D Kalb
Biographic Data
| ID | 16404 |
|---|---|
| NAME | D Kalb |
| GIVEN NAMES | D |
| FAMILY NAME | Kalb |
| SIGNATURE | KALB D |
| AFFILIATIONS | Utrecht University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4674-7655 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 38 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 143 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 38 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1991 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Vom Kopf auf die Füße
Tilly Reversed? Another Cycle of Labor and Socialism Is Possible
As labor in the capitalist system practically tripled to some three billion workers, solidary organizations of labor simultaneously dwindled in relative size and power. This is true globally but also for the historical core countries. While this is a paradox, it is not a contradiction. Capital is a (spatialized) social relationship. The globalization of capital since the 1970s has shifted the power relations with localized labor fundamentally in …
Two theories of money
The last decade of financial crisis, “financialization” and “quantitative easing” has been a feast of public learning about money and finance. Anthropology, history, and political economy rediscovered a “forgotten” history of money as fundamentally a public good rather than basically a private one. This article discusses the rediscovery of the two competing basic historical theories of money. It also notes that, after a turbulent decade of class …
Theorizing peripheral labor
Critical scholarship on twenty-first century capitalist development has called attention to certain structural limits on employment growth. Large populations excluded from formal employment are seen to eke out a precarious subsistence in informal economies, seemingly "surplus" to the needs of capital. This article, by contrast, aims to recast labor in the "peripheries," not as an externalized quantity redundant to emerging economic formations, bu…
Introduction
Double devaluations
This article builds on the contributions of anthropologists of Europe in discovering, tracing and explaining the neo‐nationalist ascendancy of the last 20 years. It picks up on earlier publications to make a succinct case for a decidedly anthropological class analysis of this worldwide and world‐shaking phenomenon, with a view mainly on Europe and the United States. It suggests the usefulness of a notion of ‘double devaluation’ in understanding a…
Anthropologists at War? A Response to Bošković in This Issue
The neo‐nationalist ascendency
March 2020. On the borders of EU Europe, with the Covid pandemic threatening human lives, sociality and welfare everywhere, Syrian refugees on the ‘Balkan Route’, bombed out of Idlib, are being beaten in the forests with wooden clubs by Romanian border guards before they are thrown back onto Serbian territory for further humiliations.11 This episode and the other ones related in the next three paragraphs are a selection from reports in the Financ…
Post-Socialist Contradictions
Want, disease, ignorance, squalor, and idleness: first recognized together in mid-nineteenth-century Europe, these are the focus of the Social Question. In 1942 William Beveridge called them the “giant evils” while diagnosing the crises produced by the emergence of industrial society. More recently, during the final quarter of the twentieth century, the global spread of neoliberal policies enlarged these crises so much that the Social Question ha…
Political Economy
Anthropological political economy emerged as a self‐conscious field of research in the United States in the 1970s, but its roots date back to eighteenth‐ and nineteenth‐century classical political economy. Key categories are value, production, social reproduction, division of labor, class, gender, race, ethnicity, capitalism, exploitation, contradiction, and contestation. Anthropological political economy emerged in close conversation with Marxis…
Dispossession
In the twenty‐first century the classic Marxian concept of dispossession reappeared in anthropology and the social sciences. The context is the discussions about neoliberalism, neoliberal globalization, the alter‐globalist movement, and later financialization. Dispossession is here seen as a systemic property of late capitalist modes of accumulation and regulation. It refers to the transfer to big capital, or to states that serve big capital, of …
Capitalism
Capitalism as a concept is as crucial for the social and human sciences as it is contested. It is used to broadly characterize some of the key relations and dynamics of contemporary societies, which the concept claims are organized around the social production, valorization, and private accumulation of capital. The basic definition of capitalism is simple: it refers to a set of social, spatial, and institutional arrangements that serves to guaran…
Trotsky over Mauss
Afterword
Commoning over time generates customs in common and therefore commonalities. The political mobilizations of the past years may well be understood as a form of urban commoning. However, while such mobilizations may sometimes understand themselves as anticapitalist, one should resist the apparently logical idea (1) that the use values off ered by an urban commons are inevitably the opposite of surplus value, (2) that the urban commons will not just…
Global South
Introduction
A summary is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.
