaced by ‘barbarism’ (what archaeology now calls the Neolithic Period) and then, with the appearance of the state, ‘civilisation’. This allows Engels to give a materialist account of the appearance of women’s oppression in human history. But it comes at the cost of hammering human history into a series of neat boxes that more recent archaeology calls into question.
The Salvage essay picks up a bit more on the last argument, but I wanted here to make two (related) points subsequent to that. The first is that there is a danger, in rejecting Engels’ (and others’) “stages” account of human history, the material baby is thrown out with the deterministic bathwater. By placing reciprocity – that is, an elementary human sociality – at the centre of an account of the development of human society, we risk reifying one part of what makes us human (our capacity for social existence) at the expense of another (our existence as material creatures, bound by the physical world.) Aristotle’s description of humans as a zoon politikon, a “political animal”, famously adopted by Marx, does a decent job of capturing that duality: social and political creatures, yes, but, crucially, also creatures.
Miniature by Pierart dou Tielt (Tournai, c. 1353). The people of Tournai bury victims of the Black Death.
And it is something of a peculiarity in David’s work that the great material factors that have shaped human history – the El Nino oscillations, whose social impact was brilliant adumbrated in Mike Davies’ Late Victorian Holocausts; recurrent plagues and epidemic disease; the long-range movements in the Earth’s temperature, like the “Little Ice Age” – are only very distantly present. Of course, an essential part of any analytical account of history, if it is to be more than just one damn thing after another, necessarily excludes a great deal. That’s the purpose of a historical model – to bring out the fundamental features of the system and so clarify the argument.
But to make the switch from credit to coin systems in fourteenth century Europe not only a more important historical event than the Black Death, but an event that occurred independently of the mass death at the same time at least feels like a point being stretched somewhat. (See ch.11 in the edition of Debt.) The crises of the 15th century, and some of their outcomes – David notes the steep rise in labourer’s wages after the bubonic plague – are secondary to the credit money-to-coin money switch that David explicitly ties in to the return of the oppressive features of his earlier “Axial Age” of the great, coin-using Eurasian civilisations, roughly from 800BC to 600AD. He locates the origins of the switch into the “Age of the Great Capitalist Empires” (1400-1971, note the precision) with the turn in the Qing dynasty from paper-based, credit-using money and back to coinage. The disappearance of the industrial revolution (however much we accept the evidence that it was far slower and took far longer than traditionally supposed) is a similar problem. The fact that we as humans have to deal with the natural world takes second place to the fact that we also have to deal with each other, in David’s account.
The problem of value
In other words, the anthropological method in David’s work required an over-centring of humanity, relative to our natural existence. His clearest statement of his own method, Towards an Anthropological Theory of Value, also brings this out. David wants to set up a duality between the material theory of value in Marx and the “immaterial” theory of value in Mauss. This is fruitful terrain to get into: the question of value is pretty much entirely ignored by the neoclassical mainstream of economics, who have been quietly pretending Cambridge, UK didn’t win the Cambridge capital controversy, and which substitutes a theory of prices in the place of a theory of value. But the issue not only of relative value at a given point in time, which a theory of prices might tell you – questions of the form “how many eggs this pint of milk can be exchanged for?” – but of value as a presence over time. In other words, independently of the relative valuations of specific commodities (whether goods or services) at any given moment, is there something in human societies that can act as a claim upon the products of those societies (again, whether considered as goods or services) that exists independently of the operations of these relative valuations? Can “value” exist outside of the moment of exchange itself in anything other than the subjective value a commodity might hold in consumption?
Marx, famously, answered this by reference to a theory of value based on labour and nature: nature is the source of value and labour, as a product of nature, can add to that value (whether in producing goods or services). Neoclassical economics, when confronted by this issue – as, for example, in considering wealth inequality over time – tends to fudge the question. Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century is such a slog in the first chapters precisely because he is honest enough to confront the problem, but attempts to do so within a neoclassical framework – a point well-made by James Galbraith in this early review. Piketty ends up referencing monetary values to the monetary value of output – a problem, given the shifts in the relative values of monies over time.
