Method and value in human history

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

...