[OPE-L] Turning Modes of Production Inside Out Or, Why Capitalism is a Transformation of Slavery David Graeber

[Rakesh Bhandari <bhandari@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Title: Turning Modes of Production Inside Out Or, Why Capitalism

I've had a long offlist discussion with David Graeber about this essay, and

while our differences are sharp, I learned a great deal from this essay.

People may know his book on Marx, Mauss and value theory--Towards an

Anthropological Theory of Value. His struggles against Yale University

are also well known.

rb

Critique of Anthropology, Vol. 26, No. 1, 61-85 (2006)
DOI: 10.1177/0308275X06061484

© 2006 SAGE Publications

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Turning Modes of Production Inside Out
Or, Why Capitalism is a Transformation of Slavery

David Graeber
Department of Anthropology, Yale University, David.Graeber@xxxxxxxx
Marxist theory has by now largely abandoned the (seriously flawed) notion of the 'mode of production', but doing so has only encouraged a trend to abandon much of what was radical about it and naturalize capitalist categories. This article argues a better conceived notion of a mode of production - one that recognizes the primacy of human production, and hence a more sophisticated notion of materialism - might still have something to show us: notably, that capitalism, or at least industrial capitalism, has far more in common with, and is historically more closely linked with, chattel slavery than most of us had ever imagined.

Key Words: capitalism * feudalism * slavery * wage labor * world-systems analysis