Class
Mavericks
New books discussed in this article:Graeber, David. 2011. Debt: The first 5,000 years. New York: Melville House.Graeber, David. 2013. The democracy project: A history, a crisis, a movement. London: Allan Lane.Harvey, David. 2011. The enigma of capital and the crises of capitalism. London: Profile Books.Harvey, David. 2012. Rebel cities: From the right to the city to the urban revolution. London: Verso.Harvey, David. 2013. A companion to Marx's Ca…
Financialization and the capitalist moment
Kajsa Ekholm Friedman and Jonathan Friedman'sThe Anthropology of Global Systems (AGS)is a robust, ambitious, and timely undertaking in macrotheoretical and macrohistorical anthropology. I show that, more than 30 years ago, its political-economic underpinnings anticipated the key mechanisms of financialization, so important for debates on the current financial crisis. By revisiting the "transition from feudalism to capitalism" debate with new insi…
Thinking about neoliberalism as if the crisis was actually happening
Financialised Capitalism Soviet Style? Varieties of State Capture and Crisis
Looking for new ways to interpret the failings of the neo-liberal economy, this article argues that financialised capitalism at the eve of the 2008 financial crisis showed striking analogies with the characteristic combination of oligopoly and informality of the Soviet economy at the eve of its collapse. State capture by oligopolists, a large "virtual economy", the inability of agencies to obtain insight into economic and financial operations, th…
We are all the people of the Vega Baja now
For a while in modern European history, urban worker protest milieus had almost by definition been dependent on the involvement of two special types of workerintellectuals. The first was the journeyman printer; the second the artisan in the shoemakers' trade. The latter was commemorated by Hobsbawm and Scott as the ''political shoemakers'' (1984). Political shoemakers were a particular nineteenthcentury breed of urban artisans, with much independ…
My multiple, manifold, and endlessly contested 1989s
Nineteen eighty-nine was for me, like for so many other Europeans and in particular Central Europeans, a year of miracles. In mid-November of that year I was traveling through the United States and giving papers on working class culture, anthropology, and history. Whenever I was asked where I came from I always answered "from the continent of the revolutions." What a joy. But I was sad that I had traveled west rather than east
Conversations with a Polish populist
Building on the work of Jonathan Friedman and of Andre Gingrich and Marcus Banks, I explain the rise of populist, neonationalist sensibilities in Poland as a set of defensive responses by working-class people to the silences imposed by liberal rule. I trace in detail a sequence of all-around dispossessions experienced by Polish working-class sodalities since 1989, when activists with substantial legitimacy among organized workers had claimed de f…
Political Sociology Meets Anthropology in The Defeat of Solidarity
Conversations with a Polish populist
Building on the work of Jonathan Friedman and of Andre Gingrich and Marcus Banks, I explain the rise of populist, neonationalist sensibilities in Poland as a set of defensive responses by working-class people to the silences imposed by liberal rule. I trace in detail a sequence of all-around dispossessions experienced by Polish working-class sodalities since 1989, when activists with substantial legitimacy among organized workers had claimed de f…
From flows to violence
Recent globalization theory reflected a chain of world historical events since the end of the Cold War. Globalization theories were tools for the making of political alliances between market liberals and political liberals. From the mid-1990s a broad range of institutionalist social science programs showed that globalization outcomes were often better explained by institutional logics (including cultural ones) than by global flows per se. This is…
Financialization and the capitalist moment
Kajsa Ekholm Friedman and Jonathan Friedman'sThe Anthropology of Global Systems (AGS)is a robust, ambitious, and timely undertaking in macrotheoretical and macrohistorical anthropology. I show that, more than 30 years ago, its political-economic underpinnings anticipated the key mechanisms of financialization, so important for debates on the current financial crisis. By revisiting the "transition from feudalism to capitalism" debate with new insi…
Expanding Class
Financialised Capitalism Soviet Style? Varieties of State Capture and Crisis
Looking for new ways to interpret the failings of the neo-liberal economy, this article argues that financialised capitalism at the eve of the 2008 financial crisis showed striking analogies with the characteristic combination of oligopoly and informality of the Soviet economy at the eve of its collapse. State capture by oligopolists, a large "virtual economy", the inability of agencies to obtain insight into economic and financial operations, th…
