Value and Worthlessness

Don Kalb is Professor of social anthropology at the University of Bergen, Norway, and Academic Director of the GRIP program on global inequality (UiB/International Science Council, Paris). He is the Founding Editor of Focaal – Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology.

• List of IllustrationsPart I: FoundationsIntroduction: Webs of Life versus Webs of Meaning: Or how I Became a Marxist AnthropologistChapter 1. No Outside? Then What? For a Dialectical “Value Regime”Part II: Living Labor, Value, and WorthlessnessChapter 2. “Worthless Poles” and other Postsocialist Devaluations: Conversations with a Polish PopulistChapter 3. “It is my history and it is worthless”: Gender and the Making of Philipsism, The NetherlandsChapter 4. Regimes of Value and Worthlessness: Two Stories and a Marxian ReflectionPart III: The Non-Surprise of the Populist RightChapter 5. Theory from the East: Class without Class and the Making of the Illiberal Right in Eastern EuropeChapter 6. Double Devaluations: The Making of the Populist Right in the Global NorthPart IV: Global Middle Classness: Living and DreamingChapter 7. “Scraps from the Bourgeois Kitchen”: In the Romanian Bubble of Outsourced CreativityChapter 8. The “Global Middle Class”: A Seductive but Empty SignifierPart V: Finance and Hegemonic DeclineChapter 9. Financialization and the Capitalist Moment: Marx versus Weber in the Anthropology of Global SystemChapter 10. Two Theories of Money: A Historical Anthropology of the State-Finance Nexus for Present PurposesPart VI. Polemics for a ReasonChapter 11. Trotsky over Mauss: Anthropological Theory and the Centennial of the Russian RevolutionChapter 12. The Labor Theory of Value and the Value Theory of LaborEpilogue: Why I Will not Make it as a Moral AnthropologistIndex

"Value and Worthlessness is crucial for understanding the right wing populist backlash. Kalb shows that rather than disaffected voters having always already been fascists, sexists, and racists, our disastrous political present is the outcome of the failure of progressive political movements to protect people from the intertwined onslaughts of Big State and Big Finance." - Ewald Engelen, University of Amsterdam"With the wit, verve, and intellectual rigor that we have come to expect from him, Don Kalb carves a path for an unapologetic, engaged, and interdisciplinary Marxist anthropology of the present. In a set of superbly crafted research essays, he reanimates essential concepts such as realism, class, unevenness, dispossession, and devaluation, and applies them with great creativity to current-day political conflagrations including the rise of the reactionary right. Value and Worthlessness shows what we are really up against in our struggle for a more egalitarian world." - Jeff Maskovsky, City University of New York, Graduate Center"This book is a masterful fugue. While unweaving anthropology’s ubiquitous focus on idealist “webs of meaning,” Don Kalb scrutinizes realist “webs of life” with an ostinato of class, labor, capital, and the contradictions of capitalism. In a world captured by the politics and scholarship of endless variations of culture and identity, a contrapunto of regimes of value and worthlessness could not have been more timely." - Ayse Caglar, University of Vienna"Kalb’s work has profoundly shaped a whole new generation of East- ern European radical intellectuals who confronted the collapse of state socialism, predatory capitalism, the national-populist responses of the dispossessed, and ultimately the bloody wars. Kalb’s Marxist anthropology shows us how to use concepts of capitalism, class, and value for understanding the escalating poly-crisis, and to think about truly revolutionary alternatives in the “East,” “West,” and “South.” - Volodymyr Ishchenko, Free University Berlin"In this trenchant manifesto for Marxist anthropology, Don Kalb shows just what the very best historical ethnography can do. Combining deep ethnography with personal reflection and theoretical ambition, this collection of chapters offers brilliant insights into theories of value, worthlessness, global capitalism, right wing populism, economic and political anthropology, and more." - Sian Lazar, University of Cambridge"In this stunning map of capitalism today, Don Kalb bursts open a Marxist critique of anthropology for its fetishism of culture and an anthropological critique of Marxism for losing local specificity and contingency within the broad tendencies of capitalism. Kalb, thereby, brilliantly sets the scene for the pressures giving rise to populist authoritarianism." - Michael Burawoy, University of California, Berkeley"Value and Worthlessness synthesizes the original, courageous, and exhilarating work of Don Kalb as he crosses boundaries, insists on contingencies and process, and sharply clarifies concepts of value, financialization, class, and labor. A vital Marxist anthropology for the present." - Ida Susser, City University of New York, Graduate Center