David Graeber, in addition to Marx’s theory of value in production – that value in human societies emerges from those societies relationships to nature, that is, ultimately the physical world, including the presence of humanity itself as a product of nature – wants to introduce a theory of value in exchange, via Mauss, in which not only can value be exist through the interactions of humans with each other and nature, but in which the interaction of humans through exchange also expresses a form of value. How else (David argues) to explain the presence of gift exchange in human society? To simplify, David introduces, via Mauss’ account of the gift exchange, another version of value which is based only on the human relationship that is formed in the processes of exchange: considered here not as market exchange (which Mauss, and David, not for its potential violence and inequality), but in the various forms of ritualised gift-giving and the notions of debt and reciprocity they are built around. It is the presence of this “human” value that, in turn, grounds his theory of humanity’s innate “communism” or capacity for reciprocity. It is because we recognise (as Mauss put it) something of the equal human in the gift – from which it obtains its value to us – that we can form human societies at all, beyond the most basic.
There are many ways to challenge this. One, reactionary in tenor, is to follow the Catholic philosopher Rene Girard, in to invert the notion of desire in the gift exchange, and see it not as the expression of reciprocal equality and an expression of the equal worth of all humans, but as its radical opposite: that what humans desire is what other humans desire – mimetic desire – creating hideous competitions over the limited number of desirable objects (or people) in the world. These contests can then only be resolved through the creation of a singular object or a person to be sacrificed, symbolically or otherwise removing the object that all desire from society: this is the scapegoat mechanism that Griard says allows us to form human societies that do not degenerate into frenzied, bloody contests. (It is from this, Griard continues, that Christianity wins its social power: there can be no greater sacrifice to make than killing the Son of God.)
I’ll come back to Girard at a later date. The argument I want to put here is that the introduction of a second but equal form of value, built around the purely human relationship somewhat undermines David’s own account of human history. In the place of materialism – which here I think has to mean the location of human societies in a definite physical space – he has an idealistic account of human history, developed ultimately from the forms of the relationship between human beings at different points. This makes Debt a brilliant analytical history of most of civilisation, and a book that has to be seriously engaged with, but also one in which the method applied leads to some peculiar and not always well-justified focuses for attention. It is odd, for instance, to make Richard Nixon’s decision to end dollar convertibility to gold in 1971 a more decisive moment in the history of humanity, ending the coin-based “Age of Capitalist Empires” at a stroke, than (say) industrialisation or the Black Death. I can see the appeal in making these sorts of counter-intuitive claims, but in this case it’s a real stretch, and its not a stretch that appears by accident but as a direct result of David’s method.
This question of nature and history matters, and will come to matter increasingly in subsequent decades, because the material foundations of our society are falling victim to the most consequential shift in the environment we inhabit since at least the invention writing. And without an account of either how our history has been shaped by our relationship as natural beings and subsequently to nature, or how it is being shaped and reshaped right now – covid-19 is a spectacular demonstration of the case, and there will be others to follow – we will fail to develop a politics that can cope with this collapse. This is one reason I prefer to call this geological time the Anthropocene, rather than – as some have suggested – the Capitalocene: the latter risks giving the impression that the transformation of the natural world is directly related to the form of human society, and can therefore be relatively easily undone with a change in the form of human society, rather than – more worryingly, but correctly – that the change in the natural world will itself reshape human society, and that much of what has been changed has been permanently lost, even with a radical and conscious alteration in how human society operates. Things are, in other words, most likely dramatically worse than even our most radical thinkers tended to contemplate.
This week, I have listened to This Machine Kills’ dissection and discussion of Evgeny Morozov’s Le Monde Diplomatique’s essay on the geopolitics of silicon chip production; read this HM essay on the rise and fall of the revolutionary left in pre-89 Poland; and read this argument for UBI by two medical practitioners in the British Journal of General Practice.
I wrote a piece on left strategy after the Unite election for Novara, short arguments for opposing NICs increases in the Guardian and Novara; and an essay on the prospect of a return to trade union militancy for the New Statesman.
[1] This propensity to communism is, in its own way, the anarchist inverse of Adam Smith’s argument, adapted later by Friedrich von Hayek and others, that the “propensity to truck, barter and trade” is a natural human instinct. Human history becomes, on this reading, the development of forms of individualism that allow the propensity to trade to flourish, and suppression of atavistic and clannish collectivist urges.