Theorizing peripheral labor
Critical scholarship on twenty-first century capitalist development has called attention to certain structural limits on employment growth. Large populations excluded from formal employment are seen to eke out a precarious subsistence in informal economies, seemingly "surplus" to the needs of capital. This article, by contrast, aims to recast labor in the "peripheries," not as an externalized quantity redundant to emerging economic formations, bu…
Afterword
Commoning over time generates customs in common and therefore commonalities. The political mobilizations of the past years may well be understood as a form of urban commoning. However, while such mobilizations may sometimes understand themselves as anticapitalist, one should resist the apparently logical idea (1) that the use values off ered by an urban commons are inevitably the opposite of surplus value, (2) that the urban commons will not just…
Mavericks
New books discussed in this article:Graeber, David. 2011. Debt: The first 5,000 years. New York: Melville House.Graeber, David. 2013. The democracy project: A history, a crisis, a movement. London: Allan Lane.Harvey, David. 2011. The enigma of capital and the crises of capitalism. London: Profile Books.Harvey, David. 2012. Rebel cities: From the right to the city to the urban revolution. London: Verso.Harvey, David. 2013. A companion to Marx's Ca…
The Anthropology of Globalization
The Anthropology of Globalization: Cultural Anthropology Enters the 21st Century. Ted C. Lewellen. Westport: Bergin and Garvey, 2002. 282 pp
Frameworks of culture and class in historical research
We are all the people of the Vega Baja now
For a while in modern European history, urban worker protest milieus had almost by definition been dependent on the involvement of two special types of workerintellectuals. The first was the journeyman printer; the second the artisan in the shoemakers' trade. The latter was commemorated by Hobsbawm and Scott as the ''political shoemakers'' (1984). Political shoemakers were a particular nineteenthcentury breed of urban artisans, with much independ…
Class (in Place) Without Capitalism (in Space)
Geoff Eley and Keith Nield embrace an institutional perspective à la Ira Katznelson, but they do so with a much stronger emphasis on popular alliance formation and social movements than Katznelson. Social history's role, in their vision, would consist of capturing the dynamics of stability and change in densely and intensively studied local contexts. It is the injustices embedded in such contexts that apparently feed these movements and alliances…
Moral production, class capacities and communal commotion
Moral production, class capacities and communal commotion
Frameworks of culture and class in historical research
On Class, the Logic of Solidarity, and the Civilizing Process
Don Kalb, On Class, the Logic of Solidarity, and the Civilizing Process: Workers, Priests, and Alcohol in Dutch Shoemaking Communities, 1900-1920, Social Science History, Vol. 18, No. 1 (Spring, 1994), pp. 127-152
On Class, the Logic of Solidarity, and the Civilizing Process
There is an economic logic and a moral logic and it is futile to argue as to which we give priority since they are different expressions of the same “kernel” of human relationship. —E. P. Thompson, 1961 Class is certainly a key concept of social history just as civilization is for the figurational sociology of Norbert Elias and his followers. Each of these traditions needs to come to terms with the other. Notwithstanding fundamentally divergent a…
The Ghost of Milton Friedman. Dissident remarks on the New Social Orthodoxy
There is a new orthodoxy in social thought which claims that a) organised solidarity is undermined within national welfare states by individualism and b) globalisation undermines the social policy capacity of welfare states from without. I argue that this orthodoxy is based on untenable, 'thick' and teleological versions of modernisation theory. These versions assume that the family and the local community have been fully replaced by the national…
Identity politics, globalization and the national state
Additional informationNotes on contributorsDon KalbDon Kalb is an anthropologist and an associate professor of general social sciences at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. He directs the Social Consequences of Economic Transformation in East Central Europe Program (SOCO) at the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM), Vienna. He has published among others Expanding Class: Power and Everyday Politics in Industrial Communities, The Netherlands, 1850-…
Expanding Class
Class (in Place) Without Capitalism (in Space)
Geoff Eley and Keith Nield embrace an institutional perspective à la Ira Katznelson, but they do so with a much stronger emphasis on popular alliance formation and social movements than Katznelson. Social history's role, in their vision, would consist of capturing the dynamics of stability and change in densely and intensively studied local contexts. It is the injustices embedded in such contexts that apparently feed these movements and alliances…
Polish Floods Clues for Civil Society and the State Post-Communism
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The Anthropology of Globalization
The Anthropology of Globalization: Cultural Anthropology Enters the 21st Century. Ted C. Lewellen. Westport: Bergin and Garvey, 2002. 282 pp
From flows to violence
Recent globalization theory reflected a chain of world historical events since the end of the Cold War. Globalization theories were tools for the making of political alliances between market liberals and political liberals. From the mid-1990s a broad range of institutionalist social science programs showed that globalization outcomes were often better explained by institutional logics (including cultural ones) than by global flows per se. This is…
Stones through the Window
Civilizing Globalization: A Survival Guide. Richard Sandbrook, ed. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003. 279 pp.Globalization, the State, and Violence. Jonathan Friedman, ed. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2003. 389 pp
Political Sociology Meets Anthropology in The Defeat of Solidarity
Political Sociology Meets Anthropology in The Defeat of Solidarity
Conversations with a Polish populist
Building on the work of Jonathan Friedman and of Andre Gingrich and Marcus Banks, I explain the rise of populist, neonationalist sensibilities in Poland as a set of defensive responses by working-class people to the silences imposed by liberal rule. I trace in detail a sequence of all-around dispossessions experienced by Polish working-class sodalities since 1989, when activists with substantial legitimacy among organized workers had claimed de f…
Financialised Capitalism Soviet Style? Varieties of State Capture and Crisis
Looking for new ways to interpret the failings of the neo-liberal economy, this article argues that financialised capitalism at the eve of the 2008 financial crisis showed striking analogies with the characteristic combination of oligopoly and informality of the Soviet economy at the eve of its collapse. State capture by oligopolists, a large "virtual economy", the inability of agencies to obtain insight into economic and financial operations, th…
We are all the people of the Vega Baja now
For a while in modern European history, urban worker protest milieus had almost by definition been dependent on the involvement of two special types of workerintellectuals. The first was the journeyman printer; the second the artisan in the shoemakers' trade. The latter was commemorated by Hobsbawm and Scott as the ''political shoemakers'' (1984). Political shoemakers were a particular nineteenthcentury breed of urban artisans, with much independ…
My multiple, manifold, and endlessly contested 1989s
Nineteen eighty-nine was for me, like for so many other Europeans and in particular Central Europeans, a year of miracles. In mid-November of that year I was traveling through the United States and giving papers on working class culture, anthropology, and history. Whenever I was asked where I came from I always answered "from the continent of the revolutions." What a joy. But I was sad that I had traveled west rather than east
Thinking about neoliberalism as if the crisis was actually happening
Financialization and the capitalist moment
Kajsa Ekholm Friedman and Jonathan Friedman'sThe Anthropology of Global Systems (AGS)is a robust, ambitious, and timely undertaking in macrotheoretical and macrohistorical anthropology. I show that, more than 30 years ago, its political-economic underpinnings anticipated the key mechanisms of financialization, so important for debates on the current financial crisis. By revisiting the "transition from feudalism to capitalism" debate with new insi…
Class
Mavericks
New books discussed in this article:Graeber, David. 2011. Debt: The first 5,000 years. New York: Melville House.Graeber, David. 2013. The democracy project: A history, a crisis, a movement. London: Allan Lane.Harvey, David. 2011. The enigma of capital and the crises of capitalism. London: Profile Books.Harvey, David. 2012. Rebel cities: From the right to the city to the urban revolution. London: Verso.Harvey, David. 2013. A companion to Marx's Ca…
Global South
Introduction
A summary is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.
Afterword
Commoning over time generates customs in common and therefore commonalities. The political mobilizations of the past years may well be understood as a form of urban commoning. However, while such mobilizations may sometimes understand themselves as anticapitalist, one should resist the apparently logical idea (1) that the use values off ered by an urban commons are inevitably the opposite of surplus value, (2) that the urban commons will not just…
Sociology (30 works) · Political science (28 works) · Law (24 works) · Politics (17 works) · Philosophy (16 works) · Epistemology (15 works) · Economics (14 works) · History (14 works) · Political economy (14 works) · Law (12